How do people make sense of their past, and look forward into their future, through practices religious, spiritual or otherwise in places of both modernity and political trauma?
This volume investigates how political, social, and individual temporal and historical horizons are generated and reformulated in relation to embodied, material, and ideological contexts. It also considers how this history-making projects itself onto imagined futures or alternative historical lines, creating temporal continuities and discontinuities.
This book presents an innovative perspective on the relationship between past and the future, namely, one that shifts the perspective from pure history or pure anthropology to the anthropology of history. Religious and spiritual engagements are fundamental to this exercise, especially ones that have emerged in times of crisis, because they provide conceptual platforms from which the past and the present connect directly to the future and its imagined horizons.
Utilising chapters and case studies drawn from Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia, this book shows that the experience of time, including temporal plasticity, emerges from social formations that are cosmological at heart. These include prophetic and messianic thinking, conversion experiences and narratives, spirit possession religions, and the mythical and symbolic dimensions of materialities and memory. This research demonstrates that ideas of cyclicity, repetition and other temporal forms are fundamental as acts of ordering human experience, as well as in other more ´modern´ forms of cosmology, teleological theories of advancement and development, and even post-apocalyptic economic and social realities.
Arvustused
The anthropology of history has become one of the disciplines most exciting areas, and this book deserves a prominent place in current debates. Scholars drawn from around the world explore the many possible shapes and trajectories of the past, and in doing so challenge our understandings of cosmology itself. * Simon Coleman, Chancellor Jackman Professor, University of Toronto, Canada * This volume shifts the focus of the anthropology of religion from the agency and plasticity of things, bodies, and spirits, to the plasticity of time and the multiple historicities generated by the relations with spirits, ghosts and other cosmic entities. A thoughtful and brilliant collection of essays; a must read. * Roger Sansi, Professor of Anthropology, University of Barcelona, Spain * Here is a book which rethinks our understanding of history and time. Ghosts, spirits, trauma and even bitcoin are analysed in a new light, showing how people in settings across the globe make sense of their past and prospects of the future through cosmologies of diverse kinds. A stimulating read. * Eric Hirsch, Professor of Anthropology, Brunel, University of London, UK *
Muu info
An innovative perspective on the relationship between the past and the future - shifting the perspective from pure history or anthropology to the anthropology of history.
Foreword, Don Handelman (University of Jerusalem, Israel)
Introduction, Ruy Blanes (ISCTE-IUL, CRIA, In2Past, Portugal) & Diana
Espírito Santo (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile)
1. Abducting the absence in the cave: Imaginative reminiscence of the Battle
of Okinawa, Miho Ishii (University of Kyoto, Japan)
2. Under the shade of Tempo, Vânia Zikan Cardoso (Universidade Federal de
Santa Catarina, Brazil)
3. The ill-fated return of the Naparama: war, spirits and anti-bullet
guerrillas in Cabo Delgado, Mozambiqu, Zacarias Tsambe, (University of
Mozambique, Mozambique)
4. We´re Evangelio, we don´t have to remember. History, ethnography, and
existence in the Argentine Qom/Toba religion, Pablo Wright
(CONICET-University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
5. Time-tricking, the spectral, and the theatre of trauma in Chile and
Angola, Ruy Blanes (ISCTE-IUL, CRIA, In2Past, Portugal) and Diana Espírito
Santo (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile)
6. Alone in the Universe: the will to live and to not will, Anastasios
Panagiotopoulos (University of Seville, Spain)
7. Cosmic Crisis: Bitcoin and the Future Economic Collapse, Matan Shapiro
(King´s College London, UK)
Hanna Skartveit (University of Bergen, Norway)
8. The history channeling: Spiritual typologies, embodied biographies and
technological prophecies in Spiritualist Buenos Aires, Miguel M. Algranti
(Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina)
9. The Haunting of Phrakhanong: Humanity, Ghosts and Heritage in Bangkoks
Urban Frontier, Andrew Alan Johnson (Stockholm University, Sweden)
10. Spirits of the past or recurrent historical figures? Challenging time
frames and historiography in the mid Zambezi Valley, northern Zimbabwe, Olga
Sicilia (University of Vienna, Austria)
Index
Diana Espírito Santo is Associate Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile. Ruy Blanes is Principal Researcher at CRIA, ISCTE-IUL, Portugal.
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