Ethnographies of Waiting

Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty

Manpreet K. Janeja, Andreas Bandak, Manpreet K. Janeja, Andreas Bandak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000180527
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

We all wait – in traffic jams, passport offices, school meal queues, for better weather, an end to fighting, peace. Time spent waiting produces hope, boredom, anxiety, doubt, or uncertainty. Ethnographies of Waiting explores the social phenomenon of waiting and its centrality in human society. Using waiting as a central analytical category, the book investigates how waiting is negotiated in myriad ways. Examining the politics and poetics of waiting, Ethnographies of Waiting offers fresh perspectives on waiting as the uncertain interplay between doubting and hoping, and asks "When is time worth the wait?" Waiting thus conceived is intrinsic to the ethnographic method at the heart of the anthropological enterprise. Featuring detailed ethnographies from Japan, Georgia, England, Ghana, Norway, Russia and the United States, a Foreword by Craig Jeffrey and an Afterword by Ghassan Hage, this is a vital contribution to the field of anthropology of time and essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and philosophy.

1
Great Expectations?: Between Boredom and Sincerity in Jewish Ritual ‘Attendance’

Simon Coleman

Introduction: a long time coming

The date is Saturday, 8 May 1976, and I am feeling uncomfortable – stifled in a new suit and tie, standing in a crowded room, at the beginning of one of the hottest English summers on record. But there are other, more urgent reasons for my unease. The room is the main hall of a Reform¹ Synagogue in North London, and the occasion is my Bar Mitzvah – the ceremony to mark the coming of age of Jewish boys who have reached the age of thirteen, requiring their public reading or chanting in Hebrew of an extract from the Torah.² By declaiming the ancient language, and despite my lack of religious conviction, I am signalling that I am competent to participate in public worship and to accept moral accountability for my actions as a Jew. Not exactly a time to relax.

While I stand on the bimah,³ behind me sits the normal Saturday morning congregation of the synagogue, alongside my extended family and friends, who have gathered to witness my performance. Indeed, my memory of that summer, apart from the ferocious heat that turned cricket pitches into concrete deserts plagued by ladybugs, is of spending Saturday morning after Saturday morning sweltering in the same suit while I attended the Bar Mitzvahs of my Jewish friends as, one after the other, we were transformed into ritually responsible adults in synagogues dotted around the city.

At this particular moment, I am nearing the end of my own Bar Mitzvah, and I’m staring up at the rabbi. He congratulates me for all the hard work I have put in during the past year, and for making my family and friends proud. But then he finishes with a loaded sign-off, situated rhetorically somewhere between a warning and an exhortation: ‘I hope we’ll be seeing you here next week as you continue your life as a Jewish adult!’ So this is what it is all about, in the end: continuity, reproduction, the active extension of an identity granted at birth. My immediate response is to think back over my preparatory encounters with the synagogue over the past year or more: the reciting of texts in a language whose meaning remained utterly opaque and largely undiscussed; listening to harangues about the importance of Israel in my life; avoiding the eye of the ill-tempered Hebrew teacher who at one point had been stuck in Israel and rendered unable to ‘instruct’ us for six weeks – an absence long enough to hint at the existence of a merciful deity; but above all, enduring tedious services, often accompanied by my equally secular and sceptical father, as we half-listened to prayer after prayer from the siddur⁴ while keeping an eye on the clock. To me, the sheer repetition of phrases in Hebrew conveyed the sense that services were trapping us within a recursive ritual loop, making time stand still as we waited for the chance to leave.

All of which means that, when the rabbi intones on the bimah that he looks forward to seeing me next week, I think to myself: ‘You’re not seeing me ever again in this synagogue.’ So much for continuity and reproduction.

Time does move on. The date is now 10 September 2010. I am with my wife Leslie,⁵ children and in-laws in another, much larger hall, located in a Jewish community centre in downtown Toronto. Leslie – buoyed by positive childhood experiences of synagogue life in the Los Angeles Valley – is keen to join a Jewish community, given that we have just moved to Canada. I am feeling quite uncomfortable again in anticipation of this particular gathering, which is there to mark Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year. My first surprise when we reach the hall is not just its size but also the fact that it is full – jam-packed with smartly dressed parents, children and students, and we struggle to find seats. People continue to mill in and out during most of the service, often chatting with neighbours in a way that seems more relaxed than my memories of English synagogues in the 1970s. But my second surprise is that, while I do not particularly want to be there, the experience is not quite as bad – as boring – as I had expected. I actually find myself looking around and mentally taking notes as I observe various styles of prayer and engagement; conversations happening left, right and centre; people’s subtly different styles of handling the texts that they are supposed to read but most of the time just hold, occasionally turning pages to keep up with the service.

Have I started to convert? No, not at all. Even to this day, I would be perfectly happy never to attend another synagogue service, unless on ethnographic or familial duty. However, I am a different person from that 13 year old. Not only am I now a husband and father, I am also an anthropologist of religion with a professional habitus that can slip into comparative, fieldwork mode. In this regard, I am reminded of the philosopher Michael Raposa’s intriguing comment that boredom is ‘at bottom a semiotic problem, arising from a difficulty on the part of the bored person in reading the signs or interpreting the information in any given situation as meaningful or interesting’ (1999: 2). Raposa’s claim begs a few questions about agency in relation to wider circumstances – feeling economically or emotionally trapped is hardly conducive to nuanced semiotic analysis, for instance – but he makes the useful point that character and complexity of observation can mitigate the deadening effects of an otherwise alienating situation.

Still, there is more to this experience of relative ritual de-alienation than becoming an ethnographer. The semiotic direction of my ‘transformation’ is more precise, and has a more specific comparative element. My work as an anthropologist of religion has not been on Judaism,⁶ but on forms of Christianity, including Pentecostalism – a form of religious activity that, as a PhD student, I had assumed would take me as far as possible from the stultifying rituals of my youth. Certainly, my initial attraction to charismatic worship was an aesthetic one: I felt an affinity for its sudden shifts in scale, rhythm and spatial orientation, its active transformations of ritual tempo through music, word, movement. In the following, I want to argue that my familiarity with Pentecostalism has encouraged me to ‘read’ my experiences of Jewish ceremonial life in a new way, though reading is too limited a metaphor to indicate the hermeneutically inflected shifts in embodied temporality involved, and the drift in my current experience from pure boredom toward another state: not quite waiting in a conventional sense, but closer to a kind of attendance – involving physical presence without any specified attitudinal or behavioural commitment. Although my coming to recognition of this state came through a distinctly roundabout semiotic route, I think it is more generally present in many synagogue contexts, especially among the many contemporary Jews in diaspora who are not Orthodox – and certainly not the highly pious and visible Hasidim,⁷ known for their long, dark clothes and hats (for men) and wigs (for women) – but rather highly assimilated, negotiating between identities of ‘cultural’, ‘religious’ and ‘ethnic’ Judaism. As Andrew Buckser has recently noted (2011: 84), the anthropology of Jewry contains many excellent ethnographies of Hasidim, who make up under a tenth of the Jews in the US, yet little exists on liberal Reform Jews, even though the latter account for more than one-third of the nation’s Jewish population. Meanwhile, those who describe themselves as ‘just Jewish’ make up a quarter of the population, and yet ‘are essentially invisible in the anthropological literature’ (2011: 84). This chapter therefore attempts to characterize the semi-ritualized attendance of the distinctly non-pious, not only describing it ethnographically but also considering what theoretical payoff might be derived from acknowledging its existence. Such discussions not only ask about how we think ethnographically and theoretically about the so-called ‘margins’ of religious cores (cf. Buckser 2011: 84), but will also take us into comparative considerations of temporality, subjectivity and religious discipline.

There is of course a long history of mutual entanglement between evangelical Christianity and Judaism.⁸ The Prosperity-oriented believers whom I study in Sweden (Coleman 2000; in press) consistently incorporate both Israel and the Jews into their End-Time Expectations, creating forms of Christian Zionism whereby ‘friendship’ with Jewish people is also a form of appropriation – what Kristian Steinberg and Anders Lundberg (2015) see as an instrumentalization of Jewish populations, since the latter’s presence in the Holy Land and rebuilding of the Temple are regarded as necessary for the Rapture. In a recent article in the Jerusalem Post, Daniel Estrin (2015) calls the regular evangelical pilgrimages to Israel during the Feast of Tabernacles an ‘evangelical bear hug’, rather felicitously encapsulating the ambiguity of an action that has the potential to combine affection with obliteration (compare also Dulin 2015).⁹

The goal- and future-oriented dimension to such apocalyticism will become relevant as I compare Jewish and evangelical attitudes toward time and ritual (cf. O’Donnell 2015), but my main focus is not on consciously orchestrated links between Christian Zionist and Jewish spaces. Rather, my concern is with how ethnographic experience of Pentecostal cultivation of sincerity, ritual engagement and subjectivity has proved key to my altered stance toward what I previously considered a pointless form of lingering within Jewish ritual contexts.¹⁰ This juxtaposition has thrown into high semiotic, hermeneutic and phenomenological relief certain dimensions of what I previously took to be merely an imposition of smothering, stultifying, ritual time – of waiting as unpleasant ‘weighting’. While Elisabeth Goodstein (2005) has referred to boredom in the context of modernity as ‘experience without qualities’, it is precisely the unearthing of certain qualities that highlight in relating to experience I previously found merely alienating. I argue that such traits emerge from perceiving the time of ‘attendance’ not as modernist clock-time, nor as pre-modern event time, but as a form of non-event time. I do not therefore describe a kind of ‘I was there’ form of attendance, where one marks presence at a historical event, such as a coronation. Nor, do I mean to use this phrase in a pejorative sense, as in the phrase, ‘Well, that was a non-event.’ Instead, my perception resonates with what Inger Sjørslev (2013: 95) sees as the problematic facing the fieldworker who seeks entrance into the ‘aesthetics of social rhythm’ of her informants, hoping thereby to become engaged in a ‘joint choreography of social interaction’ that can shed light on the field even when ‘nothing’ appears to be happening. As Craig Jeffrey points out (2008), waiting is both a common human activity and integral to the ethnographic enterprise.

In the context of this book, I am exploring a form of mundane attendance included within, rather than excluded from, ritual temporality, but one whose mundanity does not derive its primary identity through contrast with, and de facto definition of, sacrality. Nor is this a form of waiting pitched between doubt and hope, in other words between intensities of feeling oriented toward particular convictions or goals. Rather, it refers to a form of presence that is difficult to grasp or describe ethnographically, and one that might seem to exist at the margins of ritual action but says quite as much about the character of behaviour within a synagogue hall as any sermon or devoutly delivered prayer. In certain respects, it approximates the ‘unfocused presence’ that Sjørslev (2013) asserts is important for the ethnographer who is ‘hanging out’, although in the context of fieldwork such lack of focus itself is oriented toward an ultimate, definable ethnographic purpose, that of gaining data, whereas for the attendance that I describe its very lack of a single motive is an important part of its raison d’être.

In the following, I discuss interdisciplinary writings on boredom and waiting, before moving on to describe Pentecostal experiences of ritual as I have observed them in the field, exploring in particular what I see as the abhorrence of boredom that is produced in such contexts. Both of these analytical moves help me to frame my subsequent recharacterization of Jewish ritual as understood by myself and others, and in particular my interest in variations on a theme of ritualizing non-eventfulness.

On boredom and waiting

Literature on boredom takes me along some of the theoretical trajectory that I want to pursue, given that it encourages reflection on varieties of alienation from present circumstances. An important distinction is between what Samuli Schielke (2008: 256) sees as ‘the situational boredom everyone experiences sometimes, for instance waiting for a bus’ and ‘a more existential state of lack of future and hope, intimately coupled with frustration, and often close to despair’. Schielke’s differentiation parallels Haskell Bernstein’s much earlier (1975: 513) contrast of ‘boredom as responsive feeling’ with ‘boredom as malaise’. In other words, a situational or responsive state is a product of the person’s experience of specific, time-bound circumstances, as opposed to a much more chronic and possibly psychologically and/or structurally induced condition.

Both of these modes imply the cultural variability of boredom. Indeed, as Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani put it, ‘boredom… has a history’ (2009: 12), and has varied over time and space.¹¹ Acedia has long been recognized in Christian circles, implying ‘loss of spiritual connection to the divine’ (Goodstein 2005: 4), spiritual sluggishness, dullness in prayer, and a lacklustre attitude toward rituals of devotion (Raposa 1999: 2); however, the term is more associated with sin than is common in current parlance, and in medieval Europe seems to have been confined to monks and higher echelons in society, as opposed to the more democratic forms evident today (Dalle Pezze and Salzani 2009: 8). Similarly, taedium vitae – disgust with life (Toohey 2011: 15) – is associated with a cultural and social satedness only possible for aristocracy and the rich.¹²

Goodstein sees boredom haunting the contemporary West in specific ways.¹³ Its contemporary links between the static and the unproductive emerge out of ‘a modern conception of history as progress’ (2005: 5), where individual human life is also ideally placed on a trajectory of chronic movement and improvement. In this...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Worth the Wait
• 1 Great Expectations?: Between Boredom and Sincerity in Jewish Ritual ‘Attendance’
• 2 Hope and Waiting in Post-Soviet Moscow
• 3 Time and the Other: Waiting and Hope among Irregular Migrants
• 4 Waiting for God in Ghana: The Chronotopes of a Prayer Mountain
• 5 Providence and Publicity in Waiting for a Creationist Theme Park
• 6 Waiting for Nothing: Nihilism, Doubt and Difference without Difference in Post-Revolutionary Georgia
• 7 Not-Waiting to Die Badly: Facing the Precarity of Dying Alone in Japan
• Afterword
• Index