Temporal Explorations in the Anthropology of Religion

History, Cosmology and Spirits

Diana Espírito Santo, Ruy Blanes

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781350467644
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Christian Theology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword: Imagine Yourself without All Your Gear Ramon Sarró
• Introduction: Bending Time, Prospective Micro-Histories, and the Extended Horizons of Experience Diana Espírito Santo and Ruy Blanes
• 1 Abducting the Absence in the Cave: Imaginative Reminiscence of the Battle of Okinawa Miho Ishii
• 2 Under the Shade of Tempo Vânia Zikan Cardoso
• 3 The Ill-Fated “Return” of the Naparama: War, Spirits, and Anti-Bullet Guerrillas in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique Zacarias M. Chambe
• 4 “We’re Evangelio, We Don’t Have to Remember.” History, Ethnography, and Existence in the Argentine Qom/Toba Religion Pablo Wright
• 5 Time-Tricking, the Spectral, and the Theater of Trauma in Chile and Angola Diana Espírito Santo and Ruy Llera Blanes
• 6 Alone in the Universe: The Will to Live and to Not Will Anastasios Panagiotopoulos
• 7 Cosmic Crisis: Bitcoin and the Future Economic Collapse Matan Shapiro and Hanna Skartveit
• 8 The History Channeling: Spiritual Typologies, Embodied Biographies, and Technological Prophecies in Spiritualist Buenos Ai es Miguel M. Algranti
• 9 The Haunting of Phrakhanong: Humanity, Ghosts, and Heritage in Bangkok’s Urban Frontier Andrew Alan Johnson
• 10 Spirits of the Past or Recurrent Historical Figures? Challenging Time Frames and Historiography in the Mid Zambezi Valley, Northern Zimbabwe Olga Sicilia
• Afterword: Anthropology Meets Prospective Micro-History Don Handelman
• Notes on Contributors
• Index