Temporal Explorations in the Anthropology of Religion

History, Cosmology and Spirits

Diana Espírito Santo, Ruy Blanes

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350467651
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

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
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword: Imagine Yourself without All Your Gear
• Introduction: Bending Time, Prospective Micro-Histories, and the Extended Horizons of Experience
• 1 Abducting the Absence in the Cave: Imaginative Reminiscence of the Battle of Okinawa
• 2 Under the Shade of Tempo
• 3 The Ill-Fated “Return” of the Naparama: War, Spirits, and Anti-Bullet Guerrillas in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique
• 4 “We’re Evangelio, We Don’t Have to Remember.” History, Ethnography, and Existence in the Argentine Qom/Toba Religion
• 5 Time-Tricking, the Spectral, and the Theater of Trauma in Chile and Angola
• 6 Alone in the Universe: The Will to Live and to Not Will
• 7 Cosmic Crisis: Bitcoin and the Future Economic Collapse
• 8 The History Channeling: Spiritual Typologies, Embodied Biographies, and Technological Prophecies in Spiritualist Buenos Aires
• 9 The Haunting of Phrakhanong: Humanity, Ghosts, and Heritage in Bangkok’s Urban Frontier
• 10 Spirits of the Past or Recurrent Historical Figures? Challenging Time Frames and Historiography in the Mid Zambezi Valley, Northern
• Afterword: Anthropology Meets Prospective Micro-History
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Imprint