Temporal Explorations in the Anthropology of Religion : History, Cosmology and Spirits

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.