Temporal Explorations in the Anthropology of Religion - by Diana Espírito Santo & Ruy Blanes (Hardcover)

About the Book

Explores semantics across diverse religious, spiritual, cosmological, and historical views of time shape personal and collective understandings of the past through alternative historicities.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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

The anthropology of history has become one of the discipline's 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

About the Author

Diana Espírito Santo is Associate Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile.
Ruy Blanes is Principal Researcher at CRIA, ISCTE-IUL, Portugal.