This panel explores how religious symbols, rituals, and stories influence and challenge visions of the future across different contexts and traditions. Using case studies from modern Southeast Asia, Japanese literature, and Hindu Purāṇas, the papers examine how religious language and imagery shape futures. The first paper investigates floral labor in Bangkok, where Buddhist devotional garlands reflect on class insecurity and new connections between humans and flowers. The second paper discusses Hikaru Okuizumi’s The Night to Kill a Snake (1992), suggesting that its use of religious snake imagery—from Shinto myth to Genesis—disrupts narrative flow and highlights the fragility of religious futures. The third paper examines Vaiṣṇava Purāṇic cosmology, connecting cyclical time and avatāras to contemporary Hindu discussions of climate change and apocalyptic visions. Overall, the papers present how flowers, serpents, and avatars of sci-fi novels imagine religious futures.
In contemporary Bangkok, flowers are instrumental to religious life. Buddhists daily offer fresh garlands to temples to accrue merit and to ask deities for blessings. But over the past fifty years, the craftspeople who make these garlands have been forcibly removed from the city, deemed an aesthetic “blight” to the modern landscape. What is the future of these workers in a city that at once needs them and discards them? I answer this question by analyzing an eight-tiered fresh flower chandelier created by my interlocutor, a queer flower artist, which premiered at Singapore’s international art fair in 2025. Lowering the chandelier to the ground, the garlands on the bottom broke to provide a soft bed for more expensive garlands; lower-class workers are breaking under the weight of class inequality. The future is not hopeless. Through developing expansive and intimate relationships with flowers, Bangkokians can cultivate stronger floral and human solidarities.
This paper examines how Hikaru Okuizumi’s novella The Night to Kill a Snake (1992) destabilizes religiously mediated futures—often sustained by cohesive narrative structures—by proliferating religious imagery to the point where narrativity itself collapses. Through free association, the text disperses snake metaphors drawn from Shinto myth, Genesis, Greek legend, and Japanese imperial symbolism without allowing them to converge into symbolic resolution. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s account of modern literature as repetitive language without securing memory, this paper argues that the novella’s proliferating religious imagery exposes the fragility underlying both religious futurity and interpretive desire. As images multiply, the protagonist’s imagined future unravels, and the reader’s interpretive expectations are similarly frustrated. Literary art here neither redeems nor resolves; instead, it reveals futurity as radically open, suspended within the unsettling repetition of religious language itself.
This paper studies visions of the future, apocalyptic imagination and discourses on climate change in Hindu theistic traditions as revealed in the Vaishnava Puranas (4-18 c.CE). Hindu imagination sees time as cyclic, and not linear, and understands the cyclic creation and dissolution of the universe as a repetitive and normal process that is good, desired and necessary. In the Vaishnava tradition, Vishnu and his avataras, or bodily descents, in which he incarnates in various anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic forms, comes down to earth in order to save humankind from natural calamities and disasters, such as floods, draughts, etc. Similarly, the proliferation of contemporary discourses on the future, climate change, are often immersed in Hindu mythology and religious culture, and cannot be ignored when discussing the issues of apocalyptic imagination and climate change in Hindu traditions. Thus, my talk seeks to explore the complex links between visions of the future, apocalyptic imagination, the mythologizing of the divine, and the mythologizing of contemporary cultural and religious discourses on climate change.
| Tracy Pintchman | tpintch@luc.edu | View |