One of two sponsored sessions featuring ethnographies of time and temporalities, “Calendars” brings together papers examining religious approaches to reckoning the time. The first paper draws on fieldwork in Taiwan and mainland China to examine how the traditional Chinese and modern Gregorian calendrical systems are enacted simultaneously, but mobilized at different times for distinct purposes by members of these religious communities. The second paper examines how Jewish and Muslim tech workers in Toronto, New York, and Tel Aviv weave the language of the corporate workplace into the timing of their religious observances. The third paper draws on fieldwork in a Buddhist temple in Massachusetts to show how Chinese immigrants maintain and strengthen their cultural identity as a community through annual celebrations and calendrical rituals. The final paper examines how the time frames of local deities and human interlocutors work to create authority in divination in the Western Himalayas.
The traditional Chinese calendar and the modernized Gregorian calendar are commonly framed as representing conflicting ontologies of time, a tension often taken as emblematic of modernity itself. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Taiwanese and mainland Chinese communities, this paper challenges that by examining how multiple calendrical systems are enacted simultaneously in religious and social practice. It compares the qualitative, cosmologically saturated temporality encoded in the traditional Chinese calendar with the homogeneous, empty temporality implied by the Gregorian calendar. Ethnographic findings show that interlocutors routinely mobilize each calendar for distinct purposes through religious and quasi-religious techniques such as divination, auspicious date selection, and ritual timing. Rather than producing conflict, calendrical plurality enables meaningful engagement with pasts, presents, and futures across multiple temporal scales. The paper argues that modern religious life need not be defined by temporal rupture, but can instead be characterized by stable, reflexive navigation of plural temporal ontologies.
Modernist workplaces assumed a separation between work and private time, with religion ensconced in the latter. This separation is recently challenged by tech companies inviting workers to “bring their whole self” to work. Drawing on fieldwork in a tech corporation and nearly 100 interviews with observant Muslim and Jewish workers in Toronto, New York, and Tel Aviv, this paper explores how religious temporalities are reshaped when work time is flexible and religion is legitimate. While classic anthropology portrays religious time as a coherent framework for social synchronization, neoliberal emphasis on self-responsibility shifts sacred time into a realm of individual preference. Using the concept of commensurability, I analyze three techniques my interlocutors use to weave religious obligations into reconfigured work temporalities: framing religious time in labor terms (e.g., “meeting with God”), hierarchical scaling, and digital calendaring. This commensuration reflects a unique tech religiosity, turning the sacred from radical alterity into a category relational with global capitalism.
How does an immigrant Buddhist temple in New England sustain a sense of temporal order and materialize hope for the future among intergenerational Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants? This paper draws on ethnography at a Chinese Buddhist temple, the Thousand Buddha Temple (TBT) in Quincy, Massachusetts, to analyze one of the most significant annual celebrations of the Chinese community—the Lunar New Year. It explores how Chinese immigrants negotiate with the predominantly Christian host cultural environment through calendric rituals in their effort to maintain and strengthen their cultural identity as a community. In this process, the Buddhist temple functions as a “temporal container” for the immigrants, serving as a space where participants reproduce and inhabit cultural time and enact hope. This research offers an empirically grounded case study of how community is shaped through cultural ritual life.
This paper examines how prophetic authority is formed, interpreted, and sustained within divinatory practices in the Western Himalayas. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it analyzes annual encounters in which village deities speak through human mediums to deliver forecasts, moral evaluations, and ritual instructions. Rather than treating divination as a mechanism for resolving uncertainty, the paper argues that prophetic authority emerges through a relational process in which divine statements are questioned, negotiated, and adapted by their audiences. This interactive dynamic, described as performative accountability, shows how authority depends on responsiveness and evaluation rather than inherent divine status. The paper also explores how shifting descriptions of the celestial realm, local disagreements over predictions, and the availability of digital and meteorological alternatives shape responses to prophetic speech. Together, these practices demonstrate how doubt, interpretation, and ritual engagement sustain divine authority across cycles of divination.
| Lauren Leve | lgleve@unc.edu | View |