One of two sponsored sessions featuring ethnographies of time and temporalities, “Futures” brings together papers that critically assess religious approaches to futurity through diverse examinations of ritual, praxis, and reinterpretation. The first paper examines how the structure of Appalachian Pentecostal snake handlers' ritual practices enables them to enact a "nostalgic apocalypticism", in which longing for the past coexists with anticipation of the world’s imminent completion. The second paper analyzes the ways in which young Muslim women in Patna, India hold kismat (divine will/predetermined future) and mehnat (human labor) in productive tension with each other as they reframe their secular work aspirations as forms of pious practice. The final paper considers how Turkish Muslim exiles in the U.S. reimagine their positions and trajectory in a sacred timescape to make sense of their experiences of banishment to a foreign land and the prospect of dying and being buried far from home.
In Appalachian serpent handling congregations, time rarely flows linearly. Services stretch into the night, danger slows perception, and the promise of the end lingers just out of reach. Drawing on fieldwork in Appalachian Pentecostal communities, this paper examines how faith is lived in a rhythm of waiting: for the Spirit, for deliverance, for the end itself. Within these sanctuaries, time accelerates in song and testimony, then stills as a handler lifts a snake, producing a temporal experience that is simultaneously urgent, cyclical, and suspenseful.
These practices enact a form of worldbuilding through nostalgic apocalypticism, in which longing for the past coexists with anticipation of the world’s completion. Through attention to pacing, repetition, and the ethnographer’s own shifting sense of duration, this paper traces how handlers inhabit a time that is both promised and perpetually delayed. Their worship offers an anthropology of temporality in which memory, anticipation, and embodiment are inseparable.
Situated within cultural anthropology, this paper speaks to young Muslim women's aspirations of securing government jobs in Patna, India. Drawing on ethnographic research, I demonstrate how women reimagine aspirations as a form of pious practice, cultivating ethical subjectivity in holding kismat (divine will/predetermined future) and mehnat (human labor) in productive tension throughout their aspirational trajectories. Thinking of destiny as something to be made, women focus on hard work as pious labor bracketing conversations around destiny in their tayyari or preparation phase. When examination attempts prove unsuccessful, women distinguish kismat from badkismati (circumstantial ill-fortune), striving to imagine alternative futures that remain open and unknown. By centering aspiration as pious practice, I extend anthropological attention of everyday Islam into the domain of futurity, where futures are simultaneously open and predetermined.
Muslims who experience forced migration face difficult decisions as they contemplate death. Many Muslim immigrants wish to be returned to their homeland for burial, but what if exile precludes that option? This paper examines this quandary from the perspective of Turkish Muslim exiles in the U.S. The experience of the spatial dislocation of exile has led some immigrants to reimagine their positions and trajectory in a sacred timescape. Some look to sacred history to the Prophet, who suffered exile and was buried in the land of migration. Some look to the Sufi idea that human existence in the physical world is itself a form of exile, since separation from the divine is an endemic aspect of life, one that will be soothed in (future) death. That is, the immigrants reinterpret the sacred past and future to make sense of their experience of exile and death in a foreign land.
| Brendan Jamal Thornton | brendan_thornton@unc.edu | View |