Waiting for Elijah is an intimate portrait of time-reckoning, syncretism, and proximity in one of the world’s most polarized landscapes, the Bosnian Field of Gacko. Centered on the shared harvest ...feast of Elijah’s Day, the once eagerly awaited pinnacle of the annual cycle, the book shows how the fractured postwar landscape beckoned the return of communal life that entails such waiting. This seemingly paradoxical situation—waiting to wait—becomes a starting point for a broader discussion on the complexity of time set between cosmology, nationalism, and embodied memories of proximity.
Waiting for Elijah is an intimate portrait of time-reckoning, syncretism, and proximity in one of the world's most polarized landscapes, the Bosnian Field of Gacko. Centered on the shared harvest ...feast of Elijah's Day, the once eagerly awaited pinnacle of the annual cycle, the book shows how the fractured postwar landscape beckoned the return of communal life that entails such waiting. This seemingly paradoxical situation-waiting to wait-becomes a starting point for a broader discussion on the complexity of time set between cosmology, nationalism, and embodied memories of proximity.
Prelude Safet HadžiMuhamedović
Waiting for Elijah,
04/2018, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
One of the longest sinking rivers in the world begins its life in the Field of Gacko.¹ Its waters emerge as two streams beneath the mountains of Èemerno and Lebršnik, their life-sustaining force ...briefly erupting onto the wide plateau and then tumbling back into the Dinaric karst, carving out thousands of secret chambers on their journey. Those places where the river surges back down towards depths unknown are called ponor. The name comes from the Proto-Slavic feminine noun norà, meaning ‘den’, ‘lair’, ‘abyss’ or ‘chasm’ and the verb nerti (Church Slavonic ponrìti), meaning ‘ to enter’, ‘go deep into’ or
Time and Epic Residues Safet HadžiMuhamedović
Waiting for Elijah,
04/2018, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
What happens when I try to articulate an order of things, but keep being failed by my lexicon? Could some unintended residues of socialities, deeply mapped in my language–landscape–body, project onto ...my world their own reckoning? Am I complicit in the perpetuation of the worlds in which these remnants reside? This chapter considers the perdurance of memory and the affects made possible in traces, which further complicate the idea of social agent. Such forms of knowledge have the potential to surprise us, to turn back on our conscious discursive practices, reach beyond the territories mapped out by our
The Georgics Safet HadžiMuhamedović
Waiting for Elijah,
04/2018, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Historiographies are authoritative imaginings. They look for authentic evidence to structure narratives about the past, fleeing from innumerable analytical sources in its selective endeavours. ...Leaving behind the question of authority, this chapter plays with such imagination, attempting to trace the steps of the becoming of ‘our’ key cosmological characters, by taking you on a journey into the spaces and times of George and Elijah. The boundaries are so fuzzy that only an old-school ethnologist could make any sense of them. The plot appropriately starts off in the Field, but dares to make connections, from Palestine to Britain and Ireland, from
CONCLUSION Safet HadžiMuhamedović
Waiting for Elijah,
04/2018, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Through the close consideration of one Bosnian landscape, the Field of Gacko, this book has discussed the relationship between encounter and time. Broadly understood, encounters include exchanges, ...alliances and intimate proximities between the bodies of ‘different’ characters, their communities and bodies of religious thought and practice. I have looked into encounters between ‘humans’ and ‘nonhumans’, as well as between ‘different’ kinds of nonhumans. All of these encounters, I have argued, were deeply implicated in the Field’s times and temporalities and the definition of cosmological and political approaches, economies, social structures, fears, hopes and affinities. After the Field experienced forceful social
Facing time in the Field prompted me to ask again Roy Wagner’s questions: ‘Are there different kinds of time, or merely different ways of counting time? Does time have a structure, as a clock does, ...or does it merely seem to have a structure, because a clock has one?’ (1986: 82). I approached this as an ontological problem, shifting to understand how time is conceptualized in a specific context, rather than assuming a priori that I know its measure. This chapter posits that, in the Field, there are indeed distinct, even conflicting times, seldom primarily structured by the clock. Understanding
Time and In-Other Safet HadžiMuhamedović
Waiting for Elijah,
04/2018, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
I descended into the Field on a grey, piercingly cold early afternoon. The road leading from the town to the village of Nadaniæi gloomed vacantly. Not a car, not a human being, no movement but the ...wind. My eyes vigilant, surveying the snowy hills for the hungry wolves from Osman’s childhood memories. I wished I had taken some newspapers and a lighter to ward off their imminent attack.
As the road bent, three silhouettes entered my horizon: a man and two cows. We continued walking towards each other for some time, growing closer, larger and more discernible to each other’s
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