- Convenors:
-
Fabio Vicini
(University of Verona)
Lili Di Puppo (KU Leuven)
Stefan Williamson Fa (University of Cambridge)
Send message to Convenors
- Chairs:
-
Lili Di Puppo
(KU Leuven)
Stefan Williamson Fa (University of Cambridge)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
By exploring small, tender, and “passive” modes of being, the panel aims to foreground new understandings of humanness, human agency, and relationality as connected to eternity and the transcendent beyond the emphasis on “flat” circularities found in both ontological and posthumanist perspectives.
Long Abstract
This panel aims to explore ethnographically how human beings experience the Divine and the unseen not as a distant escape from reality, but as a nourishing, intimate relational source that flows into human life and is renewed daily by intra-human and human/non-human relations. In this vein, it draws attention to how small gestures of care for fellow humans, animals, and the non-human world are often ways through which human beings connect with an original mode of being, eternity, and a time before time (such as the fitrah in Islam, the imago dei in Christianity, or the buddhadhātu in Buddhism).
Some of the questions the panel aims to address are: What does an anthropological focus on micro-moments of attentiveness and giving reveal about human experiences of eternity? How can we explore the profound interplay between the timeless order of God, the otherworldly, the supernatural, eternal time, and the lived human time? How does the idea of human beings as intimately engaged in circular flows of relationality and temporality (and hence of constant return and renewal), challenge sovereign conceptions of agency? How do current crises heighten sensibility toward these other forms of relationality and temporality?
By exploring small, tender, and often “passive” modes of being, the panel aims to foreground new understandings of humanness, human agency, and relationality as connected to eternity and the transcendent beyond the emphasis on “flat” circularities found in both ontological and posthumanist perspectives.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines how eternity emerges through repetition, care, and the motif of rising “seven times” in post-earthquake Antakya. Tracing everyday practices and saintly presence that sustain life amid ruin via ethnography, it charts temporalities beyond linear recovery or theological assurance.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how experiences of eternity emerge in post-earthquake Antakya, Turkey, through idioms of repetition, suspension, and care rather than through linear narratives of recovery or resilience. Following the devastating earthquakes of February 2023, Antakya was widely declared finished—materially destroyed and affectively exhausted. Against this sense of irrevocable loss, many inhabitants responded with a different refrain: Antakya has risen from ruins “seven times.” While anchored in historical memory, this formulation gestures beyond chronology. The number seven operates as a shared metaphor for infinity, evoking a temporality in which destruction and renewal, existence and nonexistence, unfold together.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, the paper traces how this non-linear temporality is lived in the disaster’s aftermath. I focus on the afterlives of the Antakyan saint Habib-i Neccar, whose dispersed presence—across shrine, mosque, mountain, and story—continues to orient everyday practices amid ruin. In damaged landscapes, small gestures such as tending plants beside tents, lighting candles at broken sites, or invoking saints’ names sustain life in a protracted present shaped by loss and recursive violence.
Situating these practices alongside local reflections on fate, preordination, and prophesied time, the paper shows how disaster brings into view temporal registers that exceed secular anticipation and theological assurance alike. Eternity appears here as an immanent rhythm, encountered through repetition and care. Attending to these fragile practices invites a reconsideration of what it means to remain human after catastrophe: a condition sustained through relational labor that binds finite lives to enduring, unknowable durations.
Paper short abstract
In this paper, the author considers an ethnographic example of a radical form of participant knowledge, common across mystic traditions, that suggests that the divine Being and the human Being are simultaneously 'known' through processes of divinization, a sharing in the divine nature.
Paper long abstract
Anthropology in its simplest etymological terms, is a study of the human. Humans, themselves caught up in never-ceasing processes of change, are entangled within continually unfolding human and other-than-human relations. Perceptual knowledge of this field of relations (as well as discourses and practices that make sense of such perceptions) help orientate humans amongst this world of 'things'. Similar, repeated experiences lead to gradually increasing confidence in the inherent qualities or characteristics of any particular 'thing' (e.g. the warmth of the sun). For humans consciously entangled within relational fields that include the divine, repeated and similar experiences lead to gradually increasing confidence in the inherent qualities and characteristics of this particular Being. Various mystic traditions, however, suggest that true knowledge of the divine is limited by an epistemological mechanism. The divine is only known through relational processes of becoming, where true knowing (of) is only yielded through becoming (like), in other words through processes of divinization. Such moments (of divinization) might be fleeting and ephemeral and yet they appear to simultaneously reveal not only the inherent qualities of divine Being, but also the potentialities of human Being. This paper focuses on one (auto)ethnographic example, an experience where the divine Being and the human Being are simultaneously discovered as kind.
Paper short abstract
The primary aim of Śrīvidyā practitioners is to become aware of their identity with Devī, the Goddess, in her benevolent, motherly and erotic form. Thus, they partake, with and as Devī, in her primordial, generative metaphysics of care and, becoming cosmic mothers, world an auspicious existence.
Paper long abstract
The primary aim of tantric Śrīvidyā practitioners is to become aware of their identity with Devī, Śakti, the Goddess, in her benevolent, motherly and erotic form as Tripurasundarī. Origin and end of everything existing and beyond-existence, Devī, together with her consort Śiva, presides over primordial expansion–contraction metaphysics which, when expanding, manifest worlds in spacetime and, when contracting, collapse worlds into their potentiality. As the tantric practitioners I lived with in South India reveal, by realising their oneness with Devī, they partake in this cosmic creativity and, with and as Devī, ensure the maintenance of an auspicious existence.
The identity with Devī ensues from a super-imposition between the Goddess and practitioners by means of the Śrīcakra diagram, or “genetic code of the cosmos”. In Śrīvidyā’s kaulācāra path, the Śrīcakra is mapped directly onto practitioners’ bodies, and worshipped through pleasure-evoking practices.
Because female practitioners are closer to Devī due to their creative and nurturing qualities, usually, male practitioners, as Śiva, lovingly worship female practitioners, as Śakti. Thus, female practitioners become aware of their inherent divinity, while male practitioners develop the caring traits of mothers – which premise their own self-discovery as Devī. Essentially, the relationships that practitioners, Devī and beings at large establish among each other by giving and receiving acts of care determine their personhood.
Motherhood emerges as a transspecies phenomenon that exceeds gender, biology and immanence, and engenders worlds around care; by cultivating nurturing attitudes, (non-)human beings uncover their divine nature and, as Devī, unravel transcendent potentiality into manifest spacetime.
Paper short abstract
The ’Issawy Sufi order is known for its animal-mimicking rituals: a practice often labelled as un-Islamic. Challenging this view, I argue that 'Issawy rituals are based on a distinctively Islamic idea: the notion that the divine names have a transformative power, one that affects both body and soul
Paper long abstract
The ‘Issawiya is known in the ethnographic literature as “the most exotic and notorious of all North-African (Sufi brotherhoods)” (Gellner 1981: 137). Such reputation is due to the supposedly un-orthodox nature of its rituals, some of which include mimicry of animal behaviour. As shown by previous studies (Brunel 1926), ‘Issawis maintain that, through powerful secret formulas, they can acquire the qualities of animals: an aspect of the order that has been interpreted by ethnographers as the remnant of pre-Islamic forms of animism (Glasse 2002). In this paper, I will problematise this view. Based on my fieldwork with the ‘Issawy order in Libya, I will show that, in fact, the brotherhood’s supposedly animistic practices rely on specifically Qur’anic understandings of the transformative power of divine names, and in that sense they share the same logic as another, more recognisably Islamic aspect of the brotherhood: the spiritual exercises. These entail recitations of God’s names to be performed daily: a quotidian, mundane and repetitive form of dhikr (“remembrance of God”) aimed at producing internal, and therefore largely invisible transformations in one’s character, behaviour and interpersonal relations. As we will see, both the formulas for the embodiment of animal qualities and these more ordinary recitations are based on the notion that the divine names affect those who abandon themselves to their power. Both, therefore, are part of the same transformative process, one that entails both moments of spectacular metamorphosis and more subtle, imperceptible yet no less powerful forms of moral reconfiguration.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how Christians in spaces of despair cultivate gratitude in the “specious present” (James 1890). My interlocutors embrace a theology and practice of “active abiding” and thus imitate their atemporal God. Hope is not limited to the future, but also reorients the past and present.
Paper long abstract
This paper is based on ongoing multi-year fieldwork with Christian organisations in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. It explores how these multi-denominational organisations cultivate hope in spaces of despair. During this research, it has become apparent that hope it not limited to the ‘not yet’ (Bloch 1986) future for my interlocutors. In their daily lives, there was little talk of the eschaton, the afterlife or the second coming. Instead, hope as epistemological tool reoriented the past, future, and the present. In this paper particularly, I will focus on the work this hope does in the “specious present”. In his theory of consciousness, William James imagined the specious present as ‘no knife-edge, but a saddle-back with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time’ (James 1981[1890]:574). I will unwind my interlocutor’s theology of “active abiding” on this “saddle-back”. At its core, this “active abiding” incorporated gratitude into daily life and faith. This cultivated gratitude was a great source of hope in the present, as well as a tool to reorient the past. The meditative action of “active abiding” centred my interlocutors in their present, and in their relationship to their atemporal God, who was perceived as constantly existing in a state of ‘the present’ in his atemporality. To “actively abide” was to consciously seek and express gratitude for God’s actions, but also to abide in the divine mindset.
Paper short abstract
Among British Spiritualists, contact with the eternal is fundamentally oriented around the daily and unextraordinary presence of the dead. Ritual practice, and cosmology itself, are constituted via ordinary ethical relations and the provision of care between mediums, sitters, and spirits.
Paper long abstract
British Spiritualists experience the presence of the dead in everyday micro-moments of attentiveness, becoming progressively ‘attuned’ towards awareness of spirits. Perceiving the dead as accompanying the living constitutes an ethical relation of care between humans and spirits. Presence emerges through fleeting sensations, affects, coincidences, dreams, and a sense of ‘never walking alone.’ Eternity is not a rupture, but paradoxically an ordinary overlap between the timeless spirit-world and lived human temporality. Resisting normative separations between ritual and everyday reality, I show how collective mediumship events normalise spiritual presence beyond church settings. Séances, occurring in deliberately well-lit rather than darkened rooms, encourage regular conversation, laughter, and joking with the dead. Rather than constituting extraordinary moments of transcendence, mediumship consolidates ordinary relationality, allowing the dead to become known as ever-present companions in daily life. At the same time, Spiritualists’ insistence upon everyday spiritual connection shapes ritual action in a circular manner, as pragmatic worldly considerations determine which human-spirit relations come into view. Mediumship is fundamentally an ethical practice, oriented around providing healing to the bereaved through evidence that the deceased live on. Spirits who are not kin of ritual participants are deliberately ‘sent away,’ as they cannot fulfil this ethical duty. Mediumship paradoxically circumscribes transcendence: only spirits embedded in kinship networks and human temporalities acquire cosmological significance. Care relations, rather than sovereign spiritual agency, determine the presence of the so-called transcendent, positioning mediums as ethical “mediants” (Appadurai 2015). In Spiritualism, I contend, ethical reciprocity and co-participation most centrally underpin lived experiences of eternity.
Paper short abstract
This article uses Sunni occasionalism to critique secular theory’s limits on the transcendent. Through a miracle, it explores ethical subjectivity, proposing the Islamic concept of “Kasb” (acquisition)—centred on intention and choice—as key to ethical agency.
Paper long abstract
This article attempts to take Islamic theology seriously - specifically the Sunni doctrine of Occasionalism - as a productive site for anthropological theory, not just ethnographic “data”. In doing so, it exposes the limitations of secular social theory in understanding the transcendent, particularly contemporary concerns with “everyday ethics” and the “problem of God” in the anthropology of Islam. Through the ethnographic event of a miracle (keramot), the article highlights heteronomous ethical subjectivities which are neither truly “free” nor over-determined. Accordingly, it introduces the Islamic concept of “Kasb” (acquisition) as the central pillar of ethical agency in its emphasis on intention and choice, over freedom and reason.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the cultivation of divine presence as an intimate and relational source through the healing agency, hospitality, and "istimāla" (attracting people to Islam through love) of Bosnian Naqshbandi Sufi sheikh Mesud Hadžimejlić (1937–2009).
Paper long abstract
In this paper I examine the cultivation of divine presence as an intimate and relational source through the healing agency, hospitality, and "istimāla" (attracting people to Islam through love) of Bosnian Naqshbandi Sufi sheikh Mesud Hadžimejlić (1937–2009), a family descendant of the Bosnian Naqshbandi pir Husejn Baba Zukić (d. 1799). Based on interviews conducted in Spring 2024 and written sources, the paper explores how sheikh Mesud - regarded as an evlija (walī, friend of God) by local Muslims, exemplifies a broader pattern of Bosnian Sufi sheikhs whose hospitality and care towards others, held restorative powers in the Bosnian postwar period. I theorize such attentiveness in sheikh Mesud's activities as an embodiment of Muslim adab (beautiful/noble behaviour) - a form of transmission and proselytization that Bosnian sheikhs frequently emphasize on one hand, and as micro-moments of care on the other that hold a significant meaning in maintaining everyday relationships. His hospitality across ethnic and religious divides, his nurturing of neighbourliness, and his cultivation of "being with others"—expressed in the Bosnian vernacular as biti dobar čovjek (being a good human/being human)- all speak of everyday piety as ordinary practice, and of agency which is an expression of transmission of divine grace rather than of sovereign willpower. This unbroken transmission through silsila (spiritual genealogy) illustrates circular temporality: divine love flows through generations not as linear progress but as constant return and renewal to its source.