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.

Propose paper