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What does it mean to live at the end of the world? What does the end of the world mean? For Blang communities, the next Buddha will usher in a new world of perfect equality. Blang societies were born out of their worlds ending, but are also prefigurations of their own futures.

Paper long abstract

For Blang people, living in the uplands of the China-Myanmar border, the end of the world is a joyous event. When the next Buddha arrives “everything will be as flat as this board,” there will be no rich or poor, no mountains or valleys, everyone will be equally tall and beautiful. Our era of inequality will come to an end and the world will be swept clean. In some ways, Blang communities are themselves prefigurations of their own end times. They were born from conquest, epidemics, and state violence. Surviving the end of their worlds, Blang communities escaped the lowlands and established communities, self-governed through direct consensus democracy, with communal land allotment, and mutual aid. Blang communities are not utopias, but forms of social organisation considered utopian in our societies are commonplace in theirs. Blang ends of worlds are radically different from out own. This highlights the need for a comparative approach: what does the end of the world mean? How do people live before, in, and after the end of the world?

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Discussing the notion of finitude and its relation to different modes of hope and despair, the paper explores how spirituality and religion can become tools for a largely secular, post-apocalyptic climate movement that is struggling to reorient itself from utopian toward negative future imaginaries.

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By discussing the notion of finitude and its relation to different modes of hope and despair, the paper explores how spirituality and religion can become tools for a largely secular, post-apocalyptic climate movement that is struggling to reorient itself from utopian toward negative future imaginaries. As right-wing forces gain strength, public neglect of the climate crisis increases, and severe repression against climate activists has taken place in recent years, feelings of defeat and despair are growing. In this shifting political atmosphere, post-apocalyptic strands of the climate movement in Germany are gaining popularity. This reorientation is characterized by a heightened attention towards affects and emotions. Against the backdrop of an already unfolding polycrisis, Christian and other religious climate activists seek answers and resources in their traditions. Through scriptures, practices, and institutional infrastructures, they are aiming to participate in ongoing discussions about disastrous futures and the possibilities to overcome them. The paper takes the example of pastoral care to explore how finitude, as part of an emotional and spiritual process, can become a productive resource. Understood as a natural aspect of human life and the rhythms of the world, finitude may enable individuals to move from despair toward a renewed, life-affirming perspective. I conclude by arguing that, through their professional practices and knowledge, priests can be understood as experts in matters of finitude that are able to contribute both intellectually and practically to a new collapse-oriented movement by addressing the growing need for emotional guidance.

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This presentation explores alternative farming practices as forms of resistance to modernity. It focuses on interspecies negotiations at the heart of the water cycle and on ways of worlding in which non-humans are social and political partners.

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Through a comparison between the Peruvian Andes and the Breton bocage, this presentation explores alternative farming practices as active forms of resistance to conventional agriculture and the processes of reification of the environment that it proposes. It focuses in particular on interspecies negotiations at the heart of the water cycle. In the Andes, access to water resources is the result of close cooperation between indigenous peasants and the mountains, whose temporary support is only gained through extensive offerings. In Brittany, the restoration of the bocage, largely destroyed under the impetus of agricultural modernisation policies, reflects farmers’ efforts to encourage both water to flow and wildlife to repopulate farms. The aim is to present ways of worlding by alternative farming communities in which non-humans are social, political, working and trading partners. The ongoing recreation of interspecies interactions is seen as a form of resistance to modernity and a response to its environmental, economic, social and political crises. Far from being closed systems, alternative farming communities are grappling with modernity, which directly affects the ways in which they relate to the world. We will therefore explore ontologies in motion.

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This paper discusses two groups having incorporated 'uncommon futures' (Valentine & Hassoun 2019), with a focus on the affective dimensions of people identifying as punks with their ethos of no future, as well as former Jehovah's Witnesses who lived under the constant threat of the end of the world.

Paper long abstract

In many societies, the life course and especially ageing is articulated within a preventive logic. What about members of groups that resist such a linear timeline and preventive logic? Refusing the future impacts identities, or, as Sobo (2016) puts it, it is ‘affiliative’. Punks’ famous ‘no future’ slogan and its implicit credo of living in the now, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses' belief in the end of the world, both refer to alternative temporalities transcending a linear life course. The refusal to engage with future-oriented practices can have a significant impact on an individual’s health, education, and, more generally, life opportunities, both positively and negatively. Seen from this kind of perspective, aging is conceived as ‘liminal’, as speculative, negotiated, and, following Homi Bhabha, as an in-between state with the potential for subversion. This talk explores this state, especially its affective dimensions, by juxtaposing the two groups, which show astonishing similarities.

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Drawing on healthcare encounters during Lebanon’s financial crisis, I propose an ethnographic theory of collapse as the height of contradictory living, showing how collapse renders visible long-embedded social and economic contradictions in capitalist life—and makes them unavoidable.

Paper long abstract

Through ethnographic encounters with healthcare workers, patients, pharmacists, activists, and artists during Lebanon’s 2021-2022 financial crisis, I show how people in Lebanon describe their world as one that has collapsed. When capitalism reaches an apex of crisis, I show how lives are lived as prices, social relations, identities, and structures become unmoored and in-flux. This un-mooring plays out amid a historically-privatized healthcare system, one that fails spectacularly under intense conditions of medical austerity and a prolonged liquidity crisis. I propose in this paper an ethnographic theory of collapse: that collapse is the height of contradictory living. Put another way, I show how collapse renders visible the social and economic contradictions that have long been embedded in capitalist life in Lebanon — and makes them unavoidable. In this way, I suggest that contradictory living responds to the assumed ephemerality of collapse: it shows the spaces of choice and agency in how people pull apart their routines of everyday living and re-suture them along new seams. The choices that people make in response to these contradictions matter, and it is what makes agentive acts on the social, economic and political worlds during collapse possible.

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Based on ethnographic research on gambling and speculative practices in Turkey’s economic crisis, this paper examines how people live through monetary collapse as an ongoing end-times condition. It shows how lotteries and everyday gambling become techniques of re-worlding

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the economic crisis in Turkey as a lived experience of everyday end-times, focusing on gambling and speculative practices as responses to monetary breakdown, inflation, and prolonged uncertainty. Rather than approaching crisis as a singular rupture or terminal collapse, I analyse it as a condition of slow world-ending, in which state promises, economic temporalities, and expectations of continuity steadily lose credibility. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among lottery players and small-scale gamblers, I explore how practices of chance emerge as techniques for inhabiting a future that no longer feels guaranteed. In a context where wages erode, savings dissolve, and the state's monetary authority appears increasingly fragile, gambling becomes a means of recalibrating time itself. I argue that gambling in crisis operates as a form of re-worlding. It neither denies collapse nor promises redemption. Instead, it allows people to act within a world perceived as already broken, sustaining moral distinctions between hope and delusion, responsibility and abandonment. These practices also reveal the cosmological dimensions of economic crisis, as chance, fate, and calculation become intertwined with evaluations of state power, fairness, and sovereignty. By situating gambling within debates on worlding, un-worlding, and re-worlding, the paper contributes to anthropological discussions of end-times as uneven, ongoing, and embedded in everyday life. It suggests that worlds do not simply end through catastrophe, but are continuously dismantled and partially remade through mundane practices that hold together despair, hope, and moral reasoning in precarious balance.

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In post-earthquake Hatay, Turkey, the Alawite minority faces overlapping crises - COVID-19, the 2023 earthquake, the 2025 Alawite massacre, and economic collapse. Their connection to the region and sense of identity is suddenly questioned, revealing a world in which the future has become uncertain.

Paper long abstract

In post-earthquake Hatay, Turkey, young Alawites face overlapping crises - COVID-19, the 2023 earthquake, the 2025 Alawite massacre, and ongoing economic collapse. The earthquake flattened city of Antakya, prompting many to leave the region. Those who stayed were left to rebuild the city and mourn the many lives lost, yet economic precarity and cross-border violence suddenly forced Alawites to question their connection to the region and their sense of identity. Hatay, as the only place in Turkey with Alawite shrines, holds particular significance for the community.

Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2024-2025, I employ the concept of the “work of disaster” (Seale-Feldman 2020) to explore how social, ecological, and political disruptions are experienced and managed. The earthquake, delayed aid, and ongoing crises intensified vulnerabilities, particularly for minorities historically marginalized by state policies and social hierarchies. The 2025 massacre further destabilized these hierarchies and the region’s perceived security, which had already been undermined by the earthquake and the government’s slow response.

The paper emphasizes the phenomenological experience of living in a region that feels as if it is ending, illustrating processes of un-worlding and re-worlding as familiar social, spatial, and temporal structures are destabilized and partially remade. I conceptualize these experiences through dispossession of the future, a condition in which loss extends beyond material destruction to include uncertainty about intimacy, mobility, safety, and life trajectories. The Alawite minority, with nowhere else to go, struggles to forge new social and emotional worlds in the aftermath of disaster and violence.

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Based on long-term ethnographic research in post-earthquake Petrinja, this paper examines how a systemically produced regime of waiting for reconstruction reshaped the horizon of possibilities and generated situated practices of worlding under conditions of prolonged uncertainty and suspension.

Paper long abstract

Catastrophes do not begin with disastrous events, nor do they end with them. Rather, they unfold as prolonged processes that reconfigure material conditions, relations to the future, and capacities for engagement. In such contexts, the “end of worlds” is a process within which worlds are actively re-made through political and everyday actions of residents. The paper explores these processes through the case of Petrinja, Croatian town struck by a devastating earthquake on 29 December 2020, which resulted in the loss of lives, widespread displacement, the destruction of the historic city centre, and the deroutinisation of everyday life. The aftermath was defined by a period of waiting for state-led reconstruction that lasted more than two years and whose effects extend beyond the onset of reconstruction. This waiting unfolded within a systemically produced temporal and material framework shaped by administrative congestion, broken promises, and inadequate crisis communication, further intensified by its overlap with the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on post-war reconstruction experiences, residents perceived this period as one marked by uncertainty and the city’s slow demise through outmigration. The paper examines how these experiences translated into situated practices of worlding within and against this politically imposed framework of waiting. It shows how the horizon of possibilities, hopes, and expectations was continually reshaped through various forms of engagement and withdrawal, and how contested personal and collective futures remained central to these dynamics. The paper argues that attention to such practices is crucial for anthropological understandings of re-worlding in post-earthquake contexts.

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This intervention examines how a community-based socioenvironmental education program near the Sinú river delta operates as site of reworlding that seeks to counter dispossesive forces through a reclamation and reorganization of knowledge and knowledge practices.

Paper long abstract

In a coastal village near Colombia's Sinú river delta, a surf club for girls challenges gendered norms in relation to the sea. But the club isn't really about surfing. Nor is it really about gender. Rather, the surf club is part of a wider community-driven socioenvironmental education program, Sinumar, that centers knowledge and knowledge production as key to reversing dispossesive pressures. Multiple ruptures characterize the recent history of this popular but still off-the-beaten-path beachside tourist destination. Among them are transformations in the ecosystem resulting from climate change and human activity, the tensions and opportunities of a growing tourism economy, generational gaps resulting from the region's historical conflict dynamics, and a continued sense of rural marginalization that frames youths' future prospects. Local fisherfolk and educators alike speak of an unworlding associated with these pressures: the slow, attritional violence (Nixon 2011) of a disappearance of customs, of ecosystems, of cultural and intellectual traditions, of access to space and place, of ways of knowing. Driven by a relational and process-oriented territorial approach, Sinumar deploys classroom, embodied, outdoor, and revenue-generating strategies for bringing youth and adults into creative dialogue with these disappearances. This paper will discuss how Sinumar's methodology operates a practice of (re)worlding through an ongoing collective exercise of selectively reclaiming and discarding vernacular, scientific, embodied, and historical knowledges and knowledge practices, in an effort to create sustainable social, economic, and ecological conditions for the community and its youth's futures.

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Warm-water coral reef ecosystems are currently on track to disappear within our lifetime, globally. This paper examines how coastal communities in Alor, Indonesia are balancing reef death with a new marine tourism boom, focusing on ethnographic explorations of death and futurity.

Paper long abstract

At present, 80% of coral reefs are now impacted by climate change. Without major intervention on a global scale, it is now predicted that warm-water reefs will disappear as a meaningful planetary ecosystem within a generation (Lenton et al 2025). The impact of a change of this scale for the global ocean, and for humanity, is unknown. This paper is grounded in past and future work with frontline coastal communities facing this transformation in the Alor Archipelago of Eastern Indonesia. Alor sits at the bottom of the "Coral Triangle", one of the most marine biodiverse areas of the planet, and is home to a wealth of communities traditionally tied to fishing and diving its reefs. The district has also seen a major increase in reef-dependent dive tourism in the last 5 years, attached to a great deal of hope for expanding local economic opportunities (Durney, forthcoming). At the same time, Alor's reefs are vulnerable and showing signs of stress, like everywhere else. In this paper I will explore ethnographic approaches for examining how Alorese communities are living with this seesaw of tourism boom and extreme predicted vulnerability, both practically and cosmologically. Fundamentally, I am asking what does it mean to be building (infrastructure, job opportunities, hope) on something that is dying; what does this kind of existential juxtaposition do to the process of getting on with living and how to we meaningfully talk about it?

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This paper explores how agrarian communities in eastern Poland live at the “end of worlds,” where poisoned air, rebelling nature, and a sense of lost futures shape everyday practices of sense-making and situated re-worlding amid ecological and political crises.

Paper long abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic research among agrarian and post-agrarian communities in Podlasie (eastern Poland), this paper examines how rural inhabitants experience living at what they describe as the “end of worlds.” In a region sometimes framed as Poland B, narratives of environmental and moral degradation, and political abandonment articulate a sense that social and agrarian worlds have been progressively un-made through postsocialist transformation, EU agricultural politics, and contemporary ecological crises.

I analyse locally circulating end-times imaginaries centred on toxicity, bodily fragility, rebellion of nature, and the loss of a viable future. Recurrent motifs of “poisoned air,” illness, and weakening bodies are explained through overlapping temporal and cosmological frames: Cold War nuclear catastrophe (Chernobyl), present-day environmental contamination, post-pandemic life, and Christian moral idioms. These narratives resonate with older, quasi-medieval understandings of disease and danger as emanating from the air, while simultaneously indexing Anthropocene anxieties about more-than-human agency and the limits of human mastery.

Engaging anthropological debates on worlding, un-worlding, and re-worlding (Haraway; Tsing; de la Cadena), risk and crises, and the loss of the future characteristic of catastrophic societies (Berardi; Fisher), I argue that these narratives constitute practices of sense-making and partial re-worlding, with “healthy rural food” and agrarian moral economies acting as material and symbolic forms of repair amid perceived endings.

By tracing how ecological, political, and more-than-human crises are lived and negotiated in a peripheral agrarian context, the paper contributes to anthropologies of end-times by foregrounding everyday forms of endurance, moral recalibration, and world-maintenance in a polarised world.

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Drawing on ethnographic research in central Chile this paper shows how a major wildfire exposes tensions between neoliberal frameworks and relational experiences of suffering, revealing the limits of postdisaster governance by framing loss and recovery as individual rather than collective processes.

Paper long abstract

What does it mean to live through an “end of the world” when dominant ways of understanding the self and making sense of suffering no longer fit lived experience? Drawing on ethnographic research in Pompeya Sur, Quilpué, central Chile, this paper examines how a major wildfire exposes a tension between neoliberal valuations of life and relational experiences of loss, survival, and endurance. Prior to the fire, residents largely understood themselves through a subject-centered ontology emphasizing individual responsibility, autonomy, and linear life trajectories. The wildfire does not simply disrupt this worldview, it renders it insufficient.

In the aftermath, therapeutic and institutional interventions framed the event through the language of trauma, treating the fire as a discrete episode to be individually processed and temporally contained. Residents repeatedly challenged this framing. Rather than locating suffering in a single catastrophic moment, they emphasized how the fire compounded long-standing trajectories of socio-environmental fragility. Trauma, in this sense, reproduces individualized logics that obscure the relational conditions through which suffering is produced and sustained.

Many affected residents, who often describe themselves as “burned by the state,” were compelled to confront the relational nature of their existence. Survival, loss, reconstruction, and endurance are experienced not as individual achievements or failures, but as collective processes sustained through kinship ties, neighborhood relations, and material infrastructures. This relational exposure does not replace neoliberal subjectivities, instead, both modes of valuation coexist uneasily. Disaster emerges as an ontological revelation, exposing relational life while institutions persistently reassert subject-centered frameworks during post-disaster governance encounters.