WAITING FOR ELIJAH: TIME AND ENCOUNTER IN A BOSNIAN LANDSCAPE 

2018, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 

Waiting for Elijah is an intimate portrait of time-reckoning and ‘syncretic’ religion in one Bosnian landscape, the Field of Gacko. Centred on the shared harvest festivity of Elijah’s Day, it discusses the temporal dimensions of encounters, firstly through the tensions between the traditional forms of social interaction and the politics of ‘religious’ and ‘ethnic’ polarisation in the aftermath of the 1990s war in Bosnia, and then through the various contacts and exchanges manifest in the Field’s pastoral cosmology. The central ethnographic trope – waiting – builds on the creative and ‘double-coded’ orientation of the annual cycle toward its summer pinnacle, which gained new affective and political qualities in the post-war life of the Field. For those who beckoned the old landscape, waiting for Elijah became a call for the kind of communal life that entails waiting.
 
The first part of the book examines the Field existing along the rifts and frictions between two different chronotopes, or dominant ‘timespace’ themes. The landscape where encounters once anchored cosmic Time has turned towards the past as the desirable model of social interaction. Silence about the present and a strong orientation toward the past through visceral storytelling about the annual cycle became a particular form of engagement with the precarious meaning of home and the Field’s futurity. Encounters and the wealth of the Field’s traditional time-reckoning appeared as powerful remnants, sometimes in the most unlikely of places, such as the ‘anti-syncretic’ nationalist discourses. The second part of the book is a discussion of the Field’s warm season, situated in the broad scholarship on Bosnian, Proto-Slavic and Proto-Indo-European religious systems. It offers one possible extended reading of the hybrid histories of George and Elijah, the Field’s main time-defining protagonists.
 
Based on long-term and multi-sited fieldwork carried out exactly twenty years after the beginning of the war in Bosnia, Waiting for Elijah examines the complexities of time situated between folk cosmology, political constructions of history and bodily experiences of a landscape in transition. It raises far-reaching questions for the study of proximity, migration, home, time and ‘syncretic’ landscapes as well as for the interpretations of social structures and religion in Bosnia. 
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