Waiting for Elijah: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape - Paperback

by Safet Hadzimuhamedovic (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Safet HadziMuhamedovic is a social anthropologist based at the University of Cambridge, where he holds courses in the anthropology of religion, and conflict and interfaith relations. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Bosnia and the wider Mediterranean for over a decade and has been a recipient of numerous prestigious research awards.