Ethnographies of Waiting
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Ethnographies of Waiting 9781474280280_txt_print.indd 1 02/11/17 9:08 PM Ethnographies of Waiting Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty Edited by Manpreet K. Janeja and Andreas Bandak 9781474280280_txt_print.indd 3 02/11/17 9:08 PM First published 2018 by Bloomsbury Academic Published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Manpreet K. Janeja, Andreas Bandak and Contributors, 2018 Manpreet K. Janeja and Andreas Bandak have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design by Adriana Brioso Cover image © Westend61/Getty Images Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. ISBN 13: 978-1-474-28028-0 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-350-12681-7 (pbk) Contents List of Illustrations vi Contributors vii Preface and Acknowledgements xi Foreword Craig Jefrey xiii Introduction: Worth the Wait Andreas Bandak and Manpreet K. Janeja 1 1 Great Expectations?: Between Boredom and Sincerity in Jewish Ritual ‘Attendance’ Simon Coleman 41 2 Hope and Waiting in Post-Soviet Moscow Jarrett Zigon 65 3 Time and the Other: Waiting and Hope among Irregular Migrants Synnøve Bendixsen and Tomas Hylland Eriksen 87 4 Waiting for God in Ghana: Te Chronotopes of a Prayer Mountain Bruno Reinhardt 113 5 Providence and Publicity in Waiting for a Creationist Teme Park James S. Bielo 139 6 Waiting for Nothing: Nihilism, Doubt and Diference without Diference in Post-Revolutionary Georgia Martin Demant Frederiksen 163 7 Not-Waiting to Die Badly: Facing the Precarity of Dying Alone in Japan Anne Allison 181 Aferword Ghassan Hage 203 Index 209 9781474280280_txt_print.indd 5 02/11/17 9:08 PM List of Illustrations 5.1 Exhibit display at Te Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Photo by author 141 5.2 Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky. Photo by author 144 5.3 Pre-food mural at Ark Encounter. Photo by author 151 5.4 Example of Dragon Legends display case at the Creation Museum. Photo by author 155 9781474280280_txt_print.indd 6 02/11/17 9:08 PM Contributors Anne Allison is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. A specialist in contemporary Japan, she studies the interface between material conditions and desire/fantasy/imagination across various domains, including corporate capitalism, global popular culture and precarity. Allison is the author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994), Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (1996), Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (2006) and Precarious Japan (2013). She is currently conducting research on new demographic/social trends in Japan involving death, solo sociality, and self- management of (one’s own) mortuary and post-mortem arrangements. Andreas Bandak is an Assistant Professor in the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on Christian minorities in Syria and the themes of prayer, the power of examples, and the stakes of co-existence. His work has been published in a number of prominent journals, including Current Anthropology, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnos and Religion and Society. He has also co-edited the volumes Politics of Worship in the Contemporary Middle East (with Mikkel Bille, 2013) and Qualitative Analysis in the Making (with Daniella Kuzmanovic, 2014). Synnøve Bendixsen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen (Norway). Her research interests include irregular migration, political mobilization, Islam and Muslims in Europe, the study of inclusion and exclusion, and processes of marginalization. She has written a number of articles, book chapters, and edited volumes and one monograph: The Religious Identity of Young Muslim Women in Berlin (Brill, 2013). Bendixsen has been a visiting scholar at COMPAS (Oxford) and New York University. Since 2013 she has been the co-editor of the Nordic Journal of Migration Research. James S. Bielo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University. He is the author of Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Bible Study (2009), Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity 9781474280280_txt_print.indd 7 02/11/17 9:08 PM viii Contributors (2011), Anthropology of Religion: The Basics (2015); editor of The Social Life of Scriptures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Biblicism (2009); and curator for the digital scholarship project Materializing the Bible. As a teacher-scholar at Miami University, Dr Bielo teaches courses in cultural and linguistic anthropology, ethnography, religion, American communities, and transnationalism. Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, and President-elect of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. His research focuses on Pentecostalism, pilgrimage and cathedrals, and he has worked in Sweden, Nigeria and England. He is co-editor of the journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research. Publications include The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity (2000) and The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism (co-edited with Rosalind Hackett, New York University Press, 2015). Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and PI of the ERC AdvGr project ‘Overheating: An anthropological history of the early 21st century’. He has carried out research in several locations on the dynamics of cultural and social identities in complex societies undergoing rapid change, and has also directed large-scale projects on migration and diversity in Norway. His textbooks in anthropology, including Ethnicity and Nationalism (1994); Small Places, Large Issues (1995); Globalization: The Key Concepts (2007) and A History of Anthropology, are widely translated and used. His latest books are Fredrik Barth: An Intellectual Biography (2015) and Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change (2016). Martin Demant Frederiksen is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cross- Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. He has conducted anthropological fieldwork in Georgia since 2005 and Bulgaria since 2015 and published on issues such as urban planning, youth, crime, temporality and ethnographic writing. His current research concerns the roles of nothingness and meaninglessness in social life. Recent books include Young Men, Time and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia (2013) and Georgian Portraits: Essays on the Afterlives of a Revolution (2017). Ghassan Hage is the University of Melbourne’s Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has published widely in the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, racism and migration. His work fuses 9781474280280_txt_print.indd 8 02/11/17 9:08 PM Contributors ix approaches from political economy, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. He is currently working on two ARC supported projects: ‘The experience and circulation of political emotions concerning the Arab–Israeli conflict among Muslim immigrants in the Western world’ and ‘The Politics of Negotiation’ as a critical way of reconceiving inter-cultural relations. He is the author and editor of many works, including Waiting (2009), White Nation (2000) and Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003). Manpreet K. Janeja is Associate Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on trust, food, cities, migration and diversity in South Asia and Europe. She is the author of Transactions in Taste (2010), co-editor of Imagining Bangladesh (2014), and her next book, The Aesthetics of School Meals: Distrust, Risk and Uncertainty, is in the works. She has been a Eugénie Strong Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at Girton College, University of Cambridge, a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University (Centre for South Asia), and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics. Craig Jeffrey is the CEO and Director of the Australia India Institute, and former Professor of Development Geography and Official Fellow at St John’s College, University of Oxford. Currently leading a large ESRC-funded project on educated unemployed youth in South Asia, he also writes on Indian democracy, educational transformation, globalization and the ‘social revolution’ that he sees occurring across twenty-first-century India. He has authored numerous journal articles and six books, including Timepass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India (2010), and contributes regularly to BBC Radio 4, The Guardian and the Australian Financial Review. He was recently elected a Fellow of the