Interview on Waiting for Elijah: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape (Berghahn, 2018)

Anthropologist of landscape and religion Safet HadžiMuhamedović, author of WAITING FOR ELIJAH: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape (Berghahn Books), recently spoke with the NBN's Dino Kadich about topics addressed in the book. Find out more about karstic landscapes, (schizo)chronotopes, and the act of writing about time, space, landscape, and difference on the podcast. Set in the beautiful, sprawling Field of Gacko in southeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, Safet HadžiMuhamedović’s book Waiting for Elijah: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape (Berghahn Books, 2018) takes readers through intimate encounters and syncretic moments as he and his interlocutors wait for Elijah’s Day. An annual festival that is shared by Muslims and Christians in the area, Elijah’s Day forms the basis for a “grand chrontope” that imbues time with meaning in the Field. Yet, the day—and the book—are about so much more, as HadžiMuhamedović writes skillfully across cosmologies, postwar life, and possibilities for resistance in other temporalities, analyzing social difference without reducing it. In addition to the traditional writing of an academic book, he includes a closing section called “The Georgics: An Extended Poetry of the Land,” which explores connections and moments that do not fit neatly into the conceptual foreclosure of scholarship but raise profound questions nonetheless. Dino Kadich is an MPhil candidate in geography at the University of Cambridge. You can follow him on Twitter @dinokadich