“The formation of the world. Slowly what will be approaches. What will be already is. The future is ahead and behind and to either side. The future is what always existed and always will exist. Even if Time is abolished?”
Lispector in Água Viva (2012: 31)
In the social sciences, investigations of human experiences of time lead into a thicket of questions about culture and language, mind, and memory. Clarice Lispector’s words highlight that to ‘simply’ exist is never simple, and raises complex questions about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. Although in European grammars time is conventionally divided into past, present, and future, and perceived as linear, anthropologists know well that members of different societies have numerous ways of framing, expressing, and reflecting on temporality. In our edited book Christian Temporalities, we ask how we can think differently about the transcendental, particular in relation to experiences of temporality whose complexity can only be explored ethnographically. For example, the Asmat people of West Papua (Indonesia), as described by Jaap Timmer, have a history of ritual headhunting that was believed to enable the cyclical regeneration of life. For Asmat, who all converted to Catholicism in the 1950s, their “heathen past” of headhunting and cannibalism is now felt as out of time, preventing them from moving forward in linear fashion towards the development promulgated by the Indonesian government. It is therefore striking that secondary conversion to Islam allows Asmat to move beyond their decades-long struggles with this violent past of headhunting, opening-up a new horizon, a future.
The Asmat in West Papua are but one of the different cultures showcased in our volume. Presenting cases from the USA, Sweden, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, we explore the many ways various Christian believers (including Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, Baptists, and Contemplative Christians) envision and engage with multiple understandings of time as they reflect on God’s presence in their lives. Several chapters in our volume also discuss how conceptualizations of Christianity can be viewed in terms of perspectives provided by other world religions, including Islam and Judaism. In exploring these varied ethnographic cases, we show how people live in numerous, parallel and even overlapping temporalities, which are layered upon each other and may be deployed in ways that pose no contradiction for those who experience and enact them.
Immanence–the divine as it is experienced in everyday life–and transcendence–that what lies beyond human experience– appear to be mutually exclusive, but in practice many religious and political actors attempt to bring the two together in some fashion. Contributors ask how transcendental temporalities are mobilized to shape the world we live in, helping to form specifically Christian projects. In her chapter “Fátima and the Referendum: Pilgrimage as Temporal Work in Bougainville Politics”, Anna-Karina Hermkens shows how in the small tropical island group of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, transcendental powers, and specifically “Mother Mary”, have been invoked to mobilize political change in a highly diversified society. Here, the performances of Catholic pilgrimages can unite people from different regions, denominations, and political affiliations within Bougainville, and one of the ways they do so is by incorporating religious time within political practice, with the promise of societal renewal translated into new temporalities of the future. Such renewal enables people to escape from being caught in a limbo between past and future, trapped in past trauma and a temporality of waiting and passive agency that has prevented them seeing and working towards something new. For another region in the Pacific, Karen Brison describes how Fijian Pentecostal pastors draw on competing temporalities, combining discontinuity narratives–involving the rejection of the past and the embracing of a born again identity–with the idea that God has already determined the course of human history and that contemporary lives repeat those of biblical figures. Where these Christians affirm the capacity of humans to intervene in history to inaugurate an eschatological future, bringing the biblical past into the present, the Zimbabwean Baptists studied by Leanne Williams Green are particularly concerned to downplay human agency and to produce modest narratives from events they have just experienced. In her chapter “Divine Control Read Backward”, Williams Green explores how these believers place profound emphasis on God’s control over everything that happens. Yet they also see time as deeply uncertain, full of the vagaries of everyday life in postcolonial Zimbabwe: their assumption is that human corruptibility clouds any ability to identify divine action in the present and future. Rather than hoping for dramatic miracles, believers come to know God’s transcendence by recognizing traces of divine goodness crystalized only after the fact.
The idea of rupture denotes a tension between tenses, between past and future, but the chapters in this volume place more emphasis on the chronic ability of people to shift between tenses, often in one and the same action—through such behaviors as rituals, heritage, or engagement with broader projects in civic and political spheres. We show people from different Christian traditions moving between temporal registers that include the transcendental and the (secular) immanent. This is living in-between.
In particular, authors respond to Simon Coleman’s foundational work exploring how charismatic believers engage with at least two ways of dealing with history, namely ‘invoking history’ and ‘making history’. Coleman labels this engagement ‘historiopraxy’, referring to the process by which ‘novelty can be invoked through deploying cultural resources that, seemingly paradoxically, recall actions taken in the past’ (Coleman 2011: 426). Paula Pryce explores a version of historiopraxy among American followers of Wisdom Christianity. She shows how through the performance of sacred drama, followers invite Christian historical-divine persons to dwell within their bodies, thereby bringing the divine past into the lived, embodied present. Other authors look at the workings of historiopraxy by focusing on such activities as sermons, reconciliation ceremonies, Catholic pilgrimages, and the creation of religious heritage. Drawing on Coleman’s work in very different ways, these and other case-studies explore how ‘ordinary’ Christians and other religious subjects perceive and deal with relations between ‘the already fulfilled’ and ‘the not yet completed’, between present and future. As David Morgan writes in his epilogue, historiopraxy, or what he calls “the crafting of time”, is “an art practiced in everything human beings do, an intuitive discernment that shapes narrative, ritual, work, and play.” It’s how “human beings craft themselves in the great diversity of ways they do.” We invite you to explore this exciting diversity and new ways of thinking about how the divine and transcendental temporalities are mobilized across the world, to shape the world we live in.
