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.

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.

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements

Foreword to the Paperback Edition
Marko Zivkovic

Introduction

PART I: TIME AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Chapter 1. Schizochronotopia or Elijah's Pitfall
Chapter 2. Time and Home
Chapter 3. Time and In-Other
Chapter 4. Time and Epic Residues

PART II: THE MANY FACES OF ELIJAH

Prelude: A River of Many Names
Chapter 5. The Georgics: An Extended Poetry of the Land

Conclusion: Waiting for Elijah

Bibliography
Index