Beekeeping in the End Times (eBook)

Larisa Jašarević (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
216 Seiten
Indiana University Press (Verlag)
978-0-253-06814-9 (ISBN)

Infos

— The author has her own website (https://beekeepingintheendtimes.com/Home) to accompany the book, which serves as a companion with multimedia that brings in stories, images, video footage from apiaries, forage frontlines, and more. There is a documentary by the same name, which also will bolster the book's publication, that the author has worked on with her sister Azra.

— Contemporary scholarship is increasingly ecologically minded, and this book shifts the attention of current studies to Islamic sources, which are rarely read for ecological implications, and Bosnian Muslim practices.

— This book fulfills IUP's strategic goal for the global and international studies list to consider effects of environmental change on global populations.

— The target audience includes students and scholars engaged with anthropology of environment, religion, and medicine, or with multispecies ethnographies. It is of interest to those studying entomology, Islamic and religious studies, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities broadly.

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Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels wonder out loud whether the bees are still swarming. For as long as the bees are swarming, the angels are reassured, the world holds together. Still, the tale suggests, the angels live in anxious anticipation of the End. Local beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina retell the old tale with growing unease, as their honeybees weather the ground effects of climate change.

Beekeeping in the End Times relates extreme weather events and quieter disasters that have been altering honey ecologies across Bosnia and Herzegovina since 2014. While world-wide endangerment of pollinators, and bees in particular, has been the subject of much global concern, effects of climate change on the indispensable honeybees,remain understudied. Drawing on a five-year long study, the book suggests that local apiarists' field observations resonate with many climate biologists' concerns and speculations about the future of plant-bee relations on the warming planet. Local practice also adds to the record complex and puzzling trends that make honey scarce in otherwise lush, biodiverse landscapes.

To Bosnian Muslims, honeybees are more than pollinators. They are inspired beings whose honey is another form of divinely revelation. To appreciate the meaning of honeybees and to grasp the dire ecological catastrophe underway, Jašarević reads contemporary environmental writings and Sufi texts, she listens to the seasoned beekeepers and collects local wisdom tales. From start to finish, Jašarević pores over key Islamic texts, the Quran and the Hadith, and their popular retellings. The Islamic end-times lore, the book proposes, holds surprising lessons on how to live and strive in the 'not yet,' stalling the apocalypse.

Autor

Larisa Jašarević is an anthropologist, a fellow with the Independent Social Research Foundation, and a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. An independent scholar, Larisa lives and works by her apiary in northeastern Bosnia and has previously taught at the University of Chicago. She is author of Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: Intimate Debt.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments
1. Are the Bees Still Swarming? A Tale of Two Angels.
2. Honey's on the Wheels: Beekeepers' Prayers.
3. Planting on the Eve of Apocalypse. The Prophet's Advice.
4. A Near-End Ecology: A Devil at Heart.
5. The End: God's Promise.
Bibliography
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.3.2024
• Zusatzinfo: 12 b&w illus.
• Verlagsort: Bloomington
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Islam
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Ökologie / Naturschutz
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien
• Themenwelt: Weitere Fachgebiete ► Land- / Forstwirtschaft / Fischerei
• Schlagworte: Anthropology • apiculture • Bosnia • climate change • Eastern Europe • Ecocriticism • Ecology • Entomology • Environment • Environmental Humanities • ethnography • foraging • Herzegovina • Islam • kijamet • multispecies • Religion • World end
• ISBN-10: 0-253-06814-2 / 0253068142
• ISBN-13: 978-0-253-06814-9 / 9780253068149