A sweet remedy for the ills of war

Finding solace in apiaries since Bosnia’s war and the troubled peace.

TRT World Opinion, 5. April, 2022.

https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/a-sweet-remedy-for-the-ills-of-war-56085

When honey ceases to flow

Honey can flow in landscapes with dismal histories. But what futures are forecast in the honey’s waning from the wilds?

TRT World Opinion, 7. April, 2022.

https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/when-honey-ceases-to-flow-56091

December 8, 2021, Copenhagen Business School. “Apocalypse is a Heartbreak,” a keynote.

https://youtu.be/ajJtZL_VDkY

The keynote and the accompanying video set the tone for the workshop “Organizing for apocalypse,” convened jointly by ephemera, an independent, open access journal run by a devoted editorial collective and AlterEcos, a research group at the Copenhagen Business School. Starting from the premise that an apocalypse is more conceivable than ever the workshop asked might we prepare for an apocalypse and what to make of the many ongoing efforts to anticipate, counter, broadcast, or downplay apocalyptic organizing. In response, the keynote spoke of a heartbreak,as a devastating, intimate experience that Sufis highly recommend and practically cultivate in their contemplations of death and the world’s looming End. Heartbreaking is also everyday experience of local beekeepers in the face of the recurrent, disheartening finding that honey’s waning from the wilds. In fact, our species capacity for a heartbreak may be most effectively stalling the world’s bad end, the keynote proposed. The video compiles footage from the film, Beekeeping in the End Times, currently in production.

May 5, 2021. Cultural Studies UCSC Colloquium — Beekeeping in the End Times

https://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/2021/03/18/may-5-2021-larisa-jasarevic-beekeeping-in-the-end-times/

A family of would-be migrants reenacts a swarm hunt at their former apiary in northeastern Bosnia. Their folk spells were well-attuned to the sorts of crises that tatter old human-apian ties, except the latest: extreme weather and emigration. Meanwhile, one tepid February, shepherds reflect on gratitude as their sheep graze by the growing coal-power plant. “The End is not yet,” they say. These are snapshots of what Jasarevic calls the quiets of disaster. Sharing a rough cut of a story from an ethnographic film, Jasarevic’s presentation concerns disaster ecology, Islamic eschatology, and ethnography as a homesteading craft.

Larisa Jasarevic is an independent scholar and a 2021 Wenner-Gren Fejos Fellow. An anthropologist, she has research interests in bodies and health, nature, and eschatology. A beekeeper and a homesteader, she is developing dread about multispecies climate futures. Her second book, Beekeeping in the End Times(IUP), is in preparation. She taught for a decade at the University of Chicago.

Date | Time
May 5, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

Have You Heard a Matica Sing?

Beekeeping After the War in Bosnia&Herzegovina

https://www.sapiens.org/culture/apiaries-beekeeping-bosnia/

Published by SAPIENS (An editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research), this video essay summarizes our take on local beekeeping.