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]

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

Eco-charms July 20. 2020

In collaboration with Sarajevo-based, multimedia artist, Meliha Teparić (International University of Sarajevo), we are filming installations of calligraphic mobiles across the forage grounds of our apiary. A series of divine attributes are sculpted in wood, in Kufic style of Islamic calligraphy, and installed where the bees search for pollen and nectar (on linden, thyme, and pumpkin blossoms, for instance). We call these mobiles “eco-charms” and install them in a gesture of invoking and grounding disseminated divine names, which are also qualities: of vitality and substenance (Ya Hayyu, Ya Qayyum), generosity (Ya Wahab), clemency, plenitude and nourishment (Ya Rezzak), the qualities much needed in the contemporary environments where nectar and pollen—the hive staples of sweetness and sustenance—are diminishing in response to the changing climates. Why eco-charms? When all is said and done, what else remains for the beekeepers and bee lovers, if not high hopes against the odds? Against the unprecedented pace of global change, how can we not persist in prayerful expectations that species, places, and forms of life (after Van Dooren 2014) may carry on, flourishing? We thread together the means of protection used in Islamic and Sufi traditions—from invocations to amulets—on the one hand, and the invocations of resilience and promises of conservation that abound in the writings of climate change biologists and ecologists. Eco-charms stage landscape invitations for multispecies encounters and keep a record of a fresh conversation between apiculture, anthropology, and arts on the subject of hope and anticipation, in the face of anthropogenic assaults upon the biosphere, in which we all, more or less, participate.

CO/WITH: Gardening Through COVID-19
Summer 2020

video essay, 11:37 min.

CO/WITH is a filmed note from our beekeeping diary. It records a collaborative trial in planting and thinking together, remotely, about our embodied and ecological relations to the world suspended, as it were, by COVID-19.

June 4. 2020.
“Do You Believe in Coronavirus?”
Larisa Jasarevic contributes to:

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
History of Science ON CALL: Listening, Attending, Acting

Since the Coronavirus
closed the borders, the MPIWG has developed a portal that offers 3–5-minute video contributions from scholars who present their latest resarch on these and emerging
topics.

Larisa Jasarevic spoke from her apiary.

https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/video/history-science-call-larisa-jasarevic

https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/video/history-science-call-larisa-jasarevic

**Have You Heard a Matica Sing?**

Beekeeping After the War in Bosnia&Herzegovina

article & video essay, 9:51 min. 2018

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