Beekeeping in the End Times
Dr Larisa Jašarević
ISRF Independent Scholar Fellow 2022-23
NOTE: The Independent Scholar Fellowship application form has been updated since this proposal was submitted.
Abstract
Beekeeping in the End Times is an ethnographic film project that conveys Bosnian Muslim apicultures and stories about the world’s imminent ecological collapse. It shows how Islamic apocalyptic lore informs human-apian relations with ecological insights that, surprisingly, inspire hope. The ISRF fellowship proposal aims to secure funds for the films’ post-production as well as for online and on the ground distribution. The film is currently shot at the anthropologist’s apiary and compiled from the footage and findings of a postdoctoral research project on local beekeeping under the conditions of climate change. Conducted from 2014 to 2019 across Bosnia and Herzegovina the ethnographic research study has been written into a book intended for general audience. Also entitled Beekeeping in the End Times, the book is under contract with the Indiana University Press. Because, however, the implications of climate change on honeybees are surprisingly underresearched while the ecological tones of Islamic eschatology—the end time myths—are rarely acknowledged, the anthropologist has embarked on production of a film intended to reach wider audiences. The film presents three popular tales paired with events of extreme weather: 1. About angels watching for the signs of the End, including animal endangerment; 2. About planting on the eve of apocalypse; and 3. About a flower named “shame,” whose disappearance is said to signal “shameless” environmental irresponsibility. The film blends beekeepers’ storytelling with fieldwork footage from former battlegrounds and industrial zones, which are new forage frontlines. Tales are retold around apicultural predicaments in anthropogenic environments and atmospheres. The environmental message of the film is inflected by the Islamic ideas of ecology and cosmology. Rather than depict the local ways as romantic or presumably glum--in keeping with the environmental or Islamic apocalyptic (Kirksey 2015; Filiu 2011)--the film explores an eco-eschatological sensibility of broader relevance.
The Research Idea The project’s topic, problem, or question
The field-based research study that informs the Beekeeping in the End Times asked: how do local bees weather changing seasons and climates? How do the beekeepers make sense of the anthropogenic environments and atmospheres? What human-apian relations emerge under the pressure to hunt for increasingly scarce honey? In the contexts of novel and disaster ecologies (Kirksey 2015; Grove 2019) can we uncover distinct local eco-thinking and what do Islamic notions of nature contribute to them? Beekeeping in the End Times answers these questions while portraying local beekeeping and storytelling as unique modes of eco-eschatological mindfulness, understood here as an ecological orientation imbued by the sense of the planet’s looming collapse. For instance, Islamic and folk tradition describe bees as divinely inspired medicine-makers. Such representation of bees is a welcome supplement to both reductive notions of “master pollinators” and more organic visions of social but non-intelligent insects (e.g. Allison and MacCallum 2009). At the same time, the film shows that Islamically-inflected stories help take the bees’ and the earth’s ultimate fragility more seriously. Thus, the film joins the call of contemporary anthropologists, social scientists, and humanities scholars to counter the pace of global environmental devastation with “a rush of troubled stories” (Tsing 2014). In this spirit, Beekeeping in the End Times seeks to expand our ecological imagination and deepen our care for the non-humans (Haraway 2008, van Dooren 2014) while proposing that Islamic and religious apocalyptic stories merit a fair hearing.
Background Current research reference points and their limitations
Beekeeping in the End Times portrays the ways in which Bosnian Muslim apiaries persevere in anthropogenic landscapes while offering broader insights into the predicaments of honeybees in the changing global climate. While honeybees’ decline due to modern agriculture, industrial pollination, and Colony Collapse Disorder has received much attention (Suryanarayanan and Kleinman 2016; Kosek 2011; Imhoof 2012) this project shows the extent to which small-scale apicultures are threatened by extreme weather. The project addresses climate futures of the world’s most beloved insect in response to the fact that research on honeybees and global climate change is surprisingly scarce while the studies to date are published in academic venues and in highly technical language that makes them inaccessible to all but experts (e.g. Post and Avery 2019). In the vein of anthropological interest in “everyday Islam,” (Dupret et al. 2013) this project looks at Muslim practices beyond formal politics while focusing on much neglected, ecological dimensions of Islam. In doing so, it responds to the few invitations to inquire into Islamic environmental ethics (Foltz, Denny, and Baharuddin 2003). To the interdisciplinary scholarship on ecology, this ethnography contributes a non-Western vantage as well as a monotheistic perspective that is seldom considered (Moore 2014). Finally, much of the eco-scholarship is adamantly anti-apocalyptic (Kirksey 2015, Haraway 2016). As such, it discounts religious myths and alienates pious publics. In contrast, this project shows that apocalyptic stories need not inducing despair but may model an eco-stance that does not minimize the gravity of the climate change threat.
Project Thesis The hypotheses or innovative claims the research may enable you to support
The unique insight of this project is that Islamic eschatological myths, contrary to expectations (e.g. Filiu 2011, Haraway 2016), can complement discourses about vanishing bees and deepen eco-thinking. Moreover, Bosnian Muslim tales combined with strategies of ethnographic filmmaking offer new modes of empathetic storytelling and public engagement with urgent issues of the Anthropocene. In distinction to often-stated confidence in honeybees’ resilience the ethnographic research brings to the fore local apicultural observations on weather-induced disruptions of plant-insect relations and presents strong arguments that honeybees and their forage ecologies are already in peril. The film’s emphasis on Southeast European beekeeping under the conditions of changing climate (grossly underresearched; see Le Conte and Navajas 2008), is a complement to documentaries on bees that typically juxtapose industrial apiculture with more organic alternatives in Euro-American contexts (Imhoff 2012; Siegel 2010). A deep concern with local voices, along with the participatory nature of the ethnographic research and filmmaking, depart from the staged realism of the acclaimed documentary about beekeeping in the region (Kotevska and Stefanov 2019). The endeavor to hybridize Islamic eschatology and contemporary ecology in a post-secular idiom (Göle 2015; Pick 2011) and to translate anthropology into a multimedia, virtual message of environmental urgency, continues the effort to make ethnographic film publicly relevant (Suhr 2013; Razsa 2017). Finally, the film depicts ethnography as an engaged craft of research and a mode of multispecies belonging in a particular place on our precarious planet.
Methodology Methods and procedures your research will employ, with description of interactions, among different disciplinary inputs
Beekeeping in the End Times draws on five years of ethnographic research. The film’s footage references the fieldwork process itself, showing formal and informal interviews and seasonal apicultural activities. My principle interlocutors were mobile beekeepers and stationary apiarists, imams and Sufis among them. Filming took place along honey routes which sometimes overlap with the former war frontlines and overgrown edgelands of post-socialist industry. Sights of environmental devastation and its implications for forage ecologies have been filmed from 2017-2019 during extreme weather events. The film also incorporates anecdotes from anthropologists’ family apiary practice. The ISRF grant is intended to support the work on the film’s 1) post-production and 2) dissemination. Editing and post-production are time-demanding processes that not only make the product technically suitable for festival submission. These are also crucial to developing a distinct audio-visual language that conveys the appeal of local places and secures viewers’ close and empathetic attention. The editing will also help tighten the story plots with closely portrayed characters in order to convey narratives that otherwise may sound deeply foreign to secular Western audience. Finally, dissemination will be carefully planned and managed along three tracks: through documentary film festivals and arranged group screenings, which aim for film publics; through academic institutions, workshops, and environmental activists circles, including the many bee-oriented campaigners (form Greenpeace to UNFAO); and through a YouTube channel associated with the Beekeeping in the End Times website. The latter will feature a series of shorter educational video-essays drawing on the film and fieldwork footage.
Work Plan How your methods and procedures will be structured over the period of the award, including share of work time to be devoted to award research
The time afforded by ISRF grant would be devoted to a full-time work on the proposed project. Starting in January of 2022, I would embark on a year-long film’s post-production and distribution process as well as prepare video materials for online dissemination of the research results through YouTube channel and the associated website. Concretely, the tasks would be organized according to the following schedule: prepare the film portofolio (including synopsis, screen shots and such), develop an overview of target festivals, including submission criteria, and prepare a timetable for submissions and festival route (January and February); edit the film and produce a first cut (through March); organize initial screening through a network of colleagues in film industry, academia, and environmentalist organizations and incorporate the received feedback (April); make second cut (May); post-produce sound and color (June-July); send the edited film for further, professional sound editing and color correction (August-October); compile the final version (October); prepare a series of video-essays for the YouTube channel and organize complementary photo essays on the companion website for viewers’ further reference (November-December). Sound editing and color correction would be outsourced to remote editors. Video essays would be brief (10-15 minutes) and would aim to convey the research project in digestible segments while also directing the viewers’ attention to the book, the film, and the additional resources made available on the website.
Outcomes Describe project contribution, dissemination, and any further steps and longer-term goals
Beekeeping in the End Times is a multimedia project that inflects social research, ethnographic film-making and ecological thinking with local modes of storytelling. Blending insights of Islamic eschatology, reflections on the process of ethnographic research and filming with local lessons on apicultures in climate crisis, the project broadcasts its findings across multiple, interconnected media. The film addresses audiences within and beyond academy, across socially-engaged arts and media, and among the environmentalists and public at large. Combining careful research with elements of myth and suspense, as well as personal apicultural trials the film conveys an engaged tone and depicts the researcher not as a detached scholar but as a situated practitioner struggling to keep bees through weather extremes. In response to the fast pace of climate change and the public affects associated with it--ranging from anxiety, inflated optimism, or deflated indifference--the film explores new modes of compelling address and relies on faster dissemination tactics, including online screening. Distribution through at least ten international festivals aims to increase the film’s visibility and attract broader attention to the project as a whole. In addition, the project will be advertised through 1) academic list serves across disciplines; 2) apicultural research associations and save-the-bees activists; and 3) the Indiana University Press book marketing networks and promotional book talks. Finally, the film will be associated with the Working Films, an organization that matches documentaries with social justice and environmental protection publics and venues.
Ethics Statement Any measures required for ethical conduct of the research, including needed, regulatory compliance
The research project behind the Beekeeping in the End Times has been conducted in compliance with the procedures of the Internal Review Board at the University of Chicago, a committee set up to ensure ethical treatment of human subjects in social science research. The research project was formally endorsed by local academic institutions (Faculty of Veterinary Sciences and Faculty of Islamic Studies). As the risks to the involved participants were minimal, interviews were conducted on the basis of oral consent. Photography and filming proceeded only in case and to the extent that the interlocutors were comfortable. Participants in the film have also signed release forms. Throughout, due care was devoted to the politics of representation especially on issues that lend themselves to misunderstanding or stereotyping. Muslim religious practices, for instance, have been filmed obliquely, shifting the camera’s focus to subjects’ voices, hands, material objects, and lived contexts, with the aim of eschewing voyeuristic or exoticizing footage (e.g. Suhr 2013). The YouTube series and the companion essays on the website will be carefully produced with the aim of subtle educational messages on the cultural lives and ecological tones of the religion that has been utterly politicized and demonized in the new millennium.