Every hundred years, the angels ask “are the bees still swarming”? So goes a Bosnian Muslim tale of two angels waiting for the End. This talk starts with a story about the signs of the looming End to grapple with the very idea of “swarming”: what is it, what it feels like, what it does, what it foils, and for whom? The talk touches upon the apian arts of riot that have long fascinated biologists, ecologists, and technologists but goes beyond the common wisdom, following a hunch that swarming is our doing, as much as the bees’, or the angels.’ If the world is to go on. To hear the tale well and to pass it on, to take part in a multispecies riot against apocalypse, would take a flight from the old hives of reason, festering with narrow thinking and bad faith. Mixing notes from beekeeping, ethnography, and Islamic metaphysics with some documentary film footage, this talk absconds from academizing cells to build comb in the open and fill it — not with hope, but with prayer.

The anthropologist Larisa Jaśarević an independent scholar, filmmaker and beekeeper. For several years she taught at the University of Chicago. Her research on Bosnian beekeeping explores the lives of honeybees and their keepers through the lens of Islamic eco-eschatology.

This keynote lecture is part of the workshop Living through the End: Affective Lives of Finitude organized by the project Faith, Care, Despair at the CRC Affective Societies.