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Mira Guth: In the book, you write beautifully about the power of storytelling to both gather knowledge and incite action—from ethnographic stories of changing honeybee ecologies to Islamic eschatological tales that teach listeners how to live well in the face of imminent end times. Thinking about the role of stories in your book as well as your documentary—where hope and apocalypse are not mutually exclusive—what can storytelling offer us in the age of climate change?

Larisa Jašarević: Thank you, Mira, for speaking kindly of my work and for raising the question on which this book pivots. Ethnography was always about storytelling, wasn’t it? Just think back to Malinowski, Mead, or Evans-Pritchard; for all the issues that we may have with the way anthropological knowledge fit snugly with colonial projects and imperialist epistemologies, those classic monographs still yield insights and carry a charge when we re-read them nowadays, precisely because of the stories they tell. Once anthropology became more honest about and more comfortable with the fact that ours is the science of “writing culture” and ever since critical studies of modern science, such as Isabel Stenger’s Inventing Modern Science or much of Bruno Latour’s undoing of fact/fiction, storytelling has become available to us not just as a colorful way of conveying the lore of others but as a method of producing knowledge. In other words, storytelling does not just add frills but is a method of thinking through puzzles, a preferred way of teaching and sharing. Anna Tsing’s work—and, my word, what a storyteller she is!—ever since the Realm of the Diamond Queen, and for me, Friction is the insider’s guide to telling stories anthropologically, to theorizing through storytelling.

With the global environmental and climate crisis, storytelling has become all the rage among concerned scholars across the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Donna Haraway’s incitement that ‘we must tell stories” and that “stories must change” became chants at the writing riots within eco-minded scholarship that narrates our catastrophic times. Storytelling is recommended to grab attention, to compel care and action and, importantly, to recast the lots and the stakes: what in the world could we be feeling and doing if we no longer took the world we knew for granted? We are living in the ruins of our late-modern certainties. A turn to storytelling has become a way to salvage good things from our scholarly enterprise, so that robust thinking can go on as climate change frays the biosphere and overheats our undergrounds.

This book and the film I co-directed with my sister, Azra Jasarevic, draw inspiration from Islamic cosmology, metaphysics, and eschatology as well as from Bosnian Muslim lore. Now, if I started from the flat statement that as a revealed, monotheistic, Abrahamic tradition Islam has been seldom perused for its ecological and analytical insights, I’d be making an argument that is sound, provocative, but not very inviting. Let me tell you a story of two angels, instead. If you lend me an ear, you’ll hear stuff about human companion species, eco-eschatology, about near synonyms and rough translations of apocalypse, as well as about God and revelation that you may not have imagined belonging in the stiff drawer that we labeled religion and stuffed full of mothballs. Angels, it turns out, have much to do with climate change, if we broach that problem from some different grounds. The tall task has never just been to tell stories, but to earn a listening. The challenge for the storytellers is to tap into and hone the arts of listening; this is what local Sufis have taught me. Most of all, storytelling can strike a tone with listeners outside academia. I’m striving for that.

Mira Guth: By foregrounding the ecological sensibilities and metaphysical insights of Islamic thought and practice, your book makes a key contribution to the field of multispecies ethnography—among many other realms of social thought—that have often avoided thinking seriously with monotheistic religion. What kinds of doors for scholarship do you see this intervention opening?

Larisa Jašarević: You said it. My book is an invitation to venture beyond multispecies relations to think seriously through the relationships between plants, human, animals, elements and God—the nonhuman that modern secular social thought is most uncomfortable with. Likewise, to entertain the idea of the cosmos that includes angels, jinn, and, indeed, the devil. Very few sources in the budding, bold scholarship on the pluriverse, cosmologies, alien and Amerindian ontologies, human-animal relations, new vitalisms and so forth, deal with revealed religion except in passing, often off-handedly if not outright dismissively. Ontologies are welcome but metaphysics (which ontologies presume, by default) are avoided. Speculation is now cool but the mere mention of Revelation comes off as deeply inconveniencing and unconvincing. Indigenous cosmologies and science-fiction are mined for the perspectives that estrange or reenchant our ties with the planet in peril but the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions are presumed to be essentially synonyms with the western anthropocentricsm at the heart of global resourcist economy. What is more, Islam is often overlooked or lumped among the Abrahamic traditions, as presumingly not much different than Christianity or Judaism. In short, right at the heart of the most conceptually expansive surge there is a closure, a hard line drawn around the revealed tradition. My writing is tapping a finger there; scholars and writers better than I will, hopefully, take a second look, find cracks in the wall, start taking it down. Repurpose the bricks to lay down a path through the thickets and gulistans our gardens and campuses may become when we stop mowing our comfort zones. Much of the eco-minded writing, if not all of it, is about nurturing hope. There’s no shortage of good advice on why we should keep hope on a battered planet. What we’re missing is faith, now that we doubt Progress, development, disenchantment, the greenness of green technologies, the politics of climate action, and so on. Mind you, the question of faith, monotheistic or otherwise, is always a question of faith in the world teeming with sacred propositions at odds with each other. What grounds our hopes? What makes them possible and viable? We’re back to metaphysical questions.

Mira Guth: It strikes me that you initially had other plans for your research before a large storm and rainy summer hit Bosnia at the beginning of your fieldwork—with devastating implications for bees and their keepers. How did you pivot your focus? How can all contemporary anthropologists stay open and attuned to the strained multispecies worlds, inevitably touched by climate change, that they and their interlocutors must now inhabit?

Larisa Jašarević: Mira, I appreciate this question so much. It’s the key question that I can only expand upon here. Initially, I intended to write about bees but not about climate change until its ecological local effects were forced upon me by a catastrophic storm and by the weird weather that bothered bees and plants and worried beekeepers long after the storm was nearly forgotten. Initially, I didn’t think I could study climate change, but over the years I’ve been rethinking the ways in which we could be attending to it. Climate change has been largely made into a technical issue that is intimidating to anyone who’s not conversant with climate science, climate biology, technologies and narratives of climate future projections, and such. Anthropologists have been cornered into studying the issue of climate change with terms such as vulnerability, resilience, or sustainability that are themselves technical and policy terms—and as such, worth engaging, indeed—but also rather narrow and uninspiring. On the contrary, there is so much that social sciences and humanities could do to step in and help us articulate questions, hear out concerns that various parties are already raising in non-technical terms. Let us find ways to discern the myriad, oblique, disseminated ways in which strange and extreme weather, deranged seasons, elemental alterations, species mismatches, bodily and sensuous registers of the unraveling atmosphere—in short, the rattle bag that is climate change—comes upon and by-and-by upturns all domains of social life. Our terms are becoming archaic (“a nice day,” “spring fashion”); our bodily experience is already archiving records of the former planet. The almanac of late modern and multispecies habits is being rewritten. That is not a technical issue. Biologists know this for a fact: idiosyncratic responses across species will be multiplying. The same goes for all species of knowledge and practice, for all are dependent on the climate in one way or another. So, yes, how do we study it?

Mira Guth: In the book you mention your own practice of keeping bees. How has this experience shaped your research, relationship, and understanding of beekeeping in the end times?

Larisa Jašarević: Caring for the honeybees made it real for me; the whole of it, the end times, you know? But just as important has been the fact that I live by the honeybees, on a landslide-crumpled, precious heirloom of a piece of land. And that the apiary where I live and write is in Bosnia, the country where genocidal war shaped the landscape and inadvertently fostered ample new honey flow opportunities. I write from the place where, nowadays, extractivist, global ventures are quickly showing just how the corporate rush and grab to transition to green energy is, literally, colonizing air, water, and soil in the boondocks. And there’s been talk of new violence; the country has been on the edge ever since the war ended. At the same time, our mountaintop is a heaven for insects, birds, and plants. I keep seeing species that are new to me. Jasmine bushes are abloom. It’s the time of the year when owls are hooking up. The very air is hoarse with strigiform longing. The smaller birds must be on guard because this sort of courting between raptors is sealed by offerings of flesh. The mixed-up world we live in, here at my doorstep, jamal & jalal, lovers and raptors, all of us, caught in hail storms and jasmine perfume. Right now, it’s the swarming season for the honeybees. We’ve been having a swarm a day. Just yesterday, the strangest thing happened. A great swarm caught high up in a plum tree. Some fifty thousand bees, at least! Then it started separating across two, then three branches—bees literally walked back and forth, undecided. Twice I tried catching them in a swarm bag, standing up in the tree, and twice I failed. “I give up,” I swore loudly. Just as I turn on my heels, a cluster of bees plummeted to the grass, just like that, and instead of dispersing, stayed huddled on the ground, bee bodies pressed to each other, sticking tenaciously, wings folded back. What’s happening? I took a step closer and…. You can imagine the rest, dear Mira, this had been too long. Adhan from the local mosque was announcing the midday prayer. Putting things into perspective, and summoning me to presence.