Apocalyptic futures: morality, health and wellbeing at the end of the world

In the context of Covid-19, anthropologists of medicine and religion alike may be tempted to join with the media in declaring that humanity is facing the end of the world as we know it. Indeed, as the global pandemic rages on, and the dramatic restrictions of national lockdowns ease and then retighten with an anomic unevenness akin to cardiac arrhythmia, it would be easy to imagine that these ‘strange times we now live in’ are somehow utterly exceptional – an eschatological precipice like no other. Yet, as the papers in this Special Issue on ‘Apocalyptic futures: Morality, health and wellbeing at the end of the world’ amply demonstrate, while the health and social crisis of the coronavirus pandemic is replete with compelling end-times signs, it would be wrong to assume that this new disease – even in its most acutely challenging of moments – holds a monopoly over human imaginations and experiences of world endings. Put simply, popular fascinations with the end of the world did not begin with Covid-19, nor, in our view, will they end with it.

Taken literally, rather than as a bad pun, this observation about the longue durée of apocalypticism provokes new and important questions which the authors contained within this Special Issue seek to answer. How do human imaginations of the biomedical and spiritual future alter life in the present? What happens, in this forward-looking temporality, to human reflections on the past – to ‘lessons learned’ about old diseases now eradicated, or past sins now atoned for? In the context of global disease, international conflict, national protests, and localized fears and anxieties, what does wellbeing look like, and how do humans continue to promote it – medically and morally – even as they face their own mortality, and that of those they love? In seeking to safeguard the ‘health’ of a nation, how might political and clinical interventions butt up against (or marry with) millenarian religious activism heralding an imminent apocalypse? If, according to some medical and religious commentators, the apocalypse is temporally soon, geographically here, and corporally near, then how might such convictions change the way humans experience their own bodies, as well as the world around them?

Apocalyptic times

Such questions centrally address the notion of time, but, we argue, also highlight the relationship between immanence and transcendence, and often with surprising results. Thus, while the anthropology of medicine might be more readily associated with the former, and the anthropology of religion with the latter, it is our suggestion that often implicit binaries – such as embodied/ethereal or clinical/spiritual – may be usefully problematized through an analysis of human endings, most especially as they relate to apocalyptic time. Millenarian religion and palliative medicine, for example, intersect at the axis of futurity, as they both strive to promote wellbeing under the shadow of human mortality. Equally, millenarianism and medicine react to (and yet depend on) a host of wider socio-political structures and events which their imaginations of future endings are, in turn, subject to. Efforts to effectively deliver disease diagnosis and treatment, pain and risk management, drug therapies and complementary medicine, personal wellbeing and individual sanctification, treatment compliance and moral surveillance, and even new medical discoveries and eschatological revelations – all of these mortality and morality-inflected projects necessarily occur within a future-orientated temporality which are framed, nonetheless, by the social and political present.

Yet, enfolded into the medical and millenarian ‘grammar’ of these present and future-orientated socio-cultural conceptions are different temporal accounts of mortality and morality as imagined, for example, by past societies (what Koselleck [2004] terms ‘futures past’). Other relevant accounts of the temporality of human endings and new beginnings include deontological time and the cultural futures of becoming (Bergson 2001), foreclosed futures set down as prophetic certainties by some evangelicals (Boyer 1994), future perfect tense preemptive justifications for action (Massumi 2007), calculated probabilities and algorithmic futures which seek to limit future risk (Beck 1992), open futures and the radical potential of future time in and of itself (Grosz 2005), future fatalism and the evacuation of the near future (Guyer 2007), and even the future as memory. As Rosenberg and Harding (2005, 4) put it: ‘the future is not an empty category. Even as we accept a sceptical critique of prophecy, we must accept that the future is not underdetermined as overdetermined…. [O]ur futures are junkyards of memories we have not yet had.’ Such is the diversity of our apocalyptic times.

Yet, despite such diversity, all of these different temporal framings of apocalypticism and wellbeing inform not only how we create logics of understanding for our cultural futures, but how we put these virtual understandings into practice (Anderson 2010). The phenomenologist Alfred Schultz (1967) observed of the motivating quality of future imaginations, that we, for example, think of the past as ‘what happened’ while the future is often acted upon ‘in order to’ achieve some imagined goal (Sturm 2018). Such framings, whether catastrophic and therefore final, or healing and thus open to ongoing change, inform how we act and are acted upon in the medical and moral present.

Our current ‘pandemic time’ can be refracted through any of these theorizations of futurity. Some, such as Naomi Klein (2020) have viewed ‘neoliberal’ forces as aiming to limit our possibilities or recapture negative externalities. Other voices, too, are radically organizing to reshape our medical and moral futures toward anti-racist and anti/counter-capitalist alternatives to socio-economic organization. The extent to which the Black Lives Matter movement has gathered momentum via data demonstrating that black people have disproportionally suffered from Covid-19 and its effects because of institutional racism and resulting socio-economic precarity, as well as through protest against failed political leadership which the pandemic has exposed, are open questions. Yet, in this pandemic present, it would seem that the future has simultaneously opened-up and closed-down such thinking and actions, with radical and reactionary voices forced to compete with each other for the attentions of increasingly polarized publics (Sturm and 2021, this issue).

How useful might it be, in this context of fraught division, to borrow the historical meaning of ‘apocalypse’ – that is, an ‘unveiling’ of the past and a revelation of the future – as a route to discussing oppression, inequality, and injustice? Might new social spaces be created where health and well-being are re-envisioned as vehicles for redemption and millennial change? Such thinking lends itself to adaptive becomings (Zafar-Smith, 2021). Indeed, we might ask, when our lives are en masse put at risk and immanently shifting (ahead of us, but also upon us, behind us, and within us), how can we learn to live or die in the apocalypse (Roy Scranton 2015; Žižek 2011)? How might we live in crisis and at the end of normative time?

Yet, the apocalypse is not necessarily punctuated in time; it can also be emergent. As 2019 ended and 2020 began, medical experts and millenarian prophets were busy warning of an emerging viral pandemic or ‘Pale Horse’ – a crisis first identified in China which many in Europe and America assumed would prove to be little more than an unwelcome distraction from already established socio-political challenges closer to home. Indeed, across the global north, it was Trump’s election and the Brexit referendum which together marked 2016 as the end of current times as we knew them (Barkun 2017; Knowles 2018; see Foye, this issue). Intriguingly, these serious events simultaneously jostle with (sometimes only half-joking) pop-culture declarations about how to survive a viral zombie apocalypse (Thacker 2018), or the eschatological arrival of an extraterrestrial New World Order (Robertson 2016). Similarly, the US culture of survivalism (Mitchell 2001; Gribben 2021), with its fierce scepticism of government authority and a (not unrelated) deep commitment to complementary and alternative medicine, calls for all enlightened individuals and their families to prepare for a soon-to-arrive crisis (WTSHTF) which will eventually herald the apocalypse (TEOTWAWKI) (see Rawles 2010).

Thacker (2011, 1) poetically captures this milieu of apocalyptic malaise as ‘the dust of our planet’: ‘the world is increasingly unthinkable—a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, stranger weather, oil-drenched seascapes, and the furtive, always looming threat of extinction.’ But apocalyptic crises are nothing new; each generation sees themselves as living in the last days (Boyer 1994). Risks, signs, and symbols of impending doom are found in changes in everyday life, as well as in social and political anxieties reflected in mainstream media and culture (Orr 2006). Such envisioned futures are of course lived out and materialized in various ways through planning and preparing for forthcoming changes, and, as such, future concerns are always reflected in current practices, as the panic buying of toilet roll and paracetomol in the first UK lockdown amply demonstrated. Apocalyptic disasters thus bring health and wellbeing in everyday life into sharp focus: who and what endangers our everyday and future existence? What moral values, civil structures, and socio-political configurations are at risk? What might be done to ameliorate such risk? Examining imagined apocalyptic futures reveals what is prioritized and valued, as well as how life is imagined without such things; it speaks to how humans define ‘The Good’, just as much as it speaks to the ‘suffering subject’ (Robbins 2013).

Whose apocalypse? Whose crisis?

Clearly, however, any deployment of broader comparative notions such as ‘The Good’ or suffering needs to be undertaken with a view to simultaneously paying serious attention to particularity, which, in the context of this Special Issue, means attending to the social and cultural particularisms of human imaginations of catastrophe, mortality, health, and wellbeing. While many religious imaginings view the apocalypse as both singular and global, several contributors draw attention to the particular ways in which apocalypses are also scalar, be they global and regional (Sturm and Albrecht 2021), national (Foye 2021), or even confined within individual human bodies (Webster 2021). There are similarities here to what Williams (2010, 11) refers to as the ‘combined and uneven apocalypse.’ For example, not unlike P.D. James’s (1992) apocalyptic novel Children of Men, recent medical research has suggested that climate change has led to significantly more still births and miscarriages, a children of men scenario globally, which, while occurring at the scale of the home, is no less apocalyptic for those hoping for a family as they face an end to their familial wider world (Bekkar et al. 2020; See also Banner 2014). Here, global scales of environmental health apocalyptically impact health and wellbeing at the scale of the body and home.

Scaling up to the level of the regional, while they are not isolated entities (Lasrus 2012), for small island states drowning by sea level rise, the apocalypse is still enveloping, and for the health of such island communities, their world is ending; it is their apocalypse. It is for this reason we note a difference in speaking of the end of one’s ‘worlds’, as an epistemological (as opposed to ontological) delimitation of meaning in the lives of individuals (Lynch 2021), families (Zafar-Smith, 2021), communities (Whitaker 2021; Littlewood 2021), and nations (Hickman 2021). Scaling up again, this epistemological concern with how we know what (we assume) we know also points to the false globalism of many Western discourses about ‘the apocalypse’ – the destruction of capitalism, threats to democracy, dissolution of state borders, ‘World Wars’ – as, in reality, both Eurocentric and Christian-centric. For example, the now dominant comparison of Covid-19 to the 1918 Spanish Flu is amnesic of the apocalyptic loss of a different but equally relevant ‘world’, namely the smallpox, measles, and flu viruses that contributed to the genocide of an estimated 70-90% of American Indigenous peoples (Stannard 1992). As Lempert (2018) notes, this colonial damage to Indigenous peoples has meant that many are already living in the post-apocalyptic present.

Furthermore, Parkin, Krause, and Alex (2013) ask who defines a crisis – in this case, who decides something is apocalyptic? Whose values are being reproduced, and how are these framed? What techniques, regulations, technologies, and higher powers are drawn on to address it? What impact do these have on everyday life, in the here and now? Understandings of apocalypse are powerful moral narratives that pull people and time scales together in particular ways (see Hickman and Webster, in press), with profound repercussions for their emotional, biomedical, and religious lives in the forward-looking present. Building upon this observation, the papers in this Special Issue collectively suggest that by anthropologically attending to the temporal framing of apocalypticism and wellbeing, we might gain a more nuanced understanding of how particular human communities seek not just to survive, but to live and die well within whatever ‘end-times’ scenario they deem themselves to be facing.

Importantly, use of the register of apocalypticism is not limited to ‘lay’, ‘folk’, or ‘religious’ actors, but is also deployed within professional clinical and health-policy arenas (e.g. Domingo et al. 2020). Indeed, while notions of health, as well as fears about illness and the limits of medicine form both implicit and explicit elements of popular apocalyptic constructions, apocalyptic narratives are applied to biomedicine itself, as recent concerns about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) demonstrate (Nerlich and James 2009; Davies 2013; Brown and Nettleton, 2017). Through the example of AMR we see how the language of crisis has elevated the ‘antibiotic apocalypse’ – the disastrous consequences of not being able to treat common infections with antibiotics through the development of immune ‘superbugs’ – to more than a mere health problem. The suggestion of the then British Prime Minister, David Cameron, that a future failure of antibiotics would mean the UK would be ‘cast back into the dark ages of medicine’ (United Kingdom Government 2014), further implies, as Brown and Nettleton note, that the end of the effectiveness of antibiotics would be the undoing or unraveling of ‘modernity’s promissory progress’ (Brown and Nettleton, 2017).

As such, AMR is framed not only as a failure of medicine, but as a wider failure of modern life and humanity’s ability to control the environment; a social, political, environmental, and economic disaster. Indeed, that Cameron then went on to appoint an economist, Jim O’Neill, to oversee a review of antimicrobial resistance within the UK is telling. Here AMR seamlessly morphed from being primarily a medical issue, to, perhaps more fundamentally, a financial crisis – a process which clearly echoes many governments’ approaches to the coronavirus pandemic. Across these multiple contexts, using the language of apocalypse and catastrophe is clearly a way of drawing attention to an issue while attempting to motivate a unified response. Parkin, Krause, and Alex (2013) see notions of ‘crisis’ in a similar way, defined as ‘an accelerating emergency that requires extra-ordinary attention’ – a term particularly apt at capturing the sense of urgency behind efforts to produce new medical knowledge (2013, 118).

Yet, discourses of apocalypse, catastrophe, and crisis are not only forward-looking, but also deploy the backwards-looking glance of popular history and myth to achieve its aim of galvanizing diverse publics into various collective programs of medical and moral control. In the case of AMR, where health promotion and disease prevention efforts orbit around attempts to stop patients overconsuming (and clinicians overprescribing) antibiotics, the sign of an apocalyptic return to ‘the dark ages’ is often offered with a specific historical referent in mind, namely the Black Death. Invoked as arguably the most popular trope of a catastrophic failure of medicine (see Brown and Nettleton 2017), Bubonic plague – often simply ‘The Plague’ (capital T, capital P) – stands as a metonym for the Western medical apocalypse. While a third of the human population in Europe died as a result becoming infected, recent historical research suggest that medical interventions were not in vain, nor was the spread of the disease quite as indiscriminate as previously thought (Cohn 2002; 2010). Regardless, the point remains the same, namely that the mythos of ‘The Plague’, as an unstoppable, irreversible, and undiscerning killer that wipes out populations and destroys civil society remains a powerful cultural resource for hegemonic understandings of the failure (or end) of medicine as synonymous with the end of the world.

Beyond medical limits: Health and wellbeing at the end of the world

While the history and development of Western biomedicine is clearly linked to specific Christian understandings of the world, and thus to the involvement of Christian clergy and missionaries within caring and curative roles (Burridge 1991, Turner 1995), such observations can be deepened by also recognizing the specifically millenarian take-up of medicine. This seems especially important since millenarianism, despite its etymology, is not always Christian. Furthermore, in examining the relationship between millenarianism and health, we see with renewed clarity how the apocalyptic scenarios posed by millenarian activists are pushed beyond crisis, toward hopes for new bodies within a transfigured new heaven and new earth (Burridge 1969). In many such constructions, medicine does not fail or ‘end’, but merely reaches its limit, with projects of health and wellbeing continuing in different forms, through the deployment of alternative resources and relationships. From Christian Science prayer (Fox 1984), to Islamic revivalist cures involving imbibing the Quranic text (Nieber 2017), to UFO-worship and spirit-possession healing rituals (Holston 1999), to Seventh-day Adventist dietary laws (Bauch 2016, Keller 2005), to Reiki diagnostics (Beeler 2017), to Jehovah’s Witness rejection of blood transfusion treatments (Chryssides 2016), to Scientology’s condemnation of modern psychiatry and psychotropic drugs as ‘human rights abuses’ (Koenig 2000, 389), to survivalist homeopathy, field medicine, and even self-defense training (Mitchell 2001), millenarianism insistently links the promotion of health and wellbeing to the soon arrival of paradise.

In doing so, it should come as no surprise that these religious movements prepare for this paradisiacal arrival – and in some cases even seek to hasten it – by conjoining and conflating body and spirit in ways that both react to and provoke new political concerns. Such examples are numerous, and address a diverse range of issues, from gun-violence and gun-control, to government regulation of alternative therapies, to the ethics of parents refusing their children certain medical treatments on religious grounds – issues made all the more pressing (and even risky) for millenarian activists who themselves await the imminent arrival of the eschaton. And yet, millenarianism cannot be reduced to a set of medically inflected causes or effects – to a this-worldly or other-worldly reaction against corporeal deprivation or cognitive dissonance (Hickman and Webster, in press). As such, while many millenarian movements remain deeply concerned with the health of their followers, in the final instance, where conditions are beyond human control, it is transcendent forces that intervene, or do not. The eschaton arrives, the present world of ‘the faithful’ ends, and perhaps will start anew.

This form of risk thinking, where the ruinous consequences of a soon-to-end-future are nonetheless imagined as potentially reversible within the present is also a central part of how biomedicine imagines its own work, most especially within the field of public health. And, as above, while it is equally true that medicine cannot be reduced to a set of millenarian concerns, the parallels between the morality of millenarianism and that of public health are striking. Here, messages about individual responsibility (guilt) for one’s future illness as predicted (prophesied) by the prototypical risk factors (signs of the times) of over-eating (gluttony) and physical inactivity (sloth) may be ameliorated or even removed (forgiven) through the positive steps (penance) of diet (fasting) and exercise (self-flagellation). With the brute fact of mortality (judgement) comes a recognition that life-expectancy is shortening (the end-times are here) and that premature death (damnation) could arrive before sufficient action (repentance) is taken – providing all the more reason to immediately reverse (mortify) one’s excessive consumption (sins of commission) and insufficient exertion (sins of omission).

Tracing out the similarities of these parallel millenarian and medical languages is not intended to be merely provocative, but aims to highlight the shared temporal framings of these two arenas of wellbeing. Drawing the present and future together, looking after current wellbeing is viewed as also taking care of future health, while risk factors identified in the here and now accurately predict future wellbeing, seen in one’s chances of developing diabetes, dementia, and cancer. As well as allowing for the creation of new disease categories that are indicative of becoming ill (such as ‘pre-diabetes’, ‘pre-cancer’, see Aronowitz 2009), this framing, as is evident in the papers by Webster (2021) and by Lynch (2021), emphasizes the actions that should be undertaken in the present to change such futures: altering ones diet, undertaking more exercise, stimulating the brain, stopping smoking. Timescales are conflated again as the past emerges within such spaces; a patient’s genetic inheritance, medical history, and past environmental conditions all contribute to their current status and future risk. Some factors cannot be undone, and without the possibility of medical intervention, certain futures may become inevitable, with health and wellbeing coming to be redefined as a matter of adapting, surviving, or getting-by as far as possible.

Notions of the apocalypse occupy a similar space. The construction of futures is compared to and co-constituted by the present and past, and vice versa – what Hickman and Webster (in press) refer to as millenarian ‘temporal coalescence’. As such, claims about whether the future will be better or worse than today are not purely forward-looking predictions, but are simultaneously moral statements about the present (see also Jenkins 2013). The result is that the future is constructed as a time when these issues of present concern – medical, political, social, or economic failures, pollution, lawlessness, godlessness – will either be resolved, or will result in irrevocable damage. While the pain of this latter scenario forms the substance of apocalyptic speculation, the joy of the former scenario is the defining feature of the millennium – the other side of the coin of apocalypticism (Stewart and Harding 1999) – a renewal of a paradise once lost, or an emergence of something entirely new out of the ashes of disaster. Apocalyptic understandings of future health and wellbeing therefore speak to present-day moral anxieties and values, while also being mediated by prelapsarian imaginations of a millennial past. The human body may be sick today, but it was not always so. Nor, with the arrival of death and the advent of new life, will it be sick forever. Such is the corporeal and ethereal hope of health and wellbeing at the end of the world.

This special issue

Steffen (2013) defines crisis as being made up of three elements: ‘first, great danger, difficulty or confusion; second, problem-solving or decision-making; and third, a timeframe indicating that crisis has a limited extent and is seen in contrast to other supposedly more ordinary times. Thus, crisis carries an air of something delimited and extraordinary’ (Steffen 2013, 193). In the following papers, scholars from medical anthropology and the anthropology of religion come together to explore these elements. Drawing on detailed ethnographic description, the papers present various apocalyptic scenarios, and examine ways in which health and wellbeing are linked to, shape, and are shaped by, moral and socio-political contexts, and result in imagined apocalyptic futures. While these contributions capture Steffen’s ‘air of something delimited and extraordinary’ (ibid.), in other ways the understandings, practices, and events described also appear as mundane, everyday, and embedded in the taken for granted routines of life. It is this effort to explore the extraordinary and ordinary ways in which the apocalypse is embodied and lived out as a medical, moral, and temporal phenomenon that defines the common intellectual ground upon which this collection stands.

In undertaking this effort, the collection considers how the apocalypse has been constructed very differently in different ethnographic contexts, from the US, to the Caribbean, to South America, to Scotland and Northern Ireland, to the Middle East, to Southeast Asia to Germany Drawing on this regional breadth and the diverse observations it affords, the authors consider how their interlocutors’ religious and political movements work to construct apocalyptic futures by speaking to contemporary issues, while also deploying reimaginations of the past. As the reader progresses through the Special Issue, different moral values, time scales, social relations, political concerns, prophetic anxieties, and medical models of health and wellbeing will be described and analyzed. Equally, the different ways in which apocalyptic futures are brought into everyday life will be considered, including how these intersect with millenarian hopes for a transformation in human affairs, both in the here and the hereafter. The result, we hope, is a recognition that health and wellbeing can never solely be about ‘the medical’ but is inseparable from, and is indeed constructed by, wider social, political and moral concerns, many of which are tightly bound to imaginations of human endings and hopes for new beginnings.

In sum, the papers in this special issue explore the confluence of health and apocalyptic crises. Beyond these intersecting themes, analytically and theoretically the papers are held together through spatial and temporal interventions in apocalyptic and health literatures as related to different scales of medical and moral ‘world endings’, and the various experiences of past, present, and future which they create.

Finding world endings to be both temporally soon and corporally near, Joseph Webster examines two markedly different scales of apocalyptic sign searching, identified by Scottish Brethren fishermen as they look out to the North Sea, in contrast to the late/liquid modern ‘Hyper Individual’ who finds the eschaton unfolding inside their own body. Scaling up to the level of the home, Zafer-Smith (2021) ethnographically explores bodily anxiety in the northern Galilee region of Israel. Within the omnipresent known/unknown modality of imminent war, wellbeing is constructed through creative uses and imaginings of home bomb-shelters as anticipated threats to the body, home, and nation manifest. Here the future is made present, these temporalities folded into each other, in the home as a lived everyday state of risk and threat. Similarly, Lynch’s paper is concerned with the everyday lived cosmological practices among evangelical Christians in Trinidad. The contemporary anxieties and attendant health concerns of global capitalism are performed and narrated as the earthly presence of the Devil—cosmological battles on Earth—and signs of the apocalypse. Yet, in partial contrast to Webster’s Scottish Brethren interlocutors who primarily locate eschatological signs within external seascapes and landscapes, these Trinidadian evangelicals seek to achieve intensely inward individual changes of self-care to purify their bodies for the Holy Spirit during these end-times. As such, for Lynch’s interlocutors, the apocalypse is figured as both ordinary and extraordinary not as an acute rupture, being instead strikingly mundane and processual.

Focusing on the example of Protestant fundamentalism in Northern Ireland, Foye’s paper explores a scaling up from the pulpit to the nation, specifically the health of the UK body politic within the European Union, understood by many Pentecostal preachers to be the whole of Babylon, an eschatological figure closely associated with the apocalyptic rise of the Antichrist. As such, Brexit, for Foye’s interlocutors, was not only a constitutional issue, but also a spiritual war between the kingdoms of darkness and light. In this context, Foye shows how the health of the nation comes to be constructed in the space between the polling booth and the pulpit by calling Ulster Protestant voter-congregants to cast ‘Leave’ ballots in a prophetic fulfilment of British end-times destiny. Just as Brexit promised to transform the ethno-national and ethno-religious fortunes of Northern Ireland, in the same way Whitaker writes about past imaginings of future transformations of the community and the racialized body. Focusing on a mid-19^th century millenarian movement at the intersection of Brazil, Guyana, and Venezuela, the paper shows how European colonizers were not understood as ushering in an apocalyptic catastrophe as was (and is) common among many indigenous millenarian movements, but instead were understood as offering archetypal signs of an apocalypse that would transform the indigenous community by their receiving healthier, white bodies. This theme of transmogrification is also explored in Hickman’s paper among Hmong millenarian activists. Again, the health of the nation is practiced through rituals that preempt the future towards not only nationhood, but placement at the centre of the world. Questioning the theoretical and assumptive boundaries of presumed anxiety within millenarianism and apocalypticism, Littlewood reflects on his work with the Earth People in Trinidad to argue that the end of times may not necessarily be an anxious process, but rather contingent, mundane, and circumstantial.

The final paper by Sturm and Albrecht, argues that all of these themes—scale, worlds, temporalities, semantics, motivations—can potentially be applied to any human phenomenon, and across fragmented communities in times of apocalyptic imaginings, from left to right and religious to secular. Using the present spectre of Covid-19 to illustrate this shared apocalypse, the paper illustrates the malleability and omnivorous quality of apocalypticism from the conspiratorial, to the political, to the technological, and the biological. They conclude that these shared apocalyptic motivations, and semiotics found within a wide range of fragmented communities can, nonetheless, provide common ground and cause to unite unexpected partners, even when addressed from very different perspectives.

As already noted, the etymology of the word apocalypse (Ancient Greek: apokálypsis) refers variously to the action of uncovering, disclosing, or revealing. But as the curtain is pulled back, what is it that is seen? The papers in this collection agree that studying apocalypticism uncovers the subject of endings, but give various answers as to what specific objects these endings might attach themselves to – the end of time, the end of the world as we know it, the end of the body, the end of politics, the end of medicine, the end of life, or the end of death, to name only a few. Thus, by thinking not only about the apocalypse, but also with it (see Robbins and Engelke 2010), this collection seeks to deploy ethnographic specificity to analyse how these various ‘endings’ are constructed, in all their exceptional transcendence and ordinary immanence, as features of the imagined past and future, as well as the ‘lived in’ present.

Through notions of rupture to the everyday, some aspects of life appear more amenable to change than others, as suggested by the often recited quote attributed to Jameson (1994), that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Through rupture, as we have seen in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic, existing inequalities, points of tension, and crisis become more exaggerated and evident. But opportunities for breaks from business-as-usual, birthing alternative modes of thought and action, may also emerge. As such, one object uncovered by drawing on the apocalypse as a research topic might be new approaches to the anthropological study of the everyday. As well as allowing us to think more clearly about time and the future, such an uncovering might also help us to situate elements of health and wellbeing outside the normal possibilities of medical intervention, revealing apocalypticism as a space where the ‘religious’ and the ‘medical’ are intertwined, reminding us afresh that these are never far away from each other.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).