Elsewhere Opens

Imagine a divided mountain-scape. A line of ceasefire. Fog. Imagine coming to a clearing. In a mist-covered, militarized order of here and t/here, affection makes way where vision or bodies cannot. Mothers call out to daughters; sons identify their mothers’ voices in two-way traffics of sound. So long as the vocal exchange lasts, somewhere along the disputed territory of the Golan Heights, an Elsewhere opens.

With an art installation at Berlin's Gropius Bau, Smadar Dreyfus recreates what once used to be an annual event, when the Druze, a religious minority torn apart by the border between Syria and Israel, would gather on Mother's Day and use megaphones to communicate across the border: two heres, as it were, briefly tied through affective engagements on the ‘shouting hill’, its brutal separation rendered soft by evocations of voice.¹ Encountering the exchange in a darkened gallery, one discerns how an impossible landscape is bridged by amplified, airborne affect. Good wishes, salutations, bouts of excitement, prayers and religious proclamations are all affective volumes that rise in place, move through space, and land elsewhere. In capturing what survives through physical separation, Dreyfus captures for us a bracketed condition of political-cum-religious possibility, what Salomé Voegelin (2018) has called ‘interbeing’. To be embroiled such in affect is to experience qualities of the in-between and the with-each-other, which speak to affect's relational poignancy—its adeptness at resisting the partitioning of time, space, and bodies, as well as its capacity for suturing worlds.

In its barest sense, Elsewhere is the not-here. ‘In, at, or to some other place’, it refers to the else of here, to what lies beyond the immediate, exists otherwise, and a where in excess to what is present in any given time and place, even instead of it, although never completely removed from it. It follows that the else of here cannot always be described as a there—at least not in the sense that it might indicate or point to a conceptually distinct here, a removed position that has no bearing on that which constitutes a here. Thinking such, as we learn from Amira Mittermaier's (2011, 2012) work on Sufi communities in Egypt and Annalisa Butticci's (2016) work on African Pentecostals in Italy, imbricates a greater landscape of imagination and aesthetics (of presence). Paying further attention to the affective ties—in saintly dreams, inspired religious visions, spiritual callings, and bodily sensations, as well as their material afterlives—produces and evidences a dialogue between a here and an imaginal Elsewhere, knotting in its wake reciprocal relations across disparate objects, figures, and realms, whether these are spatially or temporally configured.

At the heart of such engaged worlding for us—especially when it comes to the study of religion and its multiplicitous affairs with notions of the divine—is the question of affect. We might apprehend it as that indistinct yet critical volume, discretely impinging like foggy traffics of the ‘shouting hill’, which—to think of its concrete implications—animatingly moves through, between, or alongside other volumes and engages its subjects in dialogue across invisible borderlands. Equally critical here are the political agencies, consequences, and possibilities that accompany relations across spheres and lend these engagements their arresting character.

Even though driven by comparable concerns, the scholarly explorations in this collection are guided by distinct objects of study. Articles tackle the primacy of affect in diverse religious life-worlds and discuss the multiple political engagements it beckons. Across a constellation of texts and contexts, the authors move to sharpen the here in Elsewhere and collectively advance the position that such reciprocal interbeing shapes how believers come to experience more fully the here, whether it is a point in place or a place in time. Tying together the various contributions is a meditative yet critical afterword jointly crafted by Butticci and Mittermaier. Twin and shared rubrics in this special section serve to complicate conceptual and socio-political orders of here-ness and stretch their perceptional seams with affects and inferences of the not-here and the also-here.

An undertaking such as ours, one that pulls inheritances from both affect theory and the study of religion, follows in light of Donovan Schaefer's (2015) work on ‘religious affects’. His important argument that religion is driven primarily by affects offers fresh insights into how affect, not predicated on language, shapes the multitude of links, flows, and intersections between bodies and power. More radical is his proposition that in turning to affect and by subtracting “the framework of human exceptionalism” (ibid.: 3) we can come to view religion as a thing that affords continuities rather than as something that sets us apart.² In direct conceptual terms, however, we proceed from Mittermaier's (2011, 2012) articulation of an imaginal Elsewhere so as to pursue relations and continuities that emerge through religious experience and its possibly plural configurations, as well as intersectional correspondences. In so doing, we are also able to follow Schaefer's (2015: 8) insight that in certain modes, “religion, like other forms of power, feels before it thinks, believes, or speaks.” This special section proposes that Elsewhere be discussed neither merely as a synonym for the not-here nor only as an analytical frame to gesture at the here-after. Instead, as a polyvalent figure, Elsewhere lays out and examines the critical, medial, and agentive ways in which interlocutors in the field affect—and are affected by—attendant notions of the unknown, the uncanny, the imaginal, the other-worldly, the more-than-living, the ghostly, and the invisible (Gordon [1997] 2008; Goslinga 2012; Kasmani 2017a, 2019; Lincoln and Lincoln 2015; Taneja 2018). This collection of articles is similarly attentive to processes by which interlocutors, as well as researchers, learn to engage with various notions of Elsewhere(s) in practice, ensuring that such experience is maintained as a key element of research (Gibbs 2015; Hickey-Moody 2013; Mattes et al. 2019). Moreover, insofar as the Elsewhere is a figure predominantly tied to the study of religion, we call attention to its limits and transfigurations, and also to situations where it supersedes the sphere of the religious (see Butticci and Mittermaier, this volume).³

Our departures build on the recent scholarly focus on mediation in religious life-worlds—literature in the anthropology of religion that has considered the relational possibilities that emerge and are transacted exclusively between experiencing subjects and the transcendental (Butticci 2016; Csordas 2007; Luhrmann 2012; Meyer 2010, 2011). While the interest in mediation can be said to be recent, the concerns, conversations, and critiques surrounding it are not entirely new. The fact is that ideas of corresponding with the godly and the unknown, spiritual relations, or mystical becomings have long captured the imagination of those who have studied religion and society. Despite a vibrant intellectual history, it is startling that a critical and sustained engagement with informed ideas of affect, which so often are embedded in people's relations with and perceptions of divine, other-worldly or more-than-human figures, has not taken place.

It can, of course, be conversely argued that the dominant thread of affect studies has also not engaged critically or just not enough with religious life-worlds. If anything, the field of affect studies has met with critique for its US-centrism, its analytical habits, and the fact that it has not sufficiently engaged fields beyond its comfort zone, be they areas of study or geopolitical locations (Arondekar and Patel 2016). Addressing a similar blank spot with regard to urban Africa, Dilger, Burchardt et al. (2020: 4) highlight “the importance of studying the dynamics of affect, emotion, and sentiment in relation to religious discourses, practices, and materialities … from various disciplinary, regional, and thematic perspectives.” It is only in this way that we can understand how the religious and the socio-political are affectively co-constituted in the everyday lives of African city dwellers and how “the networks between people, religious forces, and material places are constantly established, dissolved, and remade” (ibid.: 15). In a field still sparse, we put forward in five original contributions not only the specific benefits of reading religion affectively, but also the resources that religious life-worlds can provide for the greater and richer study of affect and its societal implications. The attendant proposition here is that a multi-perspectival view of the concept is afforded from various research contexts stretching across geographical settings and distinct religious communities.

In the form of a special section, “Elsewhere Affects” addresses some of the opportunities outlined above. It places the matter of affective politics and political aesthetics at the center of imaginal and dialogical engagements. It draws attention to the entanglements of material strategies and im/material affects as well as their political-moral consequences, however remote or immediate. The articles in the section constellate emic categories and etic concepts that tackle what lies beyond people's immediate material and social worlds in historically situated contexts, offering a sense also of how they world with it. This is to say that our interest in the notion of Elsewhere is not simply a nudge to religion's spatial configurations or its other geographies. It is more concerned with the concept's capacity to encourage reflection on the politics and conditions of engagement across spatial-temporal realms, and ultimately its capacity for reciprocal world-making. Going further, thinking Elsewhere can also be a thinking across species—in religion's case, complex and compound relations that tie believers with differently corporeal, non-human, or more-than-living figures across other/worldly realms (angels, djinns, saints, spirits, mythical creatures, ghosts, etc.). On comparable contact and relations with the non-human, Donna Haraway (2008: 35) speaks of knots that tie and retie partners through reciprocal action, a knottiness that we think makes it easier to account for ethical-political stakes in such relations as well as the emotional and affective toll of engaging other bodies and figures of Elsewhere. More precisely speaking, contact with ghosts, spirits, djinns, and the like, even when accompanied by feelings of trouble or burden, brings forth a multiplicitous simultaneity of relations and actors that “helps us understand the world we produce together, not [always] in political homogeneity but [also] in practical conflict and disagreement and within its plural quotidian weave” (Voegelin 2019: 88).

Taking affect and politics as interlocked,⁴ the following articles invite a thinking of the Elsewhere in religious life-worlds that treads beyond concerns of pious living and salvation and does not deny religious actions their own political bearings (see Mahmood 2011). The various contributions, individually as well as a collection, inquire how affective politics and political aesthetics enrich textures of the everyday lives of religious actors. How do orientations to specific Elsewhere(s) affect and shape people's experiences and conceptualizations of time and space? Which techniques are mobilized to teach, learn, or engage these Elsewhere(s) in post-secular contexts? What are the methodological challenges when it comes to researching Elsewhere(s), and how might an Elsewhere affect a researcher's positionality and politics of representation? And, not least, how do relations with Elsewhere(s) as the not-yet-here—to lean on José Muñoz's (2009) articulation of queerness—open up imaginal and concrete possibilities of critiquing the present, enabling actors to imagine better worlds, other futures?⁵

Just as Elsewhere opens, we wish also to suggest that it matters, it bridges, and it moves. This introduction constellates around these nodes of thinking in the following sections. “Matters” lays out how Elsewhere is a concept for aesthetic-embodied material dimensions of religiously inspired worldings. In it we explore Elsewhere's translations, transfigurations, and learnings, inquiring not only about its material manifestations, but more broadly how Elsewhere comes to matter. In “Bridges” we attend to the political dynamics of mobilities and cross-formations involving the Elsewhere. In other words, linking religious moments and feelings to larger social and political dynamics helps us understand the ways in which religiously conceived realms are continuous with other or broader notions of worlding. Insofar as affect for us serves as the move beyond religious-specific tropes, we deliberate on the politics of reading Muslim and Christian life-worlds in tandem. In “Moves” we summarize the contributions in this special section while also gesturing at scholarly ways, adjustments, and attunements necessary for taking the other-worldly seriously.

Matters

With spatial and temporal metaphors entwined, Elsewhere helps configure the aesthetic-embodied material dimensions of religious life-worlds. If it gestures at the else of this-worldly, its where denotes a capacious excess, intertwining the here-and-now with what is yet not quite there. But how does an Elsewhere materially manifest itself and indeed come to matter? We rework the conceptual frame of the imaginal Elsewhere by engaging Mittermaier's (2011, 2012) work on Sufi dream narratives in Egypt in dialogue with the political ‘aesthetics of presence’ that Butticci (2016) has articulated with regard to African Pentecostal practice in Catholic Italy. Such thinking laterally allows the imaginal and the tangible coordinates of the Elsewhere to emerge in this- and other-worldly continuations.

Our interest in the affected and affecting real presence of the imaginal Elsewhere (Butticci 2016: 79–80; Mittermaier 2011, 2012) corresponds with a multitude of related concepts, such as moral geographies, futurity, sense aesthetics, materiality, ineffability, bodily affordances, and hauntology (Cassaniti and Luhrmann 2014; Csordas 2004; Kasmani 2017b; Lim 2009; Taylor 2012). Each of these concepts can be linked to the study of Elsewhere through specific routes. While the embeddedness of moral values in space-making is made explicit in the spatial metaphor of ‘moral geography’ (Taylor 2012), the foregrounding of temporal concerns articulated in notions of futurity is furthered through the spatio-temporal coordinates of the Elsewhere. Similarly, sense aesthetics, bodily affordances, and materialities incorporate the insertion and interception of the divine into human life-worlds (Cassaniti and Luhrmann 2014) and are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are constituting elements with which the Elsewhere comes into being or perception. This is poignantly conveyed in the affective extensions and overlaps of dream-space and iconic-space that Angie Heo (2018) identifies with regard to saintly imagination among the Coptic Christians of Cairo. Revered saints arrive from the “radically elsewhere” and reveal themselves through both “the liminal space of the dreams … and their icons on earth” (ibid.: 96). The Elsewhere conceived thus is not necessarily ineffable (Csordas 2004) or before language, transposed to an externalized alterity whose presence cannot be articulated. In fact, multiple kinds of Elsewheres bear material eloquence, are sensorially organized, and might continue to exert a haunting force through an excess of their presence and power. Similarly, Anand Taneja's (2018) discussion of saintly and ghostly presences in a Delhi ruin is a fitting example in this regard. Removed temporalities—what he terms Elsewhen—return and are felt in very material settings, lingering and impinging on believers’ actions in and perceptions of the here and how, illuminating deeper and complex ecologies of time and space (see also Wilhelm-Solomon 2020).

The Elsewhere is also where “eruptions” (Mittermaier 2011: 115) of dreams, knowledge, visions, entities, affects, and sensations occur at this- and other-worldly intersections. Alternative terms, such as the divine, the transcendent, the supernatural, or the uncanny, productive as these are in their own right—do not entirely offer like Elsewhere does the opulent arrangements and engagements we are interested in capturing.⁶ For instance, the Freudian notion of the uncanny (German: unheimlich, bordering on the unfamiliar) enjoys a renewed popularity in the anthropology of religion (Goslinga 2012; Morgain 2012), in examining “the frightening … that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light” (Freud [1919] 1976: 620, 623). The analytical force of mobilizing the Elsewhere lies in its being more than that which is secret and hidden, equally spatial and temporal, effecting presences both tangible and imaginal, simultaneously this- and other-worldly. Elsewhere involves more than the visionary but is not restricted to the invisible. It is not removed insofar as it is locatable in everyday life-worlds and bears a conceptual capaciousness for organizing and making sense of the enormous diversity of religiously inspired worldings.

It bears mentioning that the literature on material religion and mediation in religious life-worlds has indeed taken into account the persuasive agency of practices, bodies, objects, images, senses, and substances for engaging the ordinary and/with the extraordinary (Behrend et al. 2014; Houtman and Meyer 2012; Meyer 2010, 2011; Morgan 2010). They have partly also focused on the subjective and embodied dimensions of these engagements and the way in which they modulate relations with the Elsewhere and its impact on the ‘ordinary’ world. At the same time, the discourse on transcendence and the scholarly focus on the divine can occur at the expense of other (this-worldly) orientations, in particular when it furnishes believers with unilateral desires of communing with godly beings. If religious action in life or one's communication with divine realms is to serve mostly an afterlife or to connect to the Elsewhere, it follows that the sense of being political and engaged in the world is commensurable only with secular projects of living. We believe that analytical moves that are fixed mostly on orientations toward the intangible world can bear the effect of obscuring if not foreclosing believers’ other modes and possibilities of targeting the immanent and affecting the political because “in over-determining the transcendent in our analysis, we risk ascribing only specific kinds of motivations to the religious subject” (Kasmani 2017a; see also Behrend and Zillinger 2014: 3–7).

The five articles in this special section lay out the processes of translations, transfigurations, and the learnings of the Elsewhere(s) across religious life-worlds available from various ethnographic and historical locations in Europe and the Middle East: among the Shi‘i communities in Iran and Lebanon (Chavoshian and Marei), the migrant African Pentecostals and a post-secular Sufi community in contemporary Germany (Mattes and Selim), and Lutheran women in early-twentieth-century Norway (Hovland). The affecting and affected Elsewhere(s) across the Shi‘i Muslim (Marei and Chavoshian), Christian (Mattes and Hovland), and post-secular Sufi (Selim) life-worlds laid out in this collection of articles manifest as spatial and temporal cross-formations of objects, materials, figures, persons, sensations, sensitivities, dreams, visions, histories, futurities, locations, and territories. However, the discussion of these Elsewhere(s) in their manifold translations, transfigurations, and learnings is not complete without attending to the social and political dynamics of religious life-worlds. How the Elsewhere manifests and matters depends more often than not on how it bridges the religious sphere to the rest-of-what-is in the here-and-now.

Bridges

It is not a new insight in the anthropological study of religion that religious engagements with the intangible world are always closely entwined with the socio-political realities of the here and now, as well as with the religious subjects’ moral and affective investments in establishing relationships beyond their tangible life-worlds. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Émile Durkheim ([1912] 1995) argued that all religions strive toward transcending the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and that the rituals which their adherents perform for this purpose establish strong moral and emotional bonds among them. In this way, religious practices—and the non-human objects and forces they mobilize and rely on—are central for ordering the relationships and symbolic meanings of the believers’ everyday lives. Furthermore, religious rituals, and the collective effervescence they evoke, are also at the heart of establishing “an ecology of persons, things, elements, specific environmental features and animals within a complex totemic system that ensures the sustainability of all life forms” (Barnwell 2018: 29).⁷

The central role of cosmology and religion for the formation of the socio-political order—and the way religious beliefs and practices condition social relationships affectively—were of significant interest in the anthropology of religion in the early twentieth century (Douglas 1966; Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1968).⁸ Attendant to this was a growing critique of approaches that prioritized the functionality and purpose of religious ideas and practices for the here and now over the study of the believers’ own understandings and experiences of the religious acts they performed. From the late 1960s onward, anthropology would increasingly focus on how different religious traditions—which were then framed as ‘cultural systems’—mediate perceptions and processes of meaning-making among religious believers themselves in highly situated ways (Geertz 1966). Scholars sought to foreground religious subjects’ own experiences and dispositions and highlighted the “powerful, pervasive, and longlasting moods and motivations” that establish a sense of “factuality” of the divine among religious actors through their ritual performances (ibid.: 90).

More recent, however, is anthropology's affair with the ‘lived’ dimensions of religion whose investment in the situated nature of religious ideas, practices, and experiences remedies the normativizing force of texts and scripture and other modes of prescribing ‘correct’ religious thought and behavior. It looks at the everyday involvement of religious subjects in ritual performances while also illustrating how religious thought and practice offer meaningful ways of engaging with globalization and technologically advanced societies in the post-secular context. Such focus on ‘lived religion’ (Marsden 2005; McGuire 2008) has of late attracted the critique of sociologists and anthropologists who bemoan the sub-discipline's preoccupation with understanding “religion through private individual and domestic practices rather than in broader contexts of power relations” (Altglas and Wood 2018: 2). The critique calls for a more sociological understanding of religious ideas and practices that acknowledges their situatedness in—and the generative power of—the social and political configurations of the contemporary world (ibid.; see also Salzbrunn 2014: 74).

With this special section, we propose an approach to the study of affective engagements with the Elsewhere in religious settings that bridges the subjective and embodied dimensions of these engagements and their close entwinement with the socio-political conditions in which they are embedded. As Butticci (2016) has argued in her study of West African Pentecostals in Northern Italy, the mobilization of practices, objects, images, and substances in these churches’ services establishes an ‘aesthetics of presence’ that facilitates not only a sense of ‘realness’ among the believers in regard to their evocations of the Elsewhere, but also a wider reconfiguration of the relationships between the Pentecostal congregations and the host society in Southern Europe. This is particularly true for the highly conflicted relationship between the Catholic and the Pentecostal churches and is especially palpable in instances when the latter appropriate dominant Catholic symbolism and prayer spaces while simultaneously rejecting those religious elements that they define as evil and idolatrous.

The contributions to this special section thus testify to the way in which religious practices’ “affective trajectories and potentialities are always embedded in—and co-shape—larger social, political, and material configurations and arrangements” (Dilger, Burchardt et al. 2020: 17) in specific environments and localities. This is relevant not only when the all-male participants of a Shi‘i ritual in Lebanon call on the “ghostly presence” of al-Mahdi—the twelfth and final imam in Shi‘i tradition—as an identifying reference for “their own ‘war on terror’” and their “struggle against injustice” (Marei, this volume). The close intertwinement between affective religious practice and the socio-political order is also at work when a Sufi teacher in Germany trains her students in the performance of “idealized and desirable affect” in order “to confront everyday life” (Selim, this volume), or when Norwegian Protestant women in the early twentieth century transformed themselves “into important actors whose ‘decisive hour’ mattered on the world stage” by establishing relationships with multiple (geographical and Christian) Elsewhere(s) (Hovland, this volume). Similarly, politics are entwined in the ways in which West African Pentecostals implicate Berlin as a religious and migratory setting in their prayers, whose repercussions carry over and affect researcher's positionality (Mattes, this volume). Last but not least, Elsewhere bridges through the intimate dream encounters that individuals have with martyrs in contemporary Iran that allow for “non-conforming practices” in waking life, even a subversion of the Iranian state's martyr-cults (Chavoshian, this volume).

In placing these works alongside each other, this special section also responds to a recent call in the anthropology of religion to move beyond the compartmentalized study of religious traditions—common in the anthropology of Islam and the anthropology of Christianity—and to explore religious phenomena comparatively across different religious (and denominational) contexts (e.g., Beekers et al. 2019; Dilger et al. 2019; Janson and Meyer 2016). Our interest, however, is not precisely comparison, but more to explore a bridging, which is to think laterally and to read along “common grounds” (Larkin and Meyer 2006: 286) that are illuminated in the wake of such moves.

Moves

In this collection, Elsewhere helps us apprehend the more-than-here of affect. In this regard, these five contributions lay out distinctly articulated ways of dealing and corresponding with that which lies over the fence, beyond an immediate field of perception and, in that sense, removed. As Ann Armbrecht (2009: 215) has so poignantly noted, the invisibility of things is not proof of their absence but of their altered value in the world we live in. Our authors’ efforts to grasp what is removed are in fact scholarly moves that strive not so much to render the invisible visible but to restore value to their presence in the world. And that is not all. On one level and in several instances, these texts also compel us researchers to consider more methodologically what it means to move in our fields while also being moved by them (see Mattes et al. 2019; Stodulka et al. 2018).

“From the Throes of Anguished Mourning” (Marei) demonstrates how the performative aspects of literary and theatrical persuasion in Shi‘i ritual lamentation practices engender imaginal engagements with the other-worldly. The Elsewhere in Marei's reading is translated through religious meta-narratives and ritual lamentation. The recalling of pious Shi‘i figures transcends the linear temporality of time and place. Although other-worldly in composition, the Elsewhere matters profoundly in the here-and-now to the extent that it is implicated in the harvesting of persistent affective dispositions within the contemporary Shi‘i self, conferring emotional legitimacy to the larger imagined community. Moving our attention from the configurations of the Elsewhere within one Shi‘i community to the Shi‘i state of Iran, “Dream-Realities” (Chavoshian) offers an evocative instance of its transfiguration in the material matter of the scented gravestone of a fallen martyr of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). The concurring real and imaginal Elsewhere materializes through the intertwining of the other-worldly dream-images of the venerated martyr and the this-worldly fragrance of his tomb. Such transfiguration of the Elsewhere, materialized in the mass veneration of the “saintly localities” (scented gravestones) of ordinary fallen soldiers, destabilizes formal chronologies and momentarily subverts the this-worldly and state-approved cult of martyrs.

Elsewhere(s), diversely conceived, are not only space-time correlates that are translated and transfigured in religious practice. They emerge from within the intense engagements of an affective pedagogy of Elsewhere(s) as well as the politics of ethnographic observations and representations that bring it into being, thereby learning from and/or clashing with our interlocutors in the field. “Learning the Elsewhere of ‘Inner Space’” (Selim) attends to the pedagogic tactics employed by an Inayati Sufi teacher in Germany. By locating Elsewhere and its fleeting affects not outside but as part of the configuration of an ‘inner space’, the Sufi teacher empowers the notion of Elsewhere with the capacity to generate affective resources that help followers bear the double burden of post-secular life. In contrast, “Politicizing Elsewhere(s)” (Mattes) tracks the troubled divergence between an ethnographer's articulation of affective engagements as observed at a Nigerian Pentecostal church in Berlin and the expectations of the church pastor. Here, what matters most is not simply manifestations but the contained and controlled articulation of eruptions from the Elsewhere. Engaging the Elsewhere, as becomes abundantly evident in this case, carries with it not only a “religious but inevitably also a political bearing.” Together, in their consideration of positionality and attunements, instances of moving and being moved, whether with, toward, or away from interlocutors, these texts enable an understanding of how and why researchers’ affects are crucial to an ‘affective scholarship’ (Stodulka et al. 2018).

The contemporary translations and transfigurations of the Elsewhere(s)—among Shi‘i communities in Lebanon and Iran, migrant African Pentecostals, and post-secular Sufi communities in Germany—find a curious echo in the historicized “responsibility to respond” as expressed by early-twentieth-century Lutheran women in Norway. “An Ethics of Response” (Hovland), translates the Elsewhere into acts of response, tracking how the Protestant women during their monthly mission meetings attended to the “calling” from God-as-Elsewhere through “quiet listening.” The intermingling of sound and silence as the selected mode of preparedness engendered an ethical relationality of call and response, from and back to the God-as-Elsewhere that shaped and was shaped by the sonic or silent response-ability of those who cared to listen. Finally, the afterword, “The Elsewhere beyond Religious Concerns” (Butticci and Mittermaier) not only analyzes various iterations of Elsewhere across authors, but also, as the title suggests, serves as a manifesto in and of itself. A most compelling feature of the afterword is its meticulous deliberation on questions of how and why the Elsewhere is to be studied and engaged.

Our endeavor is as much concerned with affects relegated to the other-worldly as it is with their worldly and worlding presences in the present—and we hope these texts establish as much. They reveal that whether carried by airborne sound, found in silence, or emanating through fragrance, Elsewhere affects: it opens, matters, bridges, moves. We come to an understanding of how distant objects are brought nearer via aesthetics of mourning, how Elsewheres are interiorized and learned through bodied pedagogies, and how affects serve to maintain moral and political distancing in a field of relations. Reflecting on what has been included in this special section, we also conversely acknowledge its limits; a great deal remains outside the purview of this work. Yet we consider these scholarly moves—be they individually motivated or collectively oriented—as illuminating ways of knotting worlds with strands of the not-here, the yet-to-come, and the still elsewhere.