Boredom, despondency, and the scourge that lays waste at noon: an anthropology of acedia

Attentive to the ways that inertia can take hold of life, Catholic monks recognize despondency as a potential not only within the monastery, but in contemporary society more widely. Such experiences are regularly mapped onto an understanding of what early Christian monks termed ‘acedia’ (a Greek term that can be translated as ‘lack of care’). Taking as my ethnographic starting point the ways in which monks of an English Benedictine monastery understood and narrated the struggle with acedia, I note how this insight has been shared as a matter of public significance: most proximately during the boredom and constraint of the lockdown in response to COVID, but also more generally as something embedded, unrecognized, in modern life. What, then, does it mean to consider acedia as an analytical category? I argue that identifying acedia not only centres despondency as an active presence in life, but refuses to privatize it and strip it of its social dimensions. This fundamental sociality is both in the interaction with the demon of acedia, moving across the boundaries of a porous mind; and also in the means to resist acedia through the stability of shared time and space.