The Anthropology of the Future (New Departures in Anthropology)

by Rebecca Bryant (Author), Daniel M. Knight (Author)

New
Paperback
2019
$27.04

Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of orientations as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope and destiny - which represent different ways in which the future may affect our present. While orientations entail planning towards and imagining the future, they also often involve the collapse or exhaustion of those efforts: moments where hope may turn to apathy, frustrated planning to disillusion, and imagination to fatigue. By examining these orientations at different points, the authors argue for an anthropology that takes fuller account of the teleologies of action.

Synopsis

Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of orientations as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope and destiny - which represent different ways in which the future may affect our present. While orientations entail planning towards and imagining the future, they also often involve the collapse or exhaustion of those efforts: moments where hope may turn to apathy, frustrated planning to disillusion, and imagination to fatigue. By examining these orientations at different points, the authors argue for an anthropology that takes fuller account of the teleologies of action.

$27.04

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10 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 236
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 28 Mar 2019
ISBN 10: 1108434371
ISBN 13: 9781108434379
Book Overview: A path-breaking account of how to analyse the future anthropologically, this book presents new questions and methods for studying the subject.

Media Reviews

The poetics and politics of everyday temporality may never be more engaging than in Bryant and Knight's call to orient the social present in awareness of the not-yet-here, the not-yet-now. Addressing the future as an object of anthropological inquiry, the authors chorus the time-reckoning of capitalism . . . at the heart of the modern, seeking traces of both spirit and heart across the global ethnoscape. The overall effect is of a future deexoticized. To my mind, this is a work for the ages, deftly informed by theory and felt through people compelled to mobilize prospects for rupture and continuity, as a matter of very real consequence. Debbora Battaglia

Author Bio

Rebecca Bryant is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. She is an anthropologist of politics and law. Among other works, she is author of The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus (2010), and De Facto Dreams: Building the So-Called State, co-authored with Mete Hatay (2019). Daniel M. Knight is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St Andrews. He writes on time and temporality, austerity and economy, and renewable energy. He is author of History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece (2015) and co-editor of History and Anthropology journal.