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New Departures in Anthropology
The Anthropology of the Future
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 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.
- GenresAnthropologyPhilosophy
235 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 28, 2019
13 people are currently reading
105 people want to read
About the author
Rebecca Bryant
14 books7 followersI am Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University and an anthropologist of politics and law. My work has focused on ethnic conflict and displacement, border practices, post-conflict reconciliation, and contested sovereignty on both sides of the Cyprus Green Line and in Turkey. I studied Philosophy (B.A.) and Cultural Anthropology (M.A., Ph.D.) at the University of Chicago and have since held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics, George Mason University, and the American University in Cairo. I have also taught as a Fulbright fellow at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and as a visiting professor at Middle East Technical University's Cyprus campus. I hold affiliations as an Associate of the Peace Research Institute Oslo and a Senior Research Fellow in the European Institute of the London School of Economics.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 3, 2022
I was almost going to read this book for my undergrad Anthro dissertation but didn't get there in the end - until now. In hindsight, maybe I was playing into one of the core arguments made in the book that the future can be indeterminate but awaken the present and orient ourselves in our everyday life projects.
Very interesting read into the future which as the book argues has previously been ignored in Anthropology literature until the beginning of the 2000s when 9/11, the financial crisis and the climate crisis unsettled our preconceived notions of time as linear and stable. (This book was published before the coronavirus pandemic - but proved to be a timely read!)
This book used and developed on Theodore Schatzki's practice theory on society as the 'site of the social': from this, Schatzki argues that social worlds emerge and social practices make spaces which are inherently temporal, interwoven into 'practice arrangement bundles'. Bryant and Knight supplement this idea with their own notion of 'teleoaffective structures' where timespaces have their own and help to give people specific goals and ends to work towards. This approach towards time is informed by Heidegger who describes the future as the being of non-being, immanence where the future futurizes itself - in other words, the future awakens the present because it helps to orient our activities in the present.
The book is broken down into six chapters which each discuss an orientation:
Chapter 1 - Anticipation
Chapter 2 - Expectation
Chapter 3 - Speculation
Chapter 4 - Potentiality
Chapter 5 - Hope
Chapter 6 - Destiny
I found the structure and set up of the book excellent for presenting theoretical debates, creating nuance and directions for research, then providing ethnographic examples which challenge or deepen the theoretical points made at the start of each chapter. The scope of the project is ambitious and as a result it felt more like an overview of these terms that future academics could refer to and develop more on.
' a new attention to the future surely spells a new sort of
anthropology. It appears to entail a reorientation of the discipline
from being to becoming, from structure to agency, and from social
institutions to the hope, planning, practices, and action that project
those into the yet-to-come. Rather than taking for granted that such
institutions will or should last, this new anthropology asks about the
fragile and tentative ways in which the present is projected into the
future, and the future drawn toward the present and past.' (p. 193)
On orientations:
'Orientations make the future appear malleable, open to manipulation, or set in stone,
implacable. Orientations capture the flux of experience, the rollercoaster
of aspirations and fears that inhabits every one of us.' (p. 193-4)
My personal favourite chapter in the book was chapter 5 on hope. It was good at making connections between Massumi's account of hope which describes it as indeterminate teleology, as opposed to more bounded definitions which describe hope as sometimes a transitive and modality with an object, for example in 'micro-utopias' like a football match.
Personally, I find time such an interesting topic to study. Anthropology does a great job of informing and supplementing theoretical perspectives with ethnographic examples, or better describe as lived experiences. I highly recommend this book to anyone in Anthropology or interested in time as a book which explores how orientations to time can be fleeting, playful but malleable.
Very interesting read into the future which as the book argues has previously been ignored in Anthropology literature until the beginning of the 2000s when 9/11, the financial crisis and the climate crisis unsettled our preconceived notions of time as linear and stable. (This book was published before the coronavirus pandemic - but proved to be a timely read!)
This book used and developed on Theodore Schatzki's practice theory on society as the 'site of the social': from this, Schatzki argues that social worlds emerge and social practices make spaces which are inherently temporal, interwoven into 'practice arrangement bundles'. Bryant and Knight supplement this idea with their own notion of 'teleoaffective structures' where timespaces have their own and help to give people specific goals and ends to work towards. This approach towards time is informed by Heidegger who describes the future as the being of non-being, immanence where the future futurizes itself - in other words, the future awakens the present because it helps to orient our activities in the present.
The book is broken down into six chapters which each discuss an orientation:
Chapter 1 - Anticipation
Chapter 2 - Expectation
Chapter 3 - Speculation
Chapter 4 - Potentiality
Chapter 5 - Hope
Chapter 6 - Destiny
I found the structure and set up of the book excellent for presenting theoretical debates, creating nuance and directions for research, then providing ethnographic examples which challenge or deepen the theoretical points made at the start of each chapter. The scope of the project is ambitious and as a result it felt more like an overview of these terms that future academics could refer to and develop more on.
' a new attention to the future surely spells a new sort of
anthropology. It appears to entail a reorientation of the discipline
from being to becoming, from structure to agency, and from social
institutions to the hope, planning, practices, and action that project
those into the yet-to-come. Rather than taking for granted that such
institutions will or should last, this new anthropology asks about the
fragile and tentative ways in which the present is projected into the
future, and the future drawn toward the present and past.' (p. 193)
On orientations:
'Orientations make the future appear malleable, open to manipulation, or set in stone,
implacable. Orientations capture the flux of experience, the rollercoaster
of aspirations and fears that inhabits every one of us.' (p. 193-4)
My personal favourite chapter in the book was chapter 5 on hope. It was good at making connections between Massumi's account of hope which describes it as indeterminate teleology, as opposed to more bounded definitions which describe hope as sometimes a transitive and modality with an object, for example in 'micro-utopias' like a football match.
Personally, I find time such an interesting topic to study. Anthropology does a great job of informing and supplementing theoretical perspectives with ethnographic examples, or better describe as lived experiences. I highly recommend this book to anyone in Anthropology or interested in time as a book which explores how orientations to time can be fleeting, playful but malleable.
Displaying 1 of 1 review