Anthropological Futures

Michael M. J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His most recent books include Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry and Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (winner of the American Ethnological Society’s Senior Book Prize), both also published by Duke University Press.

• Prologue ix1. Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems 12. Four Cultural Genealogies (or Haplotype Genealogical Tests) for a Recombinant Anthropology of Science and Technology 513. Emergent Forms of (Un)Natural Life 1144. Body Marks (Bestial/Natural/Divine): An Essay on the Social and Biotechnical Imaginaries, 1920-2008, and Bodies to Come 1595. Personhood and Measuring the Figure of Old Age: The Geoid as Transitional Object 1976. Ask Not What Man Is But What We May Expect of Him 215Conclusions and Way Ahead: Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopolitics, and Anthropological Futures 235Epilogue: Postings from Anthropologies to Come 244Notes 273References 331Index 379

“This intellectually wide-ranging and spirited book poses the question of what kind of anthropology might be required to deal most effectively with emergent human experience. . . . Fischer has written a book for our times thatwill provoke much thinking.” - Melinda Hinkson, Anthropological Forum “Anthropological Futures is both a review of core questions and scholarship and a risk-taking, future-oriented mapping of the knots of culture, nature, person, body, and science. It is a wide-ranging conversation conducted with serious erudition and originality, replete with ideas for work to come.”-Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz “As always, Michael M. J. Fischer provides deeply grounded yet very experimental and future-oriented ideas about cultural anthropology, and cultural analysis more generally. This book is a fabulous resource.”-Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute “This intellectually wide-ranging and spirited book poses the question of what kind of anthropology might be required to deal most effectively with emergent human experience. . . . Fischer has written a book for our times that will provoke much thinking.” - Melinda Hinkson (Anthropological Forum)