The Anthropology of the Future

Rebecca Bryant is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands. 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 (forthcoming). Daniel M. Knight is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. 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.

• Introduction: the future of the future in anthropology; 1. Anticipation; 2. Expectation; 3. Speculation; 4. Potentiality; 5. Hope; 6. Destiny; Conclusion: the future as method.

'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, Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts