On ‘possibility’

Abstract

The article originates in a response to discuss ‘How Is Anthropology Going?’. Perceiving a new pattern in the almost 90 years looking backward and forward from my own undergraduate training, I concentrate on the recurrent concept of human ‘possibility’. Its changing referents are traced over four 20-year cycles, starting with Malinowski and Benedict (1920s and 1930s), moving to Gellner’s Thought and Change (1965), Marcus and Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986), Graeber’s Possibilities (2008) and Rabinow’s Marking Time (2008). Particular attention is paid to the temporal horizons implied in the term and the forms of ethical, political and aesthetic agency one can infer from the orientations, tensions and attractions that horizons of possibility have inspired.

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