Anthropologies and futures: Setting the agenda

Abstract

Anthropologies and Futures calls for a renewed, open and future-focused approach to understanding the present, anticipating the unknown, and intervening in the world. This chapter, as a collective action, seeks to derail mainstream social and cultural anthropology from an insular and inward looking single-discipline route that threatens to exacerbate its isolation and incapacity to participate and intervene in the major worldmaking activities of our times. It outlines how being in the wrong temporality at the wrong time has inhibited the making of Futures Anthropology. The chapter argues that the diversity of approaches has militated against the formation of an anthropological theory of the future. It reveals how anthropologies of futures have been influenced by theoretical turns, rather than themselves being the basis for theory building. While the future-focused anthropologies emerged during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in other social science and humanities disciplines, parallel and perhaps more impactful investigations of futures began to develop.

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