Anthropologies and Futures

Anthropologies and Futures PDF Author: Juan Francisco Salazar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000190145
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book

Book Description
Anthropology has a critical, practical role to play in contemporary debates about futures. This game-changing new book presents new ways of conceptualising how to engage with a future-oriented research agenda, demonstrating how anthropologists can approach futures both theoretically and practically, and introducing a set of innovative research methods to tackle this field of research.Anthropology and Futures brings together a group of leading scholars from across the world, including Sarah Pink, Rayna Rapp, Faye Ginsburg and Paul Stoller. Firmly grounded in ethnographic fieldwork experience, the book’s fifteen chapters traverse ethnographies with people living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda, disability activists in the U.S., young Muslim women in Copenhagen, refugees in Milan, future-makers in Barcelona, planning and land futures in the UK, the design of workspaces in Melbourne, rewilding in the French Pyrenees, and speculative ethnographies among emerging communities in Antarctica. Taking a strong interdisciplinary approach, the authors respond to growing interest in the topic of futures in anthropology and beyond. This ground-breaking text is a call for more engaged, interventional and applied anthropologies. It is essential reading for students and researchers in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, design and research methods.

Anthropological Futures

Anthropological Futures PDF Author: Michael M. J. Fischer
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390795
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book

Book Description
In Anthropological Futures, Michael M. J. Fischer explores the uses of anthropology as a mode of philosophical inquiry, an evolving academic discipline, and a means for explicating the complex and shifting interweaving of human bonds and social interactions on a global level. Through linked essays, which are both speculative and experimental, Fischer seeks to break new ground for anthropology by illuminating the field’s broad analytical capacity and its attentiveness to emergent cultural systems. Fischer is particularly concerned with cultural anthropology’s interactions with science studies, and throughout the book he investigates how emerging knowledge formations in molecular biology, environmental studies, computer science, and bioengineering are transforming some of anthropology’s key concepts including nature, culture, personhood, and the body. In an essay on culture, he uses the science studies paradigm of “experimental systems” to consider how the social scientific notion of culture has evolved as an analytical tool since the nineteenth century. Charting anthropology’s role in understanding and analyzing the production of knowledge within the sciences since the 1990s, he highlights anthropology’s aptitude for tracing the transnational collaborations and multisited networks that constitute contemporary scientific practice. Fischer investigates changing ideas about cultural inscription on the human body in a world where genetic engineering, robotics, and cybernetics are constantly redefining our understanding of biology. In the final essay, Fischer turns to Kant’s philosophical anthropology to reassess the object of study for contemporary anthropology and to reassert the field’s primacy for answering the largest questions about human beings, societies, culture, and our interactions with the world around us. In Anthropological Futures, Fischer continues to advance what Clifford Geertz, in reviewing Fischer’s earlier book Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, called “a broad new agenda for cultural description and political critique.”

The Anthropology of the Future

The Anthropology of the Future PDF Author: Rebecca Bryant
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108421857
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book

Book Description
Anticipation -- Expectation -- Speculation -- Potentiality -- Hope -- Destiny.

In Search of Lost Futures

In Search of Lost Futures PDF Author: Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303063003X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Get Book

Book Description
In Search of Lost Futures asks how imaginations might be activated through practices of autoethnography, multimodality, and deep interdisciplinarity—each of which has the power to break down methodological silos, cultivate novel research sensibilities, and inspire researchers to question what is known about ethnographic process, representation, reflexivity, audience, and intervention within and beyond the academy. By blurring the boundaries between the past, present, and future; between absence and presence; between the possible and the impossible; and between fantasy and reality, In Search of Lost Futures pushes the boundaries of ethnographic engagement. It reveals how researchers on the cutting edge of the discipline are studying absence and grief and employing street performance, museum exhibit, anticipation, or simulated reality to research and intervene in the possible, the impossible, and the uncertain.

An Anthropology of Futures and Technologies

An Anthropology of Futures and Technologies PDF Author: Débora Lanzeni
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100018272X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book

Book Description
This book examines emerging automated technologies and systems and the increasingly prominent roles that each plays in our lives and our imagined futures. It asks how technological futures are being constituted and the roles anthropologists can play in their making; how anthropologists engage with emerging technologies within their fieldwork contexts in research which seeks to influence future design; how to create critical and interventional approaches to technology design and innovation; and how a critical anthropology of the way that emerging technologies are experienced in everyday life circumstances offers new insights for future-making practices. In pursuing these questions, this book responds to a call for new anthropologies that respond to the current and emerging technological environments in which we live, environments for which thinking critically about the possible, plausible, and impossible futures are no longer sufficient. Taking the next step, this book asserts that anthropology must now propose alternative ways, rooted in ethnography, to approach and engage with what is coming and to contest dominant narratives of industry, policy, and government, and to respond to our contemporary context through a public, vocal, and interventional approach.

Empirical Futures

Empirical Futures PDF Author: George Baca
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458755576
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

Get Book

Book Description
Since the 1950s, anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate the disciplines of anthropology and history. Author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and other groundbreaking works, he was one of the first scholars to anticipate and critique globalization studies. However, a strong...

Contemporary Futures

Contemporary Futures PDF Author: Sandra Wallman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134919417
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
In industrial societies imagining the future is a serious business; our assumptions about the future govern the present management of domestic, national and global resources, and are projected, some would say inflicted, on societies whose visions are different. Contemporary Futures focuses not so much on whether the future can be known, but on interpreting the way we and others picture it. The contributors, all social anthropologists, explore the effects that this picture has on the present, on group identity and belief in the self and its survival, on our relationships with other cultures, and on the future itself. They provide a cross-cultural perspective on a range of futures visualised at this time and discusses the implications of

Back to the Postindustrial Future

Back to the Postindustrial Future PDF Author: Felix Ringel
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785337998
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book

Book Description
How does an urban community come to terms with the loss of its future? The former socialist model city of Hoyerswerda is an extreme case of a declining postindustrial city. Built to serve the GDR coal industry, it lost over half its population to outmigration after German reunification and the coal industry crisis, leading to the large-scale deconstruction of its cityscape. This book tells the story of its inhabitants, now forced to reconsider their futures. Building on recent theoretical work, it advances a new anthropological approach to time, allowing us to investigate the postindustrial era and the futures it has supposedly lost.

Vertiginous Life

Vertiginous Life PDF Author: Daniel M. Knight
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800731949
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book

Book Description
Vertiginous Life provides a theory of the intense temporal disorientation brought about by life in crisis. In the whirlpool of unforeseen social change, people experience confusion as to where and when they belong on timelines of previously unquestioned pasts and futures. Through individual stories from crisis Greece, this book explores the everyday affects of vertigo: nausea, dizziness, breathlessness, the sense of falling, and unknowingness of Self. Being lost in time, caught in the spin-cycle of crisis, people reflect on belonging to modern Europe, neoliberal promises of accumulation, defeated futures, and the existential dilemmas of life held captive in the uncanny elsewhen.

The Anthropology of the Future

The Anthropology of the Future PDF Author: Rebecca Bryant
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108386342
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book

Book Description
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 efforts: 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.