From Wikimedia Commons As I complete this essay, the quarantine imposed on Baltimore stretches into its second month, and I continue teaching online amid terror and despair. Blog posts and newspaper articles forecast a new era of education in the age of social distancing, a new kind of virtual conference in the absence of travel, and new research without the face-to-face interactions that have heretofore been the bread-and-butter of ethnographic fieldwork. All of these may be prognostications, but they are not, I would submit, really about the future. Instead, each “future” describes a present--online education, virtual meetings, digital anthropology. None of them are really “new” at all. Just the opposite, they are part of a process of what Escobar (echoing Tony Fry) describes as “the systematic destruction of possible futures by the structured unsustainability of modernity” (Escobar 2018: 117). H...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.