All Tomorrow's Cultures

The American Anthropological Association/ Canadian Anthropological Society meeting in Vancouver is in November, but the browsable schedule is already out.  As in previous years, I have identified future-oriented or science fiction-oriented panels that I would love to attend (including two I'm on). This may not be a complete list, and I apologize for panels I've missed.  But even this, incomplete as it might be, is an impressive collection of a robust future-orientation in the work of anthropologists.  Thursday, November 21 8:00 AM – 9:45 AM   –   Decolonial Belongings and Futures: Creating Spaces of Belonging thru Epistemic Disobedience - Vancouver CC EAST, Room 7 2:00 PM – 3:45 PM   –   Biofutures - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 122 2:00 PM – 3:45 PM   –   Haunting Toward the Future: Colonial Durabilities and Temporalities - Vancouver CC EAST, Room 13 2:00 PM – 3...

My own entry into anticipatory anthropology started with my dissertation work, research that forms the basis for my forthcoming book, Library of Walls: Contradictions of Information Society at the Library of Congress. In the 1990s, the Library of Congress was just beginning its “National Digital Library” program, involving, among other things, the large-scale digitization of multimedia collections and their placement online. This was a technically formidable project, but it also served to telescope the hopes and fears of Library staff and users at the Library for the future. Examining my informant’s narratives about what the coming “digital library” would mean for their work and research revealed a great deal of ambivalence about both the project’s viability and its relationship to information society in general. But these did not simply fall into neatly contained categories of “computopian” and “computropian” (these are David Hakken’s terms), optimistic technophile and sullen Luddi...