Futures at AAACASCA 2019

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 – 3:45 PM  –  Untaming futures? Plural knowledges, unknown environments and technologies of anticipation (Part 1) - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 202
4:15 PM – 6:00 PM  –  In an Atmosphere of Change: Speculative Futures in Anthropological Perspective - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 118
4:15 PM – 6:00 PM  –  NARRATING THE FUTURE FOR A WARMING WORLD - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 205
4:15 PM – 6:00 PM  –  Untaming futures? Plural knowledges, unknown environments and technologies of anticipation (Part 2) - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 202

Friday, November 22

10:15 AM – 12:00 PM  –  Utopia and Changing the Future: Anthropology’s Role in Imagining Alternatives (Part 1) - Vancouver CC EAST, Room 11

2:00 PM – 3:45 PM  –  The Climate of Governance and the Governance of Climate: Negotiating the Futures of Natures & Cultures - Vancouver CC EAST, Room 15
2:00 PM – 3:45 PM  –  Utopia and Changing the Future: Anthropology’s Role in Imagining Alternatives (Part 2) - Vancouver CC EAST, Room 11
4:15 PM – 6:00 PM  –  Horizons of Possibility: Dynamic Future Selves in a Changing and Contested World - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 115

Saturday, November 23

8:00 AM – 9:45 AM  –  Algorithmic Futures: Computing as a Site and Object of Technopolitical Interventions - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 301
8:00 AM – 9:45 AM  –  Forging Futures in Contested Landscapes - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 215
10:15 AM – 12:00 PM  –  Forecasting Futures: Education as Speculative Practice - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 119
10:15 AM – 12:00 PM  –  So many futures, so little time: Anthropological approaches to catastrophe and the future - Vancouver CC EAST, Ballroom C
4:15 PM – 6:00 PM  –  Ethnographies of Palestinian Futures - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 204

Sunday, November 24

10:15 AM – 12:00 PM  –  Geological Anthropology: Waters, Ruins, Futures (Part 2) - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 101 & 102

The Meaning of the Future

Yet there is a great deal of polysemy implied in "the future," and our orientation to future temporalities likewise varies (Bryant and Knight 2019).  I did some text analysis of the abstracts for these panels in order to look at the evolving terrain of future work [click on the graph for the full size]:

 



The graph uses "Infranodus,"a web-based, text analysis application that uses word co-occurence to construct a network.  Nodes are key terms, and the edges (or lines) between them show words (actually lemmas) separated by 1 word or words separated by two words (Paranyushkin 2019).

Additionally, the algorithm tries to identify "clusters" of terms--represented by different colored nodes and edges here.  But this seems of limited efficacy here, where there is considerable overlap in the nomenclature of the future.  Better, perhaps, is to focus on a few key terms, and the terms to which they're linked.

"Environmental" [click on the map for a full image of the network]

"World"

"Climate"

"Alternative"

These keywords, together with the connections they forge, ultimately tell a more nuanced story about anthropology's emerging futures.  The lemma "world" might appear in texts as "worlding," "world-building" etc., and might point, on the one hand, to the changes inextricably impacting our world today.  On the other hand, "world" also includes links to the prospect of different worlds, however defined, whether in "space" or "imagined."  "Alternative" opens on to the imaginative element of anthropological futuring, and the ways this might gesture towards other possibilities less premised on capitalist exploitation.  This includes indigenous futures, and alternative narratives on the future from oppressed peoples.  On the other hand, "climate" brings us into the decidedly more pessimistic futures of the anthropocene, where "change," "health" and "environment" make up the dreadful calculus of environmental catastrophe.

All together, the pessimism and the optimism of the present moment, one where we teeter on the brink of future disaster, while alternatives appear to us (as anthropologists) in multiple forms, from policy changes, to space travel, to worlds re-shaped by alternatives to Eurocentric capitalist exploitation.  The future work evolving in anthropology engages all of these levels simultaneously: 1) the future as a significant horizon in the lives of our interlocutors; 2) the future as an ethnographic object in its own right; 3) the future as a site for anthropological interventions.

References

Bryant, Rebecca and Daniel Knight (2019).  The Anthropology of the Future.  NY: Cambridge University Press.

Paranyushkin, Dmitry (2019).  "Infranodus."  In Proceedings of WWW '19: The Web Conference (WWW '19), May 23, 2019, San Francissco, CA.  

My interest in anthropological futures

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 Luddite. Instead, people were keenly aware of both the new connections this experiment in information society would enable as well as the ways in which it would lead to new forms of inequality and disenfranchisement. This was a much more complex projection for information society—considered not as the autochthonous development of information technologies but as multifarious shifts in work, social life and culture—an ultimately deeply contradictory prognostication that, over the past ten years since my original field research, has largely come to pass.

I have taken this more nuanced approach to the future of information society in a variety of settings. One of the most fruitful has been my collaborations with computer scientists and robotics engineers—researches undertaken to utilize anthropological ideas to interrogate and critique linear and one-dimensional models of technologically-informed human futures. Our lives are being profoundly shaped (albeit not deterministically) by our interactions with a variety of non-human agents—including the many variously intelligent agents that guide (or goad) us along in the Internet. And yet, most working on the development of these non-human agents have utilized only crude (and even procrustean) models of human behavior grounded in what they believe to be “universal” attributes (cognitive, psychological, social and cultural) of Homo sapiens. One of my goals in collaborating with these engineers has been to act as a catalyst for the generation of alternative (e.g., less ethnocentric and less androcentric) models of the human in order to suggest new human agent/non-human agent hybrids, hybrids that we begin to explore in Handbook of Research on Agent-Based Societies.

In my mind, this is one of anthropology’s greatest resources—the ability to question (if not entirely overcome) hide-bound assumptions in order to open up the space for the imagination of alternatives to an ethnocentric present people assume will continue into an endless future. Accordingly, I began to explore the way anthropology has dealt with the “future,” not just as a theme in anthropological writings, but as a site for the interaction of anthropologists with non-anthropologists in futurology, political science and public policy. The result is my All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future, part historic review of anthropological futures, part plea for redoubling our efforts to impact the ways the future is imagined in government, international relations and other parts of the academy. Whether I’m discussing Margaret Mead’s or Reed Riner’s contributions to anthropological futures or critiquing nineteenth century “survivals” in anthropological writings on the future of race and multicultural society, my goal in the book is to both demonstrate the centrality of the future to anthropology and to salvage some of the our insights in order to stimulate futures premised on difference and diversity.

I have tried to do the same thing in the classroom, and have utilized a variety of methods (including simulations and highly abbreviated forms of Delphi and Ethnographic Futures Research) to elicit narratives about the future from my students, texts that we then have used less to actually predict than to critique the kinds of assumptions people bring to their expectations for the future, assumptions that rest on remarkably homogeneous ideas about the continued geopolitical dominance of the United States and the inevitability of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”. Moving towards possible alternatives means interrogating these assumptions for what they are—bland recapitulations of the ideological present imprisoning us in ethnocentric (and tempocentric) assumptions that have already proven disastrous for our world.

Here, my experience in the classroom has informed my current research: ethnographic futures research on Korean reunification. I ran similar future elicitations with college students and adult informants in Seoul when I was there on a Fulbright from 2006-2007. Those narratives revolved around the possibilities and pitfalls of reunification and, in particular, the kind of imagined future of a unified Korea, a future with one leg in an imagined past. Examining these narratives suggests the idea of a nation grounded in the “old” Joseon Dynasty (that last dynasty before the Japanese colonized Korea in 1910) while at the same time projecting a new, national space where “distortions” introduced in the colonial era will be resolved and Korea will (re)attain its rightful place among nations in the world. While the policy work and economic studies of institutions such as South Korea’s Ministry of Unification are, of course, vital to the success of a united peninsula, it is, I believe, the quotidian imagination of a unified Korea which will have the greatest impact upon the eventual shape of a north-south agreement, conceived, not just as a treaty or a series of policy initiatives, but as a social fact.