Ashis Nandy. Time Treks: the Uncertain Future of Old and New Despotisms. NY: Seagull Books , 2008, 228 pp., US$ 34.95 (paperback). It is easy to assume that we have no future. Not a real one, anyway. Business and government collude to limit our imagination of the future to a catalog of product releases. Within the confines of advanced capitalism, the future can only be The Present 2.0. The alternatives can only be, we’re told, atavistic returns to the “tribe” and to the various parochialisms they imply. As Fredric Jameson complained a few years ago (2005: 281): The surrender to various forms of market ideology—on the Left, I mean, not to mention everyone else—has been imperceptible but alarmingly universal. Everyone is now willing to mumble, as though it were an inconsequential concession to in passing to public opinion and current received wisdom (or shared communicational presuppositions), that no society can function efficiently with...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.