The Anthropology of the Future by Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight

Reviewed by: The Anthropology of the Future by Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight Samuel Gerald Collins Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight, The Anthropology of the Future. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 236 pp. Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight, The Anthropology of the Future. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 236 pp. Anthropology has had an ambiguous relationship with the future. In a 1935 essay, A. L. Kroeber located one "foot" of the field "squarely in history" (1935:568). Here, he reflected both the "salvage ethnography" of the early 20th century and a Boasian commitment to culture history. On the other hand, Ruth Benedict proclaimed in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword that the goal of anthropology is "a world made safe for differences" (1946:15). Contrary to Kroeber, Benedict's transitive formulation positions anthropologists as agents in creating desirable futures. That is, her cultural relativism is not merely a heuristic understanding, but an active achievement in the post-war world. Moreover, over the last two decades, it is Benedict's vision of anthropology that has become more prominent at the expense of Kroeber's. More and more, people look to anthropology for alternatives to capitalism's death-spiral into the Anthropocene. In The Anthropology of the Future, Bryant and Knight take account of these various projects in anthropology, philosophy, and elsewhere in order to survey "orientations" to the future, overlapping timespaces that position past, present, and futures along axes of time, space "teleoaffect," "a structure that is affective but also teleological, oriented towards ends" (18). Each chapter covers a different formulation of past, present, and future, creating a nuanced analytical frame for understanding future temporalities in anthropological work. Their ultimate goal is to develop models of "vernacular timespaces" of the future (23) that will allow anthropologists to consider their interlocutors' diverse futures and to "acknowledge the [End Page 231] uncertain, fragile, and often terrifying ways in which the future is emerging as integral to the lives of people we study" (193). Towards that end, the authors have marshaled a series of illustrative examples from history, from fieldwork and from what may be autobiographical confessionals (?) in order to illustrate each of the orientations: things that people hope, futures they fear, moments when the future swoops down upon people unaware. In the same style as similarly nuanced studies of time in anthropology, The Anthropology of the Future provides anthropologists a scaffolding to build future temporalities into our ethnographic work (Gell 1992). But the examples are themselves drawn from constellations of crises that characterize the present: migrations, refugees, internecine conflict. Of course, this is the reason to write such a monograph in the first place. Late modernity brings the future crashing into the present lives of our interlocutors in ways that are profoundly disruptive and transformative. Nevertheless, it is this focus on the contemporary that allows the authors to draw from the occasionally recondite writings on time and temporality and makes these scholars relevant for our current ethnographic practice. Ultimately, it is this critical synthesis of theory and practice that is a high point for this valuable monograph. Each chapter introduces a future timespace, here understood as a the particular way people experience future temporalities. The essay begins with a consideration of "anticipation," where "we not only ready ourselves but also press forward into the future, enacting it and thereby pulling the future toward the present" (28). Here, the future presses in upon us and, in the process, reorients the present. When people are caught up in global events, this future comes to the fore, not only forcing us to look to the future, but also reorienting our present vis-à-vis that future vector. This is especially the case with more epochal moment in anticipatory futures, as when the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange precipitated a "Time of Danger" that has continued to condition future imaginaries—even in the absence of actual conflict (38). Expectation, on the other hand, comes from the opposite direction—the projection of the past onto the future. What we expect to gain is a function of our experiences and our moral sense of what should happen next. This literally makes the future: "To expect is

Knight · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · History of Science and Medicine