Anthropologies and futures : setting the agenda

This book, as a collective action, seeks to derail mainstream social and cultural anthropology from an insular and inward looking single-discipline route that threatens to exacerbate its isolation and incapacity to participate and intervene in the major worldmaking activities of our times. At the margins of anthropology, applied, interdisciplinary, futures, and interventional strands have long since militated for a useful and engaged anthropological practice, and have gained traction. Yet, as a discipline, anthropology has been on track to arrive late on the futures research scene. By opening our scholarship, practice, and intentions to other disciplines, techniques, and aspirations, we have the opportunity to bring to the study and making of futures an approach inflected by the ethical and participatory principles of anthropology. The benefits are both the contribution that anthropology can offer to world making and a renewed anthropology that nevertheless maintains its critical core, its ethnographic origins and its capacity to engage with the world and people at a depth and moral perspective. These characteristics of an anthropological commitment to attempt to comprehend the world in a way that cares are fundamental to our discipline and to the practice of Futures Anthropology. Yet we call for an anthropology that is more daring, open, and interventional: that faces futures and our role in shaping them, full on, while retaining a critical perspective. This book sets the ground for this movement in anthropology, as a shared concern