Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork in Iceland, the paper explores crisis-driven interdependencies between the past, present and future, which manifest themselves in vertiginous forms of anticipation. It focuses on affective future-making and problematises temporalities of ethnographic knowledge production.

Paper long abstract:

In Iceland, the economic crisis is once again looming large on the horizon and producing social alertness and anticipatory moods. Although the crisis has not yet come and resides in the realm of imagined and possible, its locally contextualized presentiments already affect social understandings and actions. From economic and political turbulences to more mundane, tangible and intangible aspects of everyday life, they all seem to remind of not only ‘what has happened’ in the past, but also ‘what is about to happen’ in the near future. As a result, the ethnographic present is gradually fading away and becoming replaced by the vertiginous relationship between the emergent and the possible. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Iceland, the paper seeks to explore crisis-driven interdependencies between the past, present and future, which manifest themselves in vertiginous forms of anticipation. It focuses on affective future-making and problematises temporalities of ethnographic knowledge production. By unpacking the vertiginous, it aims to illuminate existing imaginaries and social practices, including those formations which are still in a state of becoming. Our ethnographic attentiveness to anticipation, future-oriented actions and active meaning making in motion offers insights into the lived affective and temporal ways of being in the world.