Paper Short Abstract:

This paper reflects on turning hopes into predictions, focusing on Tanzanian medical technology and ambitions of achieving technological sovereignty. It examines the value, processes, and outcomes of broadening predictive practices in social science

Paper Abstract:

In their recent volume, Knight and Bryant explore ways in which people orient themselves to the future, ranging from hope to anticipation to expectation. Curiously missing from their list, however, is one of the most influential: prediction. Perhaps this omission isn’t so curious. Prediction is associated with positivist epistemologies, which have been out of vogue in anthropology for some time. Contemporary anthropology has preferred to describe and interpret rather than to explain and predict.

This paper reflects on my ethnographic research on data-driven medical technologies in Tanzania and Tanzanians' own ambitions for technological sovereignty. I explore what it would take to transition both my own and my interlocutors' hopes, anticipations, and expectations into predictions. In other words, to turn a tentative orientation to the future into a more certain and committed one. Moreover, I ask why I might choose to do this, given the often spectacular failures of prediction, and what fate I predict for my own predictions. I draw from a recent interest in wresting the practice of explanation away from positivist epistemologies by broadening what it means to give an explanation. In short, I ask whether it is helpful to broaden and diversify what it means to predict.