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Accepted Paper:
On the Value of Being in the Present
Maja Petrović-Šteger
(The Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts)
Paper short abstract:
Anthropological analyses offer not only critical descriptions of the present (on its historical trajectories), but possible intimations of a society’s future. The paper reflects on what values and assumptions are built into our ways of making predictions about our fieldsites.
Paper long abstract:
Our present moment is one of unease. The state of our politics, our economies, the planet, COVID-19--all these both prompt disquiet and have exacerbated cultural and ideological differences around the world.
Anthropology, it is often claimed, is meant to have a public face. There is something like the expectation that we should act as public intellectuals who, on the basis of what they already know, offer predictions concerning the new world order and the future of our discipline (as per the call of this roundtable). This paper suggests that although our procedures of data-collection privilege the present, they overemphasize the expert’s authority and future’s predictability. In that way, they assume continuous time, not rupture.