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Paper short abstract

In conversation with debates on the 'future', this paper interrogates anthropology's estrangement from the lifeworlds it examines. Drawing on ethnographic encounters where the future is absent, I examine the institutional demands and cultural capital shaping our theoretical imperatives.

Paper long abstract

This paper takes last year's GDAT notion, 'Theorising the future is the future of anthropology', as a starting point to ask a question that has nagged at me throughout the debate: have our theoretical preoccupations drifted too far from the lives we claim to understand?

I draw on ethnographies among people for whom the future is not a horizon, but an absence. Where debt forecloses possibility, where crisis stretches indefinitely, where tomorrow is not something one plans for. Our recent disciplinary fascination with temporality and anticipation sits uneasily beside these realities. The future, as analytical concept, detaches itself from the lifeworlds of our interlocuters when we impose our temporal realities onto them.

How, then, can critiquing the 'future' contribute to [a darker] future of anthropology? Anthropology has spent decades debating its epistemological commitments, yet we rarely turn that critical gaze toward the institutional machinery that quietly shapes our work. My critique does not stop at our choice of themes. I want to implicate the academy itself. The pressure to produce "theoretical contributions" rewards a particular kind of abstraction—one that often requires us to step back from what is hardest to sit with. We accumulate scholarly capital precisely by maintaining distance from the unbearable. A darker anthropology, then, demands that we examine the conditions under which we choose what to see and how to write about it.