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- Convenor:
-
Jonathan Skinner
(University of Surrey)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Ian Yeoman
(Victoria University of Wellington)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 10 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Whether planning, modelling, forecasting or predicting, the future is always under consideration. This panel looks to the structuring and disciplining of this practice by anthropology and futurology.
Long Abstract:
Whether planning, modelling, forecasting or predicting, the future is always under consideration. This panel looks to the structuring and disciplining of this practice by anthropology and futurology. More than imagine, meditate or fantasise upon the future, we are interested in active attempts to rein in the future – to controlling in various guises what happens next whether in the field of tourism and business, medicine and crisis management, religious studies and divination. Futurology, like anthropology, is an interdisciplinary pursuit. It looks for patterns and trends and reveals alternate pathways. If anthropology examines an alterity of space, then perhaps futurology explores the alterity of time. Just what are the applied intersections between these two disciplines? What examples in anthropology contain and attempt to deliver these futures? This panel welcomes all manner of submissions engaging with these issues and topics from the theoretical and disciplinary; to the ethnographic quests to represent, understand and marshal the future in our complex technological and fraught environmental social worlds.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 10 June, 2022, -Eric Orlowski (University College London) Katherine Pfeiffer (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, we explore how futures may be solidified through emerging technologies. Through two ethnographic studies - human augmentation in Sweden and biodesign in the UK – we question the role of “objects of the future” in shifting imaginaries of the future from the virtual to the real.
Paper long abstract:
In considering how the future is reined in, one is faced with the question of causation across time. How can one act upon the future? The world we encounter, including its material contents, is in the present. It has been said that co-presence with the past is mere illusion (Irvine 2020: 83) and equally, co-presence with the future may appear a projection. Yet, objects are—affectively and socially at least—"temporally other to us" (Bryant and Knight 2015: 92) and orient us towards the past or the future. Drawing on ethnographic research of human augmentation technologies being developed by hopeful techno-utopianists in Sweden and biomaterials developed by conflicted optimists in the UK, this paper questions how a technology’s physical presence, even as a modest fragment of its future potential, acts socially as a conduit for engaging with the future. We theorize that human augmentation technologies and biomaterials enfold anticipated futures into the present: they are topological. We consider such technologies “objects of the future.” In doing so, we draw from material culture studies which understand historical objects—objects of the past—as reconstituted and (re)inscribed with meanings over time to produce different understandings of the past (Gell 1992; Irvine 2020). Objects of the past are never doing work in the past, but always in the present. “Objects of the future,” we propose, flip this dynamic, and present a means of materialising a future, solidifying it in the present to effectively shift these imaginaries from the virtual to the real.
Pavel Horák (The Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Ethnology)
Paper short abstract:
We will experience a major rise of alternative religions focusing on nature, the body, and the environment in the future decades. The rise will reflect digital revolution and transformation it bring to Euro-American societies. The paper considers future research for anthropology and related fields.
Paper long abstract:
The paper proposes a future development of alternative religion and spirituality in the Euro-American world and suggests a forthcoming research agenda for anthropology and related fields. The paper argues that we will experience a significant rise of modern paganism, earth/eco spiritualities or esoteric currents dealing with environment, body, and nature in the upcoming decades. This rise will be a reaction to the climate crisis and speedy technological development in ER, AI, metaverses, or other technologies that are likely yet to come, like digital state coins. As the new digital technologies form non-physical spaces, modern pagans and others will stress this-worldly religious ontologies and nature-spiritual environments, including human and other-than-human bodies. This rise, in turn, will also bear strong political appeal – from a return-to-the nature claims to a rejection of technology and science, which might get a radical form. I will support my argument in three ways. Firstly, I use a historical comparison with the emergence of occultism in the late nineteenth century, which was a reaction to the industrial revolution and changes within European societies. Similarly, we are currently experiencing a new technological revolution, which will transform our societies' form and impact the religious domain. Secondly, I analyse the rising popularity of modern paganism and similar environmental or ‘dark green religions’ (Taylor 2010) as evidence of this rise in Europe and the United States. Thirdly, I consider relations between human and non-human digital actors and connect the debates on alternative religions and digital anthropology.
Anthony Pickles (University of Birmingham)
Paper short abstract:
Prediction markets are the result of bets, most often on political outcomes. This paper presents ongoing ethnographic research into how market speculation refracts political understanding for those who participate in prediction markets and extends the market into speculative futures.
Paper long abstract:
Exploiting emergent technologies, the gambling industry has moved aggressively onto our personal devices, offering a range of new gambling possibilities like in-play as well as online versions of classic games like bingo. One of the most consequential innovation has seen market makers like Betfair operate as mediators between private customers who set their own odds, creating ‘prediction markets’ for all sorts of outcomes. As I write, a new market opened on the question “Will reproduction of genetically unmodified humans be banned before 2100?”. The biggest questions that prediction markets deliberate upon are political outcomes. In these markets ideological beliefs, historical trends and national moods are all reduced to prices, blunting political difference. This paper presents an account of ongoing ethnographic research, focusing on how market speculation refracts political understanding for those who participate in prediction markets and extends the market into speculative futures.