Paper short abstract:

Times of crisis inspire to imagine a different tomorrow with a different set of rules: utopian festivals and survivalist preparedness drills provide experimental spaces allowing actors to perform alternative futures and thereby questioning existing rules and exploring new exemplary ways of life.

Paper long abstract:

While always remaining unknown and uncertain, visions of the future guide our actions in the present. Paradoxically, envisioning apocalyptic and utopian futures can bring about a sense of purpose and certainty in times of crisis. We analyse utopian festivals and survivalist preparedness drills as experimental spaces, as “future laboratories”, allowing actors to envision and perform utopian and apocalyptic futures. In doing so, we argue, future laboratories facilitate the transgressing of existing rules, establishing new rules and testing exemplary ways of life. Utopian festivals explore what the world could already be like if only we established new rules and created “new certainties”. As self-proclaimed “pioneers of a good life” these festivals act as models of a better world (e.g. living in self-supporting communities without money) within the present. By contrast, preparedness drills explore surviving in a catastrophic future without functioning infrastructures and institutions. The drills equip participants with the necessary skills in order to prevail in the envisioned struggle for survival. Both laboratories provide actors with a “taste” of what the future could be like and, more importantly, what they could or should be like. Thus, future laboratories allow actors to enact exemplary versions of themselves while evoking a sense of being ahead of one’s time. Drawing on comparative ethnographic research in Germany, we analyse future laboratories merging approaches from the anthropology of the good and the anthropology of future