Cl l A P I T U M !• l i;i ; .

The Future as Cultural Fact

INTRODUCTION

I end this book by contemplating a puzzle. Anthropology hás had surprisingly

little to say about the future as a cultural fact, except in fragments and by
ethnographic accident. The historical reasons for this oversight are not hard
to identify, but the costs have been high. As the social sciences took shape in
the latter half of the nineteenth century, and as sociology took as its central
problem the shift from societies of sentiment to societies of contract, anthro-
pology elected a double burden: the study of societies of the past and the
studies of societies that appeared immune to the arrival of Western moder-
nity. The rest is history, as they say, and anthropology for most of the twentieth
century hás struggled to break out of this double confinement. In recent
decades, the subjects of anthropology have increasingly been those of the
present and of the world we live in: ethnographies of science, technology,
state, law, markets, and finance show that anthropology hás begun to bring
the tools of cultural analysis to the interconnected problems of worldwide and
globalizing processes.
Still, the intellectual infrastructure of anthropology, and of the culture
concept itself, remains substantially shaped by the lens of pastness. In one or
another way, anthropology remains preoccupied with the logic of reproduction,
the force of custom, the dynamics of memory, the persistence of habitus, the
glacial movement of the everyday, and the cunning of tradition in the social life
of even the most modern movements and communities, such as those of scien -
tists, refugees, migrants, evangelists, and movie icons. We maintain the voices
of reproduction, durability, and resilience in human life, while the culture
concept maintains an epistemology for the discovery of the variety of ways in
which human beings absorb newness into frames that they always carry with
them before the fact. l
This does not mean that anthropology hás ignored the many ways in
which humanity hás encountered, managed, and anticipated the future as a
cultural horizon. But these moments, and these insights, have not been aggre-
gated into a general point of view about humans as future-makers and of
futures as cultural facts. Consequently, today, the systematic analysis of
future-making remains the province of many fields in the social and natural
sciences, but not of anthropology. Neoclassical economics (and its many
derivative policy fields) is still the most important of these, having formed
 286 M A K I N G THE FUTURE
itself primaríly around the study of needs, wants, estimates, calculation, and
the projection of macro-outcomes from micro- actions and -choices.1 In alli-
ance with specialized techniques derived from statistics, and more recently
from linear álgebra, operations research, and the computational sciences,
economics hás Consolidated its place as the primary field in which the study
of how humans construct their future is modeled and predicted. Other fields,
such as the environmental sciences and planning and disaster management,
have built themselves on the confluence of sophisticated computational tech-
niques and new techniques for mapping, visualization, and high-order
information processing. These techniques have captured the dominant spaces
in such debates as those surrounding global warmíng, population growth,
long-term resource evaluation, and military/strategic scenario-building.
Design, architecture, and planning have substantially dominated that dimen-
sion of the future that hás to do with tools, ornaments, habitations, and
infrastructures (see chapter 13). Anthropology still plays a relatively limited
role in ethical debates surrounding such topics as animal rights, cloning, new
fornis of genetic engineering, and emergent fornis of mechanical warfare,
except as a site of valuable humanist resistance and critique. But such human-
ist critique, valuable as it may be, does not constitute a powerful intervention
based on a deep understanding of the future as a cultural fact. Só how can we
build a more systematic and fundamental anthropological approach to the
future?
THE F U T U R E AS C U L T U R A L FACT: A S P I R A T I O N , A N T I C I P A T I O N ,
IMAGINATION
We need to construct an understanding of the future by examining the interac-
tions between three notable human preoccupations that shape the future as a
cultural fact, that is, as a forni of difference. These are imagination, anticipation,
and aspiration. I have written elsewhere about the imagination as a social facl,
as a practice and a forni of work, trying to put the imagination back at the
center of cultural activity.2 The same can and must be done with anticipation
and with aspiration.
As we refine the ways in which specific conceptions of aspiration, anticipa-
tion, and imagination become configured só as to produce the future as a
specific cultural form or horizon, we will be better able to place within this
scheme more particular ideas about prophecy, well-being, emergency, crisis,
and regulation. We also need to remember that the future is not just a technical
1 I. ('„ Schelling, MicmiiMliva iinil Macrobthavior, New York: W. W. Norlon & Co., 1978.
2 A. Appaclurai, Motlernity til Liirgr: ('iillnnil Diineininif* n/ (lltihiillziilion, Minncapolis:
l Inivcrsily <>l Mimirsnla 1'ivss, i»w<i.
Ni l'11 Tl i Hl' A S ( U l l 11II A l l A i l
or neutral space, but is shot through with allccl and wilh scir..iimii l heis, wr
need to examine not just the emotions that accompany lhe l n l i n c ,r. .1 i n l i m . i l
form, but the sensations that it produces: awe, vertigo, cxcilcmcnl. tlism irni.i
tion. The many forms that the future takes are also shaped by llu-sc- alln. Is .md
sensations, for they give to various configurations of aspiration, anticipation,
and imagination their specific gravity, their traction, and their texture. Social
science hás never been good at catching these properties of human life, but it is
never too late to improve.
THE WORK OF THE I M A G I N A T I O N
In Modernity at Large, I stated the case for looking at the imagination as a
collective practice that played a vital role in the production of locality. This
argument required me to revisit and revise the history of ethnography só as to
observe that the massive archive of field ethnography, produced by anthro-
pologists and their precursors since the late nineteenth century, was less a
series of portraits of the local than a series of portraits of the production of
locality as an active, sustained, and ongoing process, through which the local
emerged against the forces of entropy, displacement, material hardship, and
social corrosion faced by ali human communities. The idea here was that the
local, quite independent of the conditions of the recent phase of globalization,
was always a sustained work in process, an emergent that required not only
the resources of habit, custom, and history, but also the work of the imagina-
tion. In this context, I proposed that the imagination is a vital resource in ali
social processes and projects, and needs to be seen as a quotidian energy, not
visible only in dreams, fantasies, and sequestered moments of euphoria and
creativity—as Durkheim, for example, made famous in The Elementary Forms
of the Religious Life. Anthropologists have frequently noted the power of the
imagination in what Victor Turner famously called "liminal" moments,3
usually special occasions in the lives of shamans, initiates, prophets, and other
persons in special states. The ritual lives of these special categories of persons
have produced a vast eíflorescence of anthropological analyses of dreams,
séances, shamanistic ecstasies, possessions, spirit-loss episodes, and other
culturally orchestrated traumas. The analysis of rnyth and ritual in the history
of anthropology is replete with testimony to the work of the imagination in
small-scale societies, but it is rarely connected to the quotidian social labor of
producing locality. Rather, it is typically part of a picture of the inversion,
subversion, sublation, or transcendence of the social. As work on ritual grew
in sophistication in the second half of the twentieth century, through the
i V Tiniu'1, 'lhe l;orcsl of Symbols: Aspecls <>/ Ndenilm RilmiL Ilhaca: Cornei) Univcrsity
1 ' l f S S , |ij ' l i
 288 MAKING THE FUTURE A '. c 1 1 1 M l M l

work of anthropologists as different as Victor Turner, Clifford (icei l / l

Claude Lévi-Strauss, there was a deeper convergence about the social p n n l m
A S P I R A T I O N AND THE P O L I T I C S OF H O P l i
tivity of ritual. Victor Turners workon social dramas, Geertzs virtuo.su |
on the Balinese cockfight, and Lévi-Strauss's meditations on totemic t l i i u l < mu Hope, and its politics and ethics, now play an increasingly p i o n i i n c n t |i.ui iu
did much to remind us that the imagination was part of the primary m.u hm philosophy and progressive social science. Ernst Bloch's grand work nu Impe'
ery of social reproduction. But this work did not produce a g c i i c i . i h / r i l marked a transition in European social thought from a preoccupulion w i l l i
rethinking of the production of everyday life, the dynamics of livcd c x p r i i utopias, radical revolution, and millennial change to more nuanced engage
ence, or the production of locality as an always incomplete project in cveu l In ments with hope as a feature of quotidian social life and with the conditions Ini
simplest of societies. its cultivation. Michael Hardt and António Negris ideas about "the multitude"7
This can even be seen in Pierre Bourdieus bold effort to place the wm l n n;-i constitute a sketch of the conditions for the global politics of hope, and David
of history, structure, agency, and calculation into a single framework, as c-.n l\i Harvey,8 speaking from a deep engagement with Marxism and geography, hás
Outline ofa Theory ofPractice, in which calculation, strategy, and improvi.s.ii n >n offered us some panoramic thoughts on the spaces of hope.
were deployed as counterpoints to the logic of the habitus. But even hei r i l n As one element of my own work with a global network of housing activists,
weight of an earlier structuralist disposition was exorcised by a view of inln i-.i. working on the problems of slums, housing, and eviction among the world's
agency, and tactics that seemed too narrow and economistic to be a fully .s.illn poorest urban citizens (see part 2 of this volume), I have argued that what may
factory account of the complex spaces within which social improvis.iii.ni be called "the capacity to aspire" is unequally distributed and that its skewed
actually occurs. Nevertheless, Bourdieu's contributions to what w.is l.ii. i distribution is a fundamental feature, and not just a secondary attribute, of
dubbed a "theory of practice" must not be underestimated, and they eei l . u u l \e an important stepextreme
forwardpoverty
in seeing futurity
(see within
chapter a broad
9). In l y c u l l u i . iIl also suggested that in the~
that context,
dialogue between anthropology and economics, especially in the field of devel-
frame. opment studies, the future had been more or less completely handed over to
We need a general recuperation of the traces of the imagination m i l n economics, with anthropology providing a sort of Greek chorus about diversity,
anthropological record, as one vital element in building a robust a n t h r < > | > < > l history, cultural values, and the dignity of local ways of living. I went on to.
ogy of the future. This will require a new conversation between approaches h > suggest that it was not fruitful for anthropologists to make the well-known crit-
liminal moments and persons, to the production of the everyday, and l<> i l n - icisms about neoclassical economics, its abstractions, its indifference to moral
linguistic and discursive processes by which violence, disaster, and emergem \e made tolerable. One powerful,and
frameworks, recent examplereliance
its excessive of this conversatiou
on market models is h > In
and solutions in regard
to the challenges of poverty. The central place for a new dialogue between
found in Veena Das's major study of violence and its relationship to the evei \y in the lives of menandand
anthropology women in
economics Delhi
is the whoin live
space which in aand througli
variety l h e theorists
of social
are discussing the relationship between recognition and redistribution, seeking
memories of Partition.4 In my own previous work, I have tried to show l l i . i l , to reconcile the apparently competing claims of dignity with those of elemen-
especially in the lives of ordinary people, the personal archive of memoi u-.. tary access to material needs. The exchanges between Nancy Fraser and Axel
both material and cognitive, is not only or primarily about the past, bui r. Honneth9 belong to this field of debate.
about providing a map for negotiating and shaping new futures.5 While sl.ile My own view is that we need to see the capacity to aspire as a social and
generated archives may primarily be instruments of governmentalily ,m<l collective capacity without which words such as "empowerment," "voice," and
bureaucratized power, personal, familial, and community archives cs|>e "participation" cannot be meaningful. In conversation with Charles Taylor,
cially those of dislocated, vulnerable, and marginalized populations .ur Amartya Sen, and Albert Hirschman, I see the capacity to aspire as a naviga-
criticai sites for negotiating paths to dignity, recognition, and politically Iça M tional capacity, through which poor people can effectively change the "terms of
ble maps for the future.
6 K. Rloch, The Principie ofHope, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.
7 M. I lardt and A. Negri, Multitude: War and Democmcy in the Age ofEmpire, New York:
lYnguin 1'i'i'ss. ;.<>()/).
4 V. lias, Life and WarJs: Violcmc and llic Dcscent inln llic Ontimiry, lU-rkdcy: U n i v i - r . i h H 11 l l . i i vcy. .S'/>nccs (>/7/o/7c, Bcrkelcy: University of Califórnia Press, 2000.
of Califórnia Press, 2006. v N 1'i.r.n anil A, l l n n n c l l i , Kcilislribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical
5 A. Ap|),iclm.ii, nl., (Ihlializiitiitn, l > i i r l i . i i n : l Hikr Univcrsily l'io.s. jooi l \ //(//iiy. l oiulotl Vri su, t ( n u .
 t . i i x n i M H - i K i i i o i I l K COlUlltlOM.S I I I
underpins mis worldvicw is Christian in a highly specific American way," 1 in
whidi llu-y arc lonlmed. Chunging lho lenns ol ivcognition mui slrviigllirniiix
which polilics, commcrce, and science are co-articulaled into a highly particu-
the capacity to aspire is already a strategy ol"niany grassrools social nuwincnK,
lar image of what the Christian good life is about. This conception of the good
including the housing movement which I study and support, namcly, lhe Sli.u \J
Slum Dwellers International (SDI). life is necessarily connected to the highly specific picture of the afterlife, with
the figure and person of Jesus being the central ethical presence that both
For the purpose of the current argument about the future, it is imporlanl Io
redeems and represents life in the here and now.
see that the capacity to aspire is a cultural capacity, ín the sense that it taki-s iis
This conception of the Christian good life is of course full of internai
force within local systems of value, meaning, communication, and disseni. lis
debates and variations, as is the case in the Islamic world, which also contains a
form is recognizably universal, but its force is distínctly local and cannol l>c
rich variety of ideas of the good life, though they have largely been represented
separated from language, social values, histories, and institutional norm.s,
in the West through the lens of terror, jihad, and suicide bombing. This is a
which tend to be highly specific. Both in the specific context of debates ovei
rather thin view of the Muslim sense of the good life, which combines a rather
development, and in the broader context of the conditions of future-making, M
different picture of the relationship of authority to community, of commerce
is important to show in what sense the capacity to aspire is a cultural capacily,
and profit to social values and solidarity, and of political warfare to self-reform
though it belongs to a family of capacities which is recognizably universal.
(as thoughtful students of the concept of jihad have made very clear). As Faisal
The best way to do this is by examining the significance of ideas of the goc K!
Devji hás begun to show in his recent work'1 on the discourses of various
life in different societies. It is true that today, as a consequence of the wiclc 1
Muslim radical thinkers, including the ideologues of Al-Qaeda, they too speak
spread impact of global media, the speed of cyber-communicatíon and lhe
today in the language of humanity and humanism, and thus are not well under-
multiplication of travei circuits (ranging from sex tourism and humanitária n
stood if we see them as crudely anti-secular. They may well represent a powerful
intervention to foreign wars and labor migration), there is a generalized growlli
metaphysics of the virtuous Muslim life (and afterlife), but this does not prevent
in shared images of the good life, some commercial and wealth centered (as
them from speaking in the idiom of a certain brand of modernist humanitari-
evidenced in the rush to trade in stocks among Japanese housewives anil
anism about suffering, justice, human rights, and human welfare. Yet the
Chinese men) and others more political, such as the global growth in popular
languages of the good life in quotidian Muslim practice, with its many varia-
ideas of democracy, even in places as isolated as Burma and Nepal. Yet thesc-
tions across the Shia, Sunni and Ismaili worlds, and across the range of social
global convergences in the search for prosperity, mobility, and voice still take
classes from the slums of Cairo to the courts of the Persian Gulf, are marked by
their force from configurations of value, ethics, and religion that are strikingly
their own brands of sexual puritanism, religious fervor, and political aggressive-
local and variable. These configurations can be looked at in the variety of images
of the good life that still characterize our world. ness. The 2007 pronouncements of the President of Iran at Columbia University,
rambling and opportunistic as they might have been, also show that there is a
An obvious case of this specificity is the world of evangelical Christianity in j
special flavor to ideas about political autonomy, sexual freedom, military
the United States. For ali its bewildering internai variety, it assembles a specific
strength, and modern educational culture in the contemporary Shia world. The
constellation of meanings surrounding the very idea of life, the afterlife, the
Islamic missionizing impulse also hás its own forms of humanist intervention,
Christian life, and the virtuous life. Today, especially in those sectors of this
and although the global spread of Islamic philanthropic money hás been widely
world that are heavily mediated through television and radio in the United
associated with the financing of terror, there is ample evidence that Islamic
States, there is a specific combination of values and messages that saturates the
global philanthropy is also tied up with its own ideas of equity, social justice,
Christian fundamentalist world and tends to emphasize: a form of salvific self-
and security for the poor of the Muslim world.
help; a healthy dose of commercial enterprise; a powerful stress on "bearing
These examples could be multiplied in the pictures of the good life, the
witness" to those who are not "saved"; a strong tendency to enter debates on
afterlife, and the just life in many societies. They are sometimes differentiated by
creation, abortion, and other scientific matters; and a longstanding bias toward
religion, sometimes by history, geography, and language, and sometimes by
the family as a moral oásis against the threats of homosexuality, divorce, and
sexual freedom. At the same time, this evangelical world hás a strong mission- 10 On this cultural specificity, see P. Guyer, Kants Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morais:
izing dimension, and through such organizations as World Vision hás become Readers Guidc, Lotulon: Continuum, 2007.
cleeply embedded in the world of transnational humanitarianism, especially in 11 F. Devji, The Tcrrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics, New
York: Columbia Universily Press, 2008.
 .1 V- l U K .11
i i i c s s M M i s m , mlllennialism, , n u l i . u l k . i l d i a n i j r , aiul i n l h e c i , i o! i ; ! n l ) , i l i / , i l
the future as A c u l t u r a l l,u l is Io say lhal hope is lhe polilical counlerpart to the
these liavc hcgim (o produce uiuisual new foci of cultural eonllicl and < p l h l i iil
work of the imagination. l-'or it is only through some sort of politics of hope that
adventurism, as we witnessed recently in the crisis ol a grotip ol Soulh K i x r . n i
any society or group can envisage a journey to desirable change in the state of
Protestantmissionaries in Afghanistan, which hás highlighted lho risinj; Í I I I | H I I
things. It might be true that in some sort of abstract typology there are "hot"
tance of South Korea as a Protestant missionizing force second only In i l n
and "cold" societies (in Lévi-Strausss famous distinction), societies which
United States in various Asian societies and beyond. Anthropology lias ,i l.m l\g record in the study of various forras of millennial eruption, noIaNv in
engage or deny change, but in the world we live in today it seems difficult to
assert that any society or social group is entirely satisfied with the state of things
the studies of Pacific Island societies in the wake of contact with the Wcsl m i l n
or that any society hás dispensed with the need for a politics of hope. Yet imag-
middle of the twentieth century and in Native American societies ravagol l > \e soldiers and colonists in North America in the nineteenth and early l u < 11
ination and aspiration, both of which can be shown to be everywhere features
tieth centuries. of the work of culture, are intimately connected with a third faculty, the faculty
of anticipation, which hás in some ways been given the greatest amount of play
Like other social science fields, however, the tendency within anthrop< >li >|; \s been to oscillate between studies of utopian and millennial movemenls on
in the archive of anthropology. Só let us turn to anticipation as a criticai element
in the study of the future as a cultural fact.
the one hand and, more recently, studies of cultural trauma on the other. 'l hc.
hás created a notable gap in the systematic study of the variability in visions < > l
the good life, the afterlife, and the just life. The consequence hás been to ivm ANTICIPATION, RISK, AND SPECULATION
force the sense that hope is a product of moments of exception and emerge n > \d that the future is not a routine element of thought and practice in ali sói ir
In a sense, the good life may be characterized as what, in any society, many
people hope to achieve. Yet anthropology hás been substantially preoccupied
ties. When attention hás been paid to the ways in which the future is a pai l ul
with what societies fear and therefore seek to avoid. At least as far back as the
how societies shape their practices, there hás been a similar tendency to osdl
great ethnographic study by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Orades and
late between the polés of metaphysics and abstraction on the one hand (on<
Magic Among the Azande, a major interest among anthropologists working in
example of which is the work of the Frendi ethnologist Geneviève Cala nu-
non-Western societies hás been to understand such practices as witchcraft,
Griaule,12 on the worldview of the Dogon people of África), and on the other, l« >
sorcery, and divination, ali linked by a common preoccupation with misfortune
portray peasants and other non-Western peoples as hyper-rational decision
but also geared to the containment of the uncertainties in the future as repre-
makers, essentially operating from basically universal rational-choice propensi
ties and algorithms. sented by maleficent events in the present. In societies organized along more
textual and numerical lines, this is the dynamic that underlies geomancy, astrol-
The missing piece here hás been a systematic effort to understand how
ogy, and other technologies of prediction. Max Weber, to whom I shall return
cultural systems, as combinations of norms, dispositions, practices, and histo
shortly, made a fundamental distinction in his gigantic comparative project on
ries, frame the good life as a landscape of discernible ends and of practical paths
the birth of capitalism between magic and religion. Magic, in his view, is
to the achievement of these ends. This requires a move away from the anthro
substantially characterized by what he considered to be irrational modes of
pological emphasis on cultures as logics of reproduction to a fuller picture i n
predicting and controlling the religious unknown.
which cultural systems also shape specific images of the good life as a map ol
In the study of cultural approaches to risk, we have a rich variety of tradi-
the journey from here to there and from now to then, as a part of the ethics of
tions on which we could draw in order to build a robust anthropology of the
everyday life. Such an approach to ideas of the good life as systematically vari-
future. Perhaps the most familiar is to be found in the many contributions of
able and valuable would be a major step toward identifying what it means to
Mary Douglas on cosmology, the social body, purity, and danger. Beginning
assert, as I have done, that the capacity to aspire is a cultural capacity, albeit one
with her classic argument about purity and danger,13 Mary Douglas was perhaps
that is everywhere the key to changing the terms of the status quo insofar as
recognition and redistribution are concerned. the first major anthropologist to see that there were frequent categorical homol-
ogies between cultural maps of the human body, the social body, and the

1965. 12 G. Calame-Griaule, Ethnologie et Langage. La parole chez lês Dogon, Paris: Gallimard,
13 M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, New
York: Praeger, 1966.
 294 M A K I N < ; TIII; FUTUUI;
cosmos, and that many human societies located danger at those points wherr
categorical distinctions ran the risk of blurring or mixture. This argumenl,
which she famously made with regará to the rules of the Book of Leviticus,
provoked much debate and some strong counter-arguments, but it remains a
classic argument which can be captured in her brilliant aphorism to the effecl
that "dirt is matter out of place." In her subsequent work on "natural symbols,""
Douglas developed these ideas further and sought to deepen the relationship
between bodily, social, and cosmological processes in order to illuminate wheri-
different societies located danger and sought to manage it by the avoidance of
categorical confusion. But in her later work, explicitly oriented to modern
Western societies, she moved from an interest in danger to an interest in risk. In
these later writings, notably a major study done in collaboration with Aaron
Wildavsky,15 Douglas made an initial effort to extend her insights from the
cosmologies of small-scale societies to the problem of risk and its managemenl
in contemporary industrial societies. This later work did bring in an explicil
concern with the future as a culturally organized dimension of human life, bui
it was only a partial breakthrough, since she remained indebted to the concern
with taxonomies and classification that she had partly derived from Evans
Pritchard and largely from Durkheim and Mauss. This prevented Douglas from
taking on the aspect of risk in modern societies that had come to be dominated
by an actuarial framework, itself derived from the birth of probabilistic think
ing, the early modern history of insurance in the West, and the subsequent and
sharp distinction between risk and uncertainty, first strongly theorized by Fran k
Knight (see chapter 12). One might say that Mary Douglas bequeathed to us ,i
strong interest in risk, but only a weak understanding of probability, uncer
tainty, and the manipulation of large numbers in modern life.
That déficit hás been recently addressed in a rich body of recent work on ,i
variety of market processes, including modern monetary fornis.16 This speciíii
body of ethnographic inquiries into risk as a managed feature of contemporary
life fits into a broader stream of culturally oriented work on emergent neo
liberal forms of capitalism, including millennial capitalism, casino capitalism,
1970. 14 M. Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, New York: Pantheon Bnok.s,
15 M. Douglas and A. B. Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection ofTcc/nin.//
and Environmental Dangers, Berkeley: University of Califórnia Press, 1983.
16 K. Hart, The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World, London: Texere, 21» K .
stock-exchanges: H. Miyazaki, "Between Arbitrage and Speculation: An Economy of Beliel .111 l
Doubt," Economy and Society, 2007, 36(3), 397-416; A. Ríles, "Real Time: Unwinding Technocntj
and Anlhropological Knowledge," American Ethnologist, 2004, 31(3), 392-405; new f i n a m i. l
in.slruments: E. LiPuma and B. Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, DuHi.iii
Duke University Press, 2004; gambling as game and lifcstyle: l. K. Callelino, Iligli Slukes: l:lon,l i
Seiiiinnle (!iiiniiij> andSovereignly, Durham: Ouke Universily Press, 2008; and relaled .similar ii.sk
ivlaled phcnonwtll o( modern global lile: B. Maurer, "kepressal r'ulinvs: PilUUKitl I V i i v a l i v r s '
Thcologicd lJnconsdous," l-toiHiniyiindSociety, 2002,31(1), r, K>
THE FUTURE AS CULTURAL FACT 295
disaster capitalism, and other highly specific forms of risk-making and risk-
taking, which connect the study of modern markets to other dimensions of
speculation, crisis, and value in contemporary life.17 While this is not the
context for a detailed review or exegesis of this new body of work, it is worth
noticing that it builds on earlier traditions of interest in entrepreneurial ethics
(Weber), in commodity fetishism of many kinds (Marx), in spectacle and
excess (Bataille),18 and in cargo cults and various other economic hysterias.
What is relevant in much of this work, for the purposes of an anthropology of
the future, is a tension between what I call the ethics ofpossibility and the ethics
of probability.
By the ethics of possibility, I mean those ways of thinking, feeling, and
acting that increase the horizons of hope, that expand the field of the imagina-
tion, that produce greater equity in what I have called the capacity to aspire, and
that widen the field of informed, creative, and criticai citizenship. This ethics is
part and parcel of transnational civil society movements, progressive demo-
cratic organizations, and in general the politics of hope. By the ethics of
probability, I mean those ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that flow out of
what lan Hacking called "the avalanche of numbers,"19 or what Michel Foucault
saw as the capillary dangers of modern regimes of diagnosis, counting, and
accounting. They are generally tied to the growth of a casino capitalism which
profits from catastrophe and tends to bet on disaster. This latter ethics is typi-
cally tied up with amoral forms of global capital, corrupt states, and privatized
adventurism of every variety.
I offer these two contrasting ethical styles to suggest that beneath the more
conventional debates and contradictions that surround what we call globaliza-
tion there is a tectonic struggle between these two ethics. One place in which we
can examine what is at stake in this struggle between the ethics of possibility
and the ethics of probability is in the recent attention that hás been paid to
systematic profiteering from disaster, insecurity, and emergency as a new
branch of capitalist speculation.
Two authors in the public sphere offer sobering pictures of the
new economy of catastrophe. Naomi Klein20 draws a direct line from the
17 J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991; A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony: Studies on the History of Society and Culture,
Berkeley: University of Califórnia Press, 2001; V. Rao, "Post-Industrial Transitions: The Speculative
Futures of Citizenship in Mumbai," in R. Mehrotra and P. Joshi, eds., The Mumbai Reader, Mumbai:
Urban Design Research Institute, 2006; J. L. Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of
Economic Regulation in Central África, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
18 Cl. Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, A. Stoekl, ed., Minneapolis:
University o l M i n n e s o l a Press, 1985.
19 I. l l . u k i i i ) ; , "Biopower and the Avalanche of Printcd Numbers," Humanilics in Society,
1982, s( i -|). •','•) '''i
/o N Klein, "l ti'..islrr Cupitulism: 'lhe New Kconomy ol Calastrophe," llarf)t'r'n, (Klober
 296 M A K I N G THE FUTURE
reconstruction profiteering in Iraq to the money that hás been made by a vau
ety of corporate interests in infrastructure, energy, security, and engineerin;; m
post-Katrina New Orleans. Klein shows that in many sites of disaster, liolh
natural and manmade, throughout the world, we see a similar logic. In lu-i
analysis,
not só long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments w h r n
atomized communities put disasters aside and pulled together. Today thcy .u r
moments when we are hurled further apart, when we lurch into a r a d i i a l l v
segregated future where some of us will fali off the map and others asceml In .1
parallel privatized state, one equipped with well-paved highways and skyw.iy..
safe bridges, boutique charter schools, fast-lane airport terminais, and deln.xr
subways.21
Kleirís analysis of what she calls the disaster capitalism complex shows thal i l is
more worrisome than the old military industrial complex, for it is not simply
parasitic on the state and public resources, but actually seeks to gut and repl.u <•
them until public infrastructure is thoroughly exhausted and these very privalr
interests can rent public goods to the very society and state from which it 01 ÍJM
nally hijacked them. Klein is able to show evidence from both the heart of ilu-
US government to well beyond it that we are entering a period where disastci
apartheid is well on its way to producing a world of suburban green zoncs, .1
global version of Baghdad where middle-class suburbanites in guarded subm !>•.
buy and provide their own infrastructure, energy, and security, in anticipulion
of widespread disaster and infrastructural breakdown. We are already seeing, in
áreas like suburban Atlanta, the birth of "contract cities"—that is, cities crealol
from scratch by private contractors in order to create stand-alone cities foi lhe
suburbs, and to allow them to escape ali tax responsibilities for their pooivi
neighbors and fellow citizens. Even more worrisome, analyses of glolul
economic and political trends show that stock markets now greet news of majoi
disasters with ebullient stock-price increases, thus suggesting that p o l i l k a l
disaster creates economic booms, unlike the steep crash in various markets aliei
9/11. The spectacular profits produced by the recent spate of disasters world
wide show the thin line between exploiting disasters and counting on thcni in
the race for profits:
An economic system that requires constant growth while bucking almost ali j
attempts at environmental regulation generates a steady stream of disasters ;
2007, 47 sH; see alsn N. Klein, 'lhe Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York:
Metropolitan H o o k s / l l e n r y lloll, 2007.
THE F U T U R E AS C U L T U R A L I ; A C T Z<-)7
its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short icrni
profits oífered by purely speculative investment hás turned the stock, currcncy and
real-estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the
Mexican peso crisis, the dot-com collapse, and the subprime-mortgage crisis
demonstrate.... Disaster generation can therefore be left to the markets invisible
hand. This is one área in which it actually delivers.22
Kleins analysis can be linked directly into the ethics of probability by referring
to an essay by Michael Lewis that appeared in the New York Times Sunday
Magazine on August 26, 2007, with the title, "In Natures Casino."23 Lewiss essay
also focuses on disasters, catastrophes, and profits, but hás a narrower aim,
which is to illuminate the specific ways in which risk managers and analysts
have developed new techniques for calculating the odds of catastrophe. Though
it appeared a few weeks before Kleins, this essay can be read as an analysis of the
technical weaponry generated by the disaster capitalism complex to handle the
new risks from which it aims to profit.
Lewis's essay centers on the insurance industry and its relationship to other
elements of the global market in risk, especially in the period after Katrina,
during which many insurers took massive losses after decades of massive gains
in disaster-prone regions of the United States. The center of Lewiss analysis is
the growth in the role and respectability of a remarkable new financial instru-
ment called the catastrophe bond, or "cat bond" for short. The catastrophe bond
is an instrument calculated to produce profits and minimize losses for the
insurance industry, but as a derivative device it also allows a variety of other
players to play in what Lewis calls "natures casino" the market in the calcula-
tion of the risks associated with extremely rare events (what quantitativa traders
call "tail risks" or financial cataclysms that are believed to have a i percent or
less chance of occurring). Catastrophe bonds allow their buyers in effect to
become sellers of catastrophe insurance: the buyer will lose ali his or her money
if a certain disaster event occurs within a certain number of years and the seller
of the cat bond—usually an insurance company seeking to insure itself against
extreme losses—pays the buyer a high rate of interest. Certain hedge funds are
big players in catastrophe bonds, and an entirely new brand of companies,
which are dominated by natural scientists and mathematicians, create models
for valuing the risks of catastrophic events, on the basis of which the whole
casino operates. In short, catastrophe hás become an object not just of the prof-
its from traditional insurance (and so-called re-insurance) but of new kinds of
financial instruments that quantify risk in relation to events where the past is a
highly imperlect guide to the future. This industry, built around a sophisticated
M l < \ v r . , In N.ilmt", t .r.inn.'' Ni'\v V<>f'A lime*. ;<M>/.
 298 MAKING THE FUTURE
THE F U T U R E AS CULTURAL FACT 299

combination of probabilistic thinking, gambling, scientific modeling, pricing,

been steadily eroded by the pressures of improvisation, the future is certainly
and risk-assessment, captures almost perfectly what I am calling the ethics of
not a neutral or technical space for ali those who occupy the space of possibility
probability and its ruthless approach to the problems of a world of (valuable)
rather than of probability as their primary orientation to the world. To most
disasters. If we combine Naomi Kleirís incisive analysis of the disaster capital -
ordinary people—and certainly to those who lead lives in conditions of poverty,
ism complex (which directly promotes disaster as a source of windfall profits
exclusion, displacement, violence, and repression—the future often presents
based on disaster apartheid and the gutting of public infrastructure) with
itself as a luxury, a nightmare, a doubt, or a shrinking possibility. For those
Lewiss analysis of new financial instruments and protocols (which increase the
societies and groups now faced by growing suffering, dislocation, disaster, or
ways of profiting from the risk associated with unlikely events), we can see that
disease—roughly 50 percent of the world's population by any measure—the
the ethics of probability takes risk to spaces of emergency and suffering which
biggest afFective reality is that the future is a trauma inflicted on the present by
were unimagined by someone like Weber when he associated the spirit of entre-
the arrival of crises of every description. Consequently, hope is often threatened
preneurship with certain Calvinist religious doctrines and psychologies.
by náusea, fear, and anger for many subaltern populations. This afFective crisis,
The challenge for those who wish to study mechanisms for gambling, spec-
which also inhabits a geography that is not uniform, planetary, or universal,
ulation, risk taking, and other forms of wager in the contemporary world is that
needs to be fully engaged by those who seek to design the future, or even to
we do not yet have a reliable way to connect vernacular understandings of
design for the future, taking account of the fact that the future is not a blank
uncertainty, risk, and forecasting as practices of everyday life in ali societies, to
space for the inscription of technocratic enlightenment or for nature's long-
the massive new technologies that have emerged to manage risk in its aggregate
term oscillations, but a space for democratic design that must begin with the
and catastrophic forms and to profit from it through sophisticated new finan-
recognition that the future is a cultural fact.
cial markets and instruments. To be able to do this we need to examine, in a
culturally informed way, the zones and practices through which the ethics of
possibility come into contact with the ethics of probability in specific regional, OUR DISCIPLINES, OURSELVES
historical, and cultural milieus. This will require the close study of whether antl
These thoughts about the urgency of building a robust anthropology of the
how those who sell their organs as part of an organ trade, or those who practice
future bring me back to the journey I have undertaken in this book. I opened
highly risky forms of sexual contact, or those who undertake dangerous jour-
the book with a chapter that was first published in 1986, a chapter about how
neys in order to cross national borders, or those who elect to work in extremely
things circulate, about how such circulation both encounters and transforms
hazardous conditions (such as diamond mines) on the chance of striking it rich,
different regimes oFvalue, and about how these regimes can only be understood
or those who usefengshui to determine the logic of expensive new homes, or
if we concede to objects some of the same forms of agency, energy, and biograph-
those who build homes in ecologically fragile settings against ali warnings, see
ical vicissitude that we attribute to ourselves.
their actions in the complex negotiations between the ethics of possibility and
The subsequent chapters of this book have explored ways in which the last
the ethics of probability. Such ethnographic work is still in its infancy. To explore
few decades of globalization have complicated my initial thoughts about the
this space more carefully, we need to reopen the many meanings of the idea ol
social life of things. We can see now that the forms of circulation continue to
"speculation," ali of which have strong linguistic, religious, arid vernacular
interact with the circulation of forms to produce unexpected new cultural
inflections, só that we can gain a better picture of the ways in which the sciences
configurations in which locality always takes surprising new forms. And as the
of anticipation today interact with the quotidian strategies and practices ol
process of globalization continues to generate complex new crises of circula-
future-making.
tion, we need to commit ourselves to a partisan position, at least in one regard,
For the large percentage of the worlds population which may be said to
and that is to be mediators, facilitators, and promoters of the ethics of possibil-
function in the condition of "bare life,"24 we have not yet found ways to articu
ity against the ethics of probability. I have alluded to this distinction at various
late how anticipation, imagination, and aspiration come together in the work ol
points in the preceding chapters. Here I will simply say that this ethical commit-
future-making. For even "bare life" never lacks in moral shape and texture, and
ment is grounded in the view that a genuinely democratic politics cannot be
never operates outside a rich afFective frame. As the world of the habitus hás
bascd on the avalanche of numbers—about population, poverty, profit, and
predation llial threaten to kill ali street-level optimism about life and lhe
.'.) ( i . Agambcn, //orno SUKT: Sovcrcigti /'<mrr uni! Ittirc l.i/i; SUmloril: Sl.mloid Uniivcrsity woild. U.ilhoi, il musl bnilil on the ethics ol possibility, wliich can oller a more
nu lir.iw |i|,iilm in Idi improvini; lho planetary q n a l i l y ol l i l c .nul e.m . u i o i u
 l ; or Ihosr ol us wlio slill work in aiul liom l l u - academy, l l i i s cthical . M I M I
ment cannot be applicd abslractly or in those doinains Iroin which wo aiv iiin-.i
distant or disconnected. It rnust begin at home: in our institutions, our clisi i
plines, and our methods. This is why I have anchored this book aromul ,m
argument about the importance of the anthropology of the future to (In- vci v
future of anthropology. It is not that I believe in the divine election of anlliro
pology to save the academy, and much less the world. Every field of expcrlisr
and inquiry can and must make its own versions of this criticai journey. I loi v
ground anthropology in recognition of the fact that it is my own médium,
context, and formative ground. It is, furthermore, also a circulating forni ol
thought that will continue to make its own global journeys. I believe that tlu-sr
global journeys in the future of anthropology are much more likely to strengt hon
the ethics of probability if they take serious account of the need for an anthro
pology of the future. In this regard, if in no other, we have nothing to lose bui
our chains.
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