Modern Times

Abstract

Anthropologists have long neglected the future as an object of study, and recent contributions to the topic rarely address it systematically. This essay argues that this is the result of the unfinished project of postcolonial reflexivity about the anthropological subject. Anthropologists are, like most other social scientists, addicted to primitive temporal classifications of modernity and especially its tendency toward epochal thinking. To combat this lack of reflexivity, we need to identify the ideological effect of futuristic thinking and replace it by a more sophisticated plurality of modern futures. An ethnographic and historical focus on the coexistence of open and empty futures and the tendency to devalue the present by not-yet events will result in an anthropology that becomes the more universal as it recognizes the experience of multiple temporalities.