Claiming futures

Abstract

The papers in this special issue on 'environmental futures' draw liberally on cross-disciplinary conversations, yet their strength comes from their ethnographic depth and their characteristically anthropological willingness to consider diverse types of entities and phenomena in the same holistic frame. The range of places (Oman, Alaska, Egypt, Colombia, Antarctica, etc.) and entities (ice, oil, gold, governmental officials, glaciologists, salmon, models and scenarios, PowerPoint presentations, rainfall, etc.) engaged in these instances of 'prognostic politics' provide the kind of material that distinguishes the anthropological project of building theory through ethnography and comparison. In writing this response, I group the papers in pairs under four topics that bring out some of the especially interesting and novel contributions of the issue as a whole. The themes are: temporality and uncertainty; anticipatory knowledges; resource affect; and material signs. These themes refract the visions presented in the papers, showing details of the process of claiming multiple uncertain, agonistically engaged futures, and the consequences of these claimed futures. I briefly conclude by considering these papers as part of the current pragmatist (sometimes called 'ontological') bent of some anthropological work, and the heuristic possibilities provided by this orientation.