Prelude: An accountability, written in the year 2108

Abstract

This 'archaeology of the future' examines how we, as scholars and anthropologists, will be read - and judged - in the time to come. Twenty-second-century theoreticians may well ask (as we today ask of colonial-era scholarship): "Did the scholars in the early twenty-first century see in their analyses new kinds of warfare, unparalleled forms of violence, potentialities yet to be developed?" Through an analysis of events likely to unfold over the course of the next 100 years (from changing power constellations to anthropology's attempt to commit disciplinary suicide), this article affirms an anthropology that takes ontological reflexivity seriously; that no longer accepts outdated heuristics dividing theory from theoretician from Being (production of the world); and that grounds this approach in an accountability recognizing epistemology as dynamic, honest, and emergent. © Berghahn Journals.