Anthropology and the Near-Future Concept

Abstract

My concept of the “near future” originates in a paper published in 2007, in the context of what US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called The Age of Turbulence (2007) in the economy. The coincidence of this economic concern, alongside a rising religious focus on “the end times, ” and secular concerns with the new millennium, global warming and political turbulence, became complex and contested themes for conceptualization. A calculable “near future” may be disappearing, as referring to a manageable range of rational planning of the postwar, 5-year-plan kind, with its confident expectation of making life better within a definite time frame, and by following a defined path. Instead, a “punctuated time” of multiple dates and commitments is being crafted and managed together by both individual people and collectivities, drawing more often on invocations of “apocalypse” as looming disaster, and “emergence” as an indeterminate process. Anthropological analysis has also inserted new questions about ontology: how do we conceptualize ourselves in these differently defined transitional modes? My paper endorses and explores how “anticipation” can help to focus empirical exploration of the complexity of temporal concepts and processes, in the public sphere.