الصيف ٢٠٢١، القاهرةمقرر قصير
Anthropology of the Future (online)
تفاصيل المقرر
- الدورة
- الصيف ٢٠٢١، القاهرة
- يبدأ
- الأحد، ١١ يوليو
- المواعيد
- الأحد، ١٧:٠٠–١٩:٠٠
- المدة
- ٨ أسابيع
- طريقة الحضور
- عبر الإنترنت
- لغة التدريس
- الإنجليزية
مشاركة
ناقشه مع الذكاء الاصطناعي
- اختر مساعد الذكاء الاصطناعي الذي تفضّله.
- ستُفتح علامة تبويب جديدة، وستجد النص التوجيهي جاهزًا للاستخدام.
- اضغط على إرسال لتبدأ استكشاف الصفحة من خلال الحوار، على طريقة سيلاس.
عن المقرر
Why should we – in the present – study and engage with the future? And if we do study it, how should we go about it? These are the foundational questions of this course. Broadly, anthropologists study the future in three main modes: future as temporalities, future as possibilities, and future as ideological objects.
In thinking of the future as temporality, anthropologists wonder about the meaning of the future and its relationship to the past and the present. They also question how we think of time and how we inhabit it. For instance, some anthropologists challenge its linearity by proposing other alternative modes. In tackling the future as unrealized possibilities of the present, anthropologists study things like hope, alternatives, and dreams, and follow how the present’s infinite possibilities have been appropriated by certain power structures. Anthropologists question the way we predict the future and how it relates to our reading of the past and our inhabitation of the present. They ask how certain institutions impose their logic, whether accumulative or algorithmic, to promote certain futures over others. This takes us to our last focus, which is of the future as an ideological object. Anthropologists here ask simple questions, such as: what happens when we name a city ‘the city of the future’, or ‘the car of the future’? How does this affect the present and reinterpret the past? What kind of ideologies are imposed on the future and present by confining the future to certain objects or discourse? Here, objects such as sci-fi, future money, space entrepreneurship, or future cities are examined.
Besides these modes, anthropologists also ask: how can we think of collective communal methodologies for imagining, predicting, and dreaming about the future? How can we democratize the future-making process? What are possibilities of the present that we can work with and learn from? Why does the future always fail to fulfil our utopian or revolutionary visions? What are other imaginations, desires, and lives that could actualize? How do we understand and find hope in dark times? And how does one imagine otherwise radical futures and presents?
This class has three aims. The first is to go through the main methodological and theoretical questions of the anthropology of the future. The second is to learn together how to read the temporal politics of certain texts through unpacking the texts’ audiences, political projects, and temporal hierarchies, and to answer the primary question: who exactly is this text written for whose future is it directed toward? Thirdly and lastly, to hope to build on our current moment’s anxieties, conspiracies, and uncertainties about the future and to think of other futures that can materialize.
مَن يقدّم المقرر
من زميل التدريس Potential reading list for ten weeks
Don’t panic, we will not read everything included here! We will make our own list from these readings depending on our common interests. Some will be required, and the rest will be recommended for your own reference. We will end the course by writing final reflections on the course or the questions that stimulated us most throughout the weeks.
مسار المقرر
يوليو ٢٠٢١
- Bryant, Rebecca, and Daniel M. Knight. The Anthropology of the FutureCambridge University Press, 2019. Introduction.
- Hodges, Matt. “Rethinking Time's Arrow.”Anthropological Theory, vol. 8, no. 4, 2008, pp. 399–429. doi:10.1177/1463499608096646.
- Bear, Laura. “Doubt, Conflict, Mediation: the Anthropology of Modern Time.”Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 20, 2014, pp. 3–30. doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12091
- Munn, Nancy D. “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay.”Recommended. Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 21, no. 1, 1992, pp. 93–123. doi:10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.000521.
- Gell, Alfred. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images.Recommended. Berg, 1996.
- Clifford Geertz. “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in Cultural Analysis.”Recommended. Man, vol. 2, no. 1, 1967, p. 153. doi:10.2307/2798709.
- Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object.Columbia University Press, 2002. Introduction and conclusion.
- Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.”Global Transformations, 2003, pp. 7–28. doi:10.1007/978-1-137-04144-9_2.
- Scott, David. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Post coloniality.Princeton University Press, 1999. Introduction.
- Pursley, Sara. Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq.Stanford University Press, 2019. Introduction and chapter 4.
- ظل الكارثه الطويل: ثمان ملاحظات حول ضرورة تجاوز المستقبلby هيثم الورداني. (Title reconstructed from PDF text.)
- Salem, Sara. Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony.Recommended. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
- Bou Baker, Heba. For the war yet to come.Recommended.
أغسطس ٢٠٢١
- Salazar, Juan Francisco. Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds.Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Introduction.
- Maruyama, Magoroh, and Arthur M. Harkins. Cultures of the Future.De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Introduction.
- Sandison, Alan, and Robert Dingley. Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction.St. Martin's Press, 2000. Introduction.
- Appadurai, Arjun. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition.New York, 2013. Introduction.
- Harjo, Laura. Spiral to the Stars Mvskoke Tools of Futurity.UA press, 2019. Introduction.
- Guerriero, Silas. Divination Practices.Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions, 2015.
- Mitchell, Timothy. “Economentality: How the Future Entered Government.”Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 4, 2014, pp. 479–507. doi:10.1086/676417.
- Maurer, Bill. “Repressed Futures: Financial Derivatives’ Theological Unconscious.”Money and Calculation, 2010, pp. 148–173. doi:10.1057/9780230298019_8.
- Bahng, Aimee. Migrant Futures: Decolonizing speculation in financial times.Duke University Press, 2018.
- Asad, Talal. Secular Translations: Nation State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason.Columbia University Press, 2018. Introduction, conclusion.
- Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason.Duke University Press, 2017. Introduction.
- Halpern, Orit. Beautiful Data: a History of Vision and Reason since 1945.Duke University Press, 2015. Introduction.
- Amoore, Louise. Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others.Duke University Press, 2020. Introduction.
Choose from the three groups below.
- Günel, Gökçe. Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi.A- Future cities, sci-fi and space entrepreneurship. Duke University Press, 2019. Introduction.
- Valentine, David. “Exit Strategy: Profit, Cosmology, and the Future of Humans in Space.”A- Future cities, sci-fi and space entrepreneurship. Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 85, no. 4, 2012, pp. 1045–1067. doi:10.1353/anq.2012.0073.
- Liu, Xiao. Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Post socialist China.A- Future cities, sci-fi and space entrepreneurship. University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Introduction.
- Bernstein, Anya. The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia.A- Future cities, sci-fi and space entrepreneurship. Princeton University Press, 2019. Introduction.
- Graeber, David. Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination.B- Utopia and apocalypse. Autonomedia, 2012.
- Larrinaga, Carlos. “The Utopia of Rules. On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.”B- Utopia and apocalypse. Social and Environmental Accountability Journal, vol. 36, no. 3, 2016, pp. 209–210. doi:10.1080/0969160x.2016.1235401.
- Latour, Tsing & Strengers et al. “Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse.”B- Utopia and apocalypse. Ethnos, vol. 83, no. 3, 2018, pp. 587–606. doi:10.1080/00141844.2018.1457703.
- Noble, Richard. Utopia: Documents of Contemporary Art.B- Utopia and apocalypse. MIT Press, 2009.
- Crapanzano, Vincent. Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology.C- Black futures, revolutions, and otherwise horizons. University of Chicago Press, 2004. Introduction.
- Gordillo, Gastón. “World Revolution Z.”C- Black futures, revolutions, and otherwise horizons. Libcom.org, 2012. libcom.org/library/world-revolution-z-gast%C3%B3n-gordillo.
- Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.C- Black futures, revolutions, and otherwise horizons. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Introduction.
- Le Guin, Ursula. the ones who walk away from Omelas.C- Black futures, revolutions, and otherwise horizons. (Name as written in the flow: Ursual.)
- Buck-Morss, Susan. Dream worlds and catastrophe.C- Black futures, revolutions, and otherwise horizons. MIT Press, 2000. Introduction.
- Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope.Univ. of California Press, 2008. Conclusion.
- Povinelli, Elizabeth. “After the Last Man: Images and Ethics of Becoming Otherwise.”e-Flux, 2012. The flow gives www.e-flux.com/journal/after-the-last-man-images-and-ethics-of-becoming-otherwise/.
- Barad, K. “On Touching--The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.”Differences 23, no. 3 (2012): 206-23. doi:10.1215/10407391-1892943.
- Adnan, Etel. The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay = Der Preis Der Liebe, Den Wir Nicht Zahlen Wollen.Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2011.
- Roy, Arhundti. The end of imagination.2016. Selections.
قائمة قراءات المقرر
- Mittermaier, Amira. Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination.Recommended. University of California Press, 2011.
- Shore, Chris, and Marilyn Strathearn. “Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies.”Recommended. Man, vol. 28, no. 2, 1993, p. 401. doi:10.2307/2803459.
- Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World.Recommended. Duke press, 2015.
اشترك في نشرة سيلاس
المقررات الجديدة والدعوات المفتوحة ومقالات سيلاس، في بريدك.
١٨ أكتوبر ٢٠٢٦
Join CILAS's Spring semester of 2026
- Spring 2026, Cairo
