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INTRODUCTION
itself primaríly around the study of needs, wants, estimates, calculation, and or neutral space, but is shot through with allccl and wilh scir..iimii l heis, wr
the projection of macro-outcomes from micro- actions and -choices.1 In alli- need to examine not just the emotions that accompany lhe l n l i n c ,r. .1 i n l i m . i l
ance with specialized techniques derived from statistics, and more recently form, but the sensations that it produces: awe, vertigo, cxcilcmcnl. tlism irni.i
from linear álgebra, operations research, and the computational sciences, tion. The many forms that the future takes are also shaped by llu-sc- alln. Is .md
economics hás Consolidated its place as the primary field in which the study sensations, for they give to various configurations of aspiration, anticipation,
of how humans construct their future is modeled and predicted. Other fields, and imagination their specific gravity, their traction, and their texture. Social
such as the environmental sciences and planning and disaster management, science hás never been good at catching these properties of human life, but it is
have built themselves on the confluence of sophisticated computational tech- never too late to improve.
niques and new techniques for mapping, visualization, and high-order
information processing. These techniques have captured the dominant spaces
THE WORK OF THE I M A G I N A T I O N
in such debates as those surrounding global warmíng, population growth,
long-term resource evaluation, and military/strategic scenario-building. In Modernity at Large, I stated the case for looking at the imagination as a
Design, architecture, and planning have substantially dominated that dimen- collective practice that played a vital role in the production of locality. This
sion of the future that hás to do with tools, ornaments, habitations, and argument required me to revisit and revise the history of ethnography só as to
infrastructures (see chapter 13). Anthropology still plays a relatively limited observe that the massive archive of field ethnography, produced by anthro-
role in ethical debates surrounding such topics as animal rights, cloning, new pologists and their precursors since the late nineteenth century, was less a
fornis of genetic engineering, and emergent fornis of mechanical warfare, series of portraits of the local than a series of portraits of the production of
except as a site of valuable humanist resistance and critique. But such human- locality as an active, sustained, and ongoing process, through which the local
ist critique, valuable as it may be, does not constitute a powerful intervention emerged against the forces of entropy, displacement, material hardship, and
based on a deep understanding of the future as a cultural fact. Só how can we social corrosion faced by ali human communities. The idea here was that the
build a more systematic and fundamental anthropological approach to the local, quite independent of the conditions of the recent phase of globalization,
future?
was always a sustained work in process, an emergent that required not only
the resources of habit, custom, and history, but also the work of the imagina-
THE F U T U R E AS C U L T U R A L FACT: A S P I R A T I O N , A N T I C I P A T I O N ,
tion. In this context, I proposed that the imagination is a vital resource in ali
IMAGINATION social processes and projects, and needs to be seen as a quotidian energy, not
visible only in dreams, fantasies, and sequestered moments of euphoria and
We need to construct an understanding of the future by examining the interac- creativity—as Durkheim, for example, made famous in The Elementary Forms
tions between three notable human preoccupations that shape the future as a of the Religious Life. Anthropologists have frequently noted the power of the
cultural fact, that is, as a forni of difference. These are imagination, anticipation, imagination in what Victor Turner famously called "liminal" moments,3
and aspiration. I have written elsewhere about the imagination as a social facl, usually special occasions in the lives of shamans, initiates, prophets, and other
as a practice and a forni of work, trying to put the imagination back at the persons in special states. The ritual lives of these special categories of persons
center of cultural activity.2 The same can and must be done with anticipation have produced a vast eíflorescence of anthropological analyses of dreams,
and with aspiration.
séances, shamanistic ecstasies, possessions, spirit-loss episodes, and other
As we refine the ways in which specific conceptions of aspiration, anticipa- culturally orchestrated traumas. The analysis of rnyth and ritual in the history
tion, and imagination become configured só as to produce the future as a of anthropology is replete with testimony to the work of the imagination in
specific cultural form or horizon, we will be better able to place within this small-scale societies, but it is rarely connected to the quotidian social labor of
scheme more particular ideas about prophecy, well-being, emergency, crisis, producing locality. Rather, it is typically part of a picture of the inversion,
and regulation. We also need to remember that the future is not just a technical subversion, sublation, or transcendence of the social. As work on ritual grew
in sophistication in the second half of the twentieth century, through the
1 I. ('„ Schelling, MicmiiMliva iinil Macrobthavior, New York: W. W. Norlon & Co., 1978.
2 A. Appaclurai, Motlernity til Liirgr: ('iillnnil Diineininif* n/ (lltihiillziilion, Minncapolis: i V Tiniu'1, 'lhe l;orcsl of Symbols: Aspecls <>/ Ndenilm RilmiL Ilhaca: Cornei) Univcrsity
l Inivcrsily <>l Mimirsnla 1'ivss, i»w<i.
1 ' l f S S , |ij ' l i
288 MAKING THE FUTURE A '. c 1 1 1 M l M l
1965. 12 G. Calame-Griaule, Ethnologie et Langage. La parole chez lês Dogon, Paris: Gallimard,
13 M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, New
York: Praeger, 1966.
294 M A K I N < ; TIII; FUTUUI;
THE FUTURE AS CULTURAL FACT 295
cosmos, and that many human societies located danger at those points wherr
categorical distinctions ran the risk of blurring or mixture. This argumenl, disaster capitalism, and other highly specific forms of risk-making and risk-
which she famously made with regará to the rules of the Book of Leviticus, taking, which connect the study of modern markets to other dimensions of
provoked much debate and some strong counter-arguments, but it remains a speculation, crisis, and value in contemporary life.17 While this is not the
classic argument which can be captured in her brilliant aphorism to the effecl context for a detailed review or exegesis of this new body of work, it is worth
that "dirt is matter out of place." In her subsequent work on "natural symbols,"" noticing that it builds on earlier traditions of interest in entrepreneurial ethics
Douglas developed these ideas further and sought to deepen the relationship (Weber), in commodity fetishism of many kinds (Marx), in spectacle and
between bodily, social, and cosmological processes in order to illuminate wheri- excess (Bataille),18 and in cargo cults and various other economic hysterias.
different societies located danger and sought to manage it by the avoidance of What is relevant in much of this work, for the purposes of an anthropology of
categorical confusion. But in her later work, explicitly oriented to modern the future, is a tension between what I call the ethics ofpossibility and the ethics
of probability.
Western societies, she moved from an interest in danger to an interest in risk. In
these later writings, notably a major study done in collaboration with Aaron By the ethics of possibility, I mean those ways of thinking, feeling, and
Wildavsky,15 Douglas made an initial effort to extend her insights from the acting that increase the horizons of hope, that expand the field of the imagina-
cosmologies of small-scale societies to the problem of risk and its managemenl tion, that produce greater equity in what I have called the capacity to aspire, and
in contemporary industrial societies. This later work did bring in an explicil that widen the field of informed, creative, and criticai citizenship. This ethics is
concern with the future as a culturally organized dimension of human life, bui part and parcel of transnational civil society movements, progressive demo-
it was only a partial breakthrough, since she remained indebted to the concern cratic organizations, and in general the politics of hope. By the ethics of
with taxonomies and classification that she had partly derived from Evans probability, I mean those ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that flow out of
Pritchard and largely from Durkheim and Mauss. This prevented Douglas from what lan Hacking called "the avalanche of numbers,"19 or what Michel Foucault
taking on the aspect of risk in modern societies that had come to be dominated saw as the capillary dangers of modern regimes of diagnosis, counting, and
by an actuarial framework, itself derived from the birth of probabilistic think accounting. They are generally tied to the growth of a casino capitalism which
ing, the early modern history of insurance in the West, and the subsequent and profits from catastrophe and tends to bet on disaster. This latter ethics is typi-
sharp distinction between risk and uncertainty, first strongly theorized by Fran k cally tied up with amoral forms of global capital, corrupt states, and privatized
adventurism of every variety.
Knight (see chapter 12). One might say that Mary Douglas bequeathed to us ,i
strong interest in risk, but only a weak understanding of probability, uncer I offer these two contrasting ethical styles to suggest that beneath the more
tainty, and the manipulation of large numbers in modern life. conventional debates and contradictions that surround what we call globaliza-
That déficit hás been recently addressed in a rich body of recent work on ,i tion there is a tectonic struggle between these two ethics. One place in which we
variety of market processes, including modern monetary fornis.16 This speciíii can examine what is at stake in this struggle between the ethics of possibility
body of ethnographic inquiries into risk as a managed feature of contemporary and the ethics of probability is in the recent attention that hás been paid to
life fits into a broader stream of culturally oriented work on emergent neo systematic profiteering from disaster, insecurity, and emergency as a new
branch of capitalist speculation.
liberal forms of capitalism, including millennial capitalism, casino capitalism,
Two authors in the public sphere offer sobering pictures of the
new economy of catastrophe. Naomi Klein20 draws a direct line from the
1970. 14 M. Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, New York: Pantheon Bnok.s,
15 M. Douglas and A. B. Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection ofTcc/nin.//
and Environmental Dangers, Berkeley: University of Califórnia Press, 1983. 17 J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Chicago: University of
16 K. Hart, The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World, London: Texere, 21» K . Chicago Press, 1991; A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony: Studies on the History of Society and Culture,
stock-exchanges: H. Miyazaki, "Between Arbitrage and Speculation: An Economy of Beliel .111 l Berkeley: University of Califórnia Press, 2001; V. Rao, "Post-Industrial Transitions: The Speculative
Doubt," Economy and Society, 2007, 36(3), 397-416; A. Ríles, "Real Time: Unwinding Technocntj Futures of Citizenship in Mumbai," in R. Mehrotra and P. Joshi, eds., The Mumbai Reader, Mumbai:
and Anlhropological Knowledge," American Ethnologist, 2004, 31(3), 392-405; new f i n a m i. l Urban Design Research Institute, 2006; J. L. Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of
in.slruments: E. LiPuma and B. Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, DuHi.iii Economic Regulation in Central África, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Duke University Press, 2004; gambling as game and lifcstyle: l. K. Callelino, Iligli Slukes: l:lon,l i 18 Cl. Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, A. Stoekl, ed., Minneapolis:
Seiiiinnle (!iiiniiij> andSovereignly, Durham: Ouke Universily Press, 2008; and relaled .similar ii.sk University o l M i n n e s o l a Press, 1985.
ivlaled phcnonwtll o( modern global lile: B. Maurer, "kepressal r'ulinvs: PilUUKitl I V i i v a l i v r s ' 19 I. l l . u k i i i ) ; , "Biopower and the Avalanche of Printcd Numbers," Humanilics in Society,
Thcologicd lJnconsdous," l-toiHiniyiindSociety, 2002,31(1), r, K> 1982, s( i -|). •','•) '''i
/o N Klein, "l ti'..islrr Cupitulism: 'lhe New Kconomy ol Calastrophe," llarf)t'r'n, (Klober
296 M A K I N G THE FUTURE THE F U T U R E AS C U L T U R A L I ; A C T Z<-)7
reconstruction profiteering in Iraq to the money that hás been made by a vau its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short icrni
ety of corporate interests in infrastructure, energy, security, and engineerin;; m profits oífered by purely speculative investment hás turned the stock, currcncy and
post-Katrina New Orleans. Klein shows that in many sites of disaster, liolh real-estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the
natural and manmade, throughout the world, we see a similar logic. In lu-i Mexican peso crisis, the dot-com collapse, and the subprime-mortgage crisis
analysis, demonstrate.... Disaster generation can therefore be left to the markets invisible
hand. This is one área in which it actually delivers.22
not só long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments w h r n
atomized communities put disasters aside and pulled together. Today thcy .u r Kleins analysis can be linked directly into the ethics of probability by referring
moments when we are hurled further apart, when we lurch into a r a d i i a l l v to an essay by Michael Lewis that appeared in the New York Times Sunday
segregated future where some of us will fali off the map and others asceml In .1 Magazine on August 26, 2007, with the title, "In Natures Casino."23 Lewiss essay
parallel privatized state, one equipped with well-paved highways and skyw.iy.. also focuses on disasters, catastrophes, and profits, but hás a narrower aim,
safe bridges, boutique charter schools, fast-lane airport terminais, and deln.xr which is to illuminate the specific ways in which risk managers and analysts
subways.21 have developed new techniques for calculating the odds of catastrophe. Though
it appeared a few weeks before Kleins, this essay can be read as an analysis of the
Kleirís analysis of what she calls the disaster capitalism complex shows thal i l is technical weaponry generated by the disaster capitalism complex to handle the
more worrisome than the old military industrial complex, for it is not simply new risks from which it aims to profit.
parasitic on the state and public resources, but actually seeks to gut and repl.u <• Lewis's essay centers on the insurance industry and its relationship to other
them until public infrastructure is thoroughly exhausted and these very privalr elements of the global market in risk, especially in the period after Katrina,
interests can rent public goods to the very society and state from which it 01 ÍJM during which many insurers took massive losses after decades of massive gains
nally hijacked them. Klein is able to show evidence from both the heart of ilu- in disaster-prone regions of the United States. The center of Lewiss analysis is
US government to well beyond it that we are entering a period where disastci the growth in the role and respectability of a remarkable new financial instru-
apartheid is well on its way to producing a world of suburban green zoncs, .1 ment called the catastrophe bond, or "cat bond" for short. The catastrophe bond
global version of Baghdad where middle-class suburbanites in guarded subm !>•. is an instrument calculated to produce profits and minimize losses for the
buy and provide their own infrastructure, energy, and security, in anticipulion insurance industry, but as a derivative device it also allows a variety of other
of widespread disaster and infrastructural breakdown. We are already seeing, in players to play in what Lewis calls "natures casino" the market in the calcula-
áreas like suburban Atlanta, the birth of "contract cities"—that is, cities crealol tion of the risks associated with extremely rare events (what quantitativa traders
from scratch by private contractors in order to create stand-alone cities foi lhe call "tail risks" or financial cataclysms that are believed to have a i percent or
suburbs, and to allow them to escape ali tax responsibilities for their pooivi less chance of occurring). Catastrophe bonds allow their buyers in effect to
neighbors and fellow citizens. Even more worrisome, analyses of glolul become sellers of catastrophe insurance: the buyer will lose ali his or her money
economic and political trends show that stock markets now greet news of majoi if a certain disaster event occurs within a certain number of years and the seller
disasters with ebullient stock-price increases, thus suggesting that p o l i l k a l of the cat bond—usually an insurance company seeking to insure itself against
disaster creates economic booms, unlike the steep crash in various markets aliei extreme losses—pays the buyer a high rate of interest. Certain hedge funds are
9/11. The spectacular profits produced by the recent spate of disasters world big players in catastrophe bonds, and an entirely new brand of companies,
wide show the thin line between exploiting disasters and counting on thcni in which are dominated by natural scientists and mathematicians, create models
the race for profits: for valuing the risks of catastrophic events, on the basis of which the whole
casino operates. In short, catastrophe hás become an object not just of the prof-
An economic system that requires constant growth while bucking almost ali j its from traditional insurance (and so-called re-insurance) but of new kinds of
attempts at environmental regulation generates a steady stream of disasters ; financial instruments that quantify risk in relation to events where the past is a
highly imperlect guide to the future. This industry, built around a sophisticated
2007, 47 sH; see alsn N. Klein, 'lhe Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York:
Metropolitan H o o k s / l l e n r y lloll, 2007.
M l < \ v r . , In N.ilmt", t .r.inn.'' Ni'\v V<>f'A lime*. ;<M>/.
298 MAKING THE FUTURE
THE F U T U R E AS CULTURAL FACT 299