Contemporary Futures

In industrial societies visualising the future is a serious business. Our assumptions about it govern the management of resources at every level - domestic, national and global - and we project them onto other non-industrial societies whose visions are necessarily different. The contributors to this volume, all social anthropologists, provide a comparative cross-cultural perspective of the idea of the future. They write of the range of futures visualised inour own and other cultures, and discuss its implications for the future of anthropology itself. The main focus is not on prediction as such, but on the causes and consequences of images of the future held in specific contexts of time and place. The contributiors interpret the way we (and others) picture the future, and then seek to understand the effects of our (and their) picturing it in the way we (and they) do. These essays dem onstrate that images of the future may affect what actually happens in the future, and more importantly, that images of the future can constrain the present at least as much as do images of the past. They show how beliefs in the future underpin the sense of self and its survival, and how changes in those beliefs may radically alter the way indivduals relate to each other, to the natural environment, and to culture itself. Because the idea of the future is a topic hitherto neglected by social anthropologists, this collection directs new and original light on the interpretation of other cultures. It will be of great interest to students and teachers of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, and to others intrigued by the philosophical basis of ordinary life.