Futures All Around: Anthropological Reflections on Where (and How) to Find the Future

Ringel, Felix

Abstract

Since the future does not exist (yet), one could argue that it cannot have a place either. However, any social science must still account for the fact that there are futures all around. Indeed, in most contexts references to the future abound. As I argue in this paper, the social sciences have for too long disregarded these futures and approached their objects of inquiry with a perspective from the past. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two postindustrial European cities, I lay out a presentist approach to the study of the future and its localities in order to analytically put past and future on an equal footing. This approach is shaped by my own discipline’s methods of fieldwork and participant observation, but it is of relevance for the social sciences more generally. For a social anthropologists, the aim is to take relations to the future seriously, and explore how the yet-to-come is imagined in the present and has effects on it. Where then, in spatial and epistemic terms, do we find the future, and how?

Citation

Ringel, F. (2025). Futures All Around: Anthropological Reflections on Where (and How) to Find the Future. In J. Glückler, M. Garschagen, & R. Panitz (Eds.), Placing the Future (119-139). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-76841-5_7

• Online Publication Date: May 7, 2025
• Publication Date: May 8, 2025
• Deposit Date: Apr 10, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: May 29, 2025
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 119-139
• Series Title: Knowledge and Space
• Series ISSN: 1877-9220
• Book Title: Placing the Future
• ISBN: 9783031768408
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-76841-5_7
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3786047
• Contract Date: Jan 10, 2025