The Anthropology of the Future

Review of Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. New York: Verso, 2013.

Arjun Appadurai’s latest collection of essays, The Future as Cultural Fact, begins with a concession. He writes that he has had occasion to learn from critics of his 1996 book, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, “who found it too celebratory, perhaps even breathless, about the new world of open borders, free markets, and young democracies that seemed to have entered world history” (1). When he describes The Future as Cultural Fact as a sequel to Modernity at Large, then, he means “sequel” not as mere addition, but as extension and complication; what we get is not simply more of the same but rather the spinning out of a new story that was hiding unacknowledged in the gaps, shadows, and omissions of the first.
 
If the first book’s encounter with globalization was seemingly structured by optimism about the new social forms made possible by globalization, the second is especially attentive to violence. After an introductory chapter that predates even Modernity at Large (a modified version of the introduction to Appadurai’s 1986 The Social Life of Things), the subsequent chapters of the book are primarily concerned with what happens not to “objects” or “things” but to human bodies as a result of their encounter with economic forces and with the macroscopic winds of global trade and geopolitical change. The politics of the book emerge out of the question of how scholars might intervene in these forces and mold them to our ends. The theoretical question that ends chapter two—“why universities move less swiftly than, say, AK-47s” (69)—thus turns out not to be randomly or arbitrarily chosen, despite the play of that interrupting “say.” Rather, it is precisely this opposition that structures and energizes the entire book: how cultural form (and especially the space of the progressive but enclaved university) might catch up to the violence that seems to precede us everywhere.
 
The chapters that conclude Part I of the book all engage with this violence in the form of the AK-47, from a lengthy rumination on Gandhi and the “morality of refusal” in chapter three, to chapter four’s attention to the genocidal movements that have become the nightmarish face of post-Cold War globalization since the publication of Modernity at Large, to the centrality of “blood” (as both kinship, bloodline, and violence, bleeding) in the form of the nation-state itself in chapter five. The last of these is noteworthy in its stylistic shift from detached prose to Appadurai’s biographic remembrance of his father’s political activism in the early days of Indian independence, and his concordant sense that the space of the nation and the space of the family dialectically produce each other. In Part II, the book shifts from direct technologies of blood and murder to structural violence, here instanced in Appadurai’s interest in the slums of Mumbai. Mumbai is a quintessential space of globalization for Appadurai because it makes visible the dialectical tension between the optimism and violence he sees dividing Modernity at Large from The Future as Cultural Fact. In the time of globalization, cities like Mumbai have become spaces of both immense wealth and inconceivable poverty; they both “attract more poor people than they can handle and more capital than they can absorb” (131). In Mumbai, and through his encounters with housing activists in that city, Appadurai begins to construct a counter-vision of globalization from below, from the perspective of “human waste and waste humans” (123).  Chapter eight, focused on the work of housing and democracy activists in the city, explicitly turns to the “politics of shit” as a way of concretizing this conjuncture, noting that the lack of hygienic infrastructure in the slums of the city abets not only a spirit of humiliation and degradation but the material spread of disease. “Toilet festivals,” organized by activists for the urban poor, mark a strategy of opposition to this “ecology of fecal odors, piles, and channels.” “The politics of shit … presents a node at which concerns of the human body, dignity, and technology meet”; the slum toilet becomes for Appadurai an unexpected encounter between globality and locality precisely when an official from the World Bank “has to examine the virtues of a public toilet and discuss the merits of this form of shit management with the shitters themselves,” thus offering Mumbai’s poor the chance of moving “from abjection to subjectivation” (170).
 
Appadurai’s interest in Mumbai intersects with his own research practice at the site of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization he helped found in the city to help young people gain access to research apparatuses and the machine of knowledge production. Part III thus takes the ideals of “deep democracy,” the politics of recognition, and “cosmopolitanism from below” that he finds in his studies of Mumbai social movements and attempts to apply these self-reflexively to the space of the university itself. Again, structural violence is Appadurai’s organizing principle, here the creation of unnecessary misery by the hegemony of finance capital, especially in the post-crash period of the first decade of the twenty-first century. However, even here he finds a principle of hope in the idea of the future itself. In Part III, the meaning of the phrase “the future as cultural fact” becomes significant to the work as a whole, suggesting that imagination, possibility, constitutes resistance to finance capital’s rigid insistence on the logic of probability and rationalized risk assessment.
 
The concluding chapters of the book seek to put this spirit of alterity and oppositional culture into practice. In chapter thirteen, we find the “social life” not of “things” but of “design,” a reframing that attempts to re-inject principles of human agency and deliberative planning into the radical market-determinism of end-of-history neoliberal capitalism. At the same time, when we foreground design, objects themselves become quasi-agents, exhibiting a kind of gifted human agency precisely through the fact of their own designedness (258). In this chapter Appadurai investigates how “design” intersects with “planning,” and in particular how both might intersect with “sustainability” in an era of both financial and ecological crisis. He writes, “We need to make better designs for planning and improve the planning context for our social designs, so that these two activities become more fruitfully meshed in developing solutions for the short- and long-terms” (267).
 
The final two chapters of the book seek to extend the proposed ethos of “designed planning / planned designing,” first into the realm of research and then into academic disciplinary forms (including or especially his home discipline of anthropology). At the same time, this section of the book seeks to name an ambition for planning and design that is genuinely positive in its aspirations, rather than simply attempting to mitigate the worst disasters. Here we see the fullest reemergence of Appadurai’s political optimism, now disciplined (or perhaps forged) by the prolonged encounter with violence that constitutes most of the work. Chapter fourteen may be the more provocative, at least on the level of political programming; it asserts without apology that research should be reconceived as a human right, one that has been systematically denied to the poor and marginalized, making genuinely democratic citizenship impossible. “Research,” he writes, “is a specialized name for a generalized capacity to make disciplined inquiries into those things we need to know but do not know yet” (269). Naming this capacity a human right consequently mandates a radical rethinking of the way access to research—both as already-produced knowledge and as the opportunity for new knowledge-making—is distributed according to imperial logics and class dynamics in contemporary global capitalism (269). The capacity to research, Appadurai ultimately argues, is closely linked to “the capacity to aspire, the social and cultural capacities to plan, hope, desire, and achieve socially valuable goals” (282). Thus the ongoing project of democratization supported by The Future as Cultural Fact may first require the democratization of research itself (282-283).
 
In chapter fifteen, Appadurai concludes his project with a sustained analysis of the status of the future as a “cultural fact,” as a social and material force. He speaks specifically to the discipline of anthropology, which he says has always concerned itself with “the past” both literally (in its study of historical societies) and figuratively (in its typical focus only on those contemporary societies that have “appeared immune” to European imperialism and “Western modernity” [285]). But these observations have a much wider reach than just tweaking anthropological method. For Appadurai, the future is real: already shaping and being shaped in the present, already accessible to us through the imagination, already “shot through with affect and sensation” (287). Re-inaugurating a politics of hope is therefore especially urgent in an era in which the future, when we acknowledge it at all, is conceived only as a coming space of austerity, disaster, deprivation, and mass death, as in the “disaster capitalism” and shock doctrines identified by Naomi Klein (295-296). The “ethics of probability”—the future as risk management, seen from the standpoint of a neurotic insurance agent—can only think of the future in these negative terms, as a space of danger always at risk of eruption, explosion, or catastrophic collapse. Appadurai’s “ethics of possibility” announces an answer to a spirit of totalizing pessimism that can only perceive the future as a trauma: “By the ethics of possibility, I mean those ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that increase the horizons of hope, that expand the field of the imagination, that produce greater equity in what I have called the capacity to aspire, and that widen the field of informed, creative, and critical citizenship” (295).
 
The last paragraph is a call directed to those “who still work in and from the academy,” asking that we apply this utopian ethics not abstractly or theoretically but in our everyday practice, “in our institutions, our disciplines, and our methods.” The ethics of possibility, we are told, begin in our own workplaces, our own communities. The call for a new future, like so much else in Appadurai’s work, becomes something at once global and local: “Every field of expertise and inquiry,” he writes, “can and must make its own versions of this critical journey” (300). The anthropology of the future cannot be limited to anthropology, nor to academic practice, nor even to the university writ large; in the end, the ethics of possibility extend to any and every human endeavor that seeks to make the future better.