On the Side of Predictable

Abstract

In order to be able to contextualize and understand social worlds, anthropologists pay close attention. We observe how individuals and communities relate to each other and to their ideas. We study the intimate and subjective, as well as the large-scale cosmologies by which people make themselves and the world. Our participatory methods and reflective analysis document the complex, intricate, patterned, and also random aspects of people’s reasoning and actions. These activities, on anthropology’s part, supposedly offer not only critical descriptions of the present (on its historical trajectories), but possible intimations of a society’s future. Anthropological analysis, in other words, not only describes but also anticipates. This position paper focuses on the notions of anticipation, predictability, and possibility in anthropology. It asks what methodological and theoretical assumptions are built into our ways of making predictions about our field sites. It invites the reader to consider the effects certain anticipatory practices have for the people and phenomena we study as well as for the discipline. Centrally, the paper proposes different ways of attending to visions that anticipate the future. By reflecting on my ethnographic and analytical journeys in Serbia, I attempt to explain why I currently make so much of questions of predictability and possibility in both the field and the discipline. My desire is to open up a discussion on the value of cultivating attention to what seems to emerge on the side of predictable.

Evoking Eternity

“…David Henig (2020, 93) observes that much of the anthropological scholarship on temporality in post‐Yugoslav spaces focuses on secular, future‐oriented projects. He makes a fair point: to challenge the image of post‐Yugoslav citizens as inescapably defined by historic violence, anthropologists have (rightly) insisted on people's capacity for visionary, future‐oriented thinking (Petrović‐Šteger 2020a, 2020b), their yearnings for normality (Jansen 2015), and how, through hope, they reach toward better futures (Jansen 2016; Jovanović 2018). Henig (2020, 93) offers the crucial insight that we must consider such secular temporal reasoning together with conceptions of time deriving from religious thought, since both intersect “in a given historical‐political nexus” (see also Gilbert et al 2008, 11).…”