Module ’Anticipatory Knowledge’

October 9-11, 2015

Prof. Grégoire Mallard Prof. Filipe Calvao

Prof Shalini Randeria, IHEID Prof. Aditya Bharadwaj, IHEID Prof. Annelise Riles, Cornell University Prof. Joe Masco, University of Chicago

The proliferation in contemporary public life and economic activity of expert renditions of the future – from financial forecasts to ‘big data’ marketing, demographic projections and environmental risk assessments, as well as medical, security, or techno-scientific scenarios – begs the question of how the future is turned into an object of knowledge and political intervention in different settings. The study of anticipatory knowledge practices has become a fast-growing research area in anthropology that cuts across the sub-fields of legal, economic, medical and environmental anthropology. Ethnographic research on the topic has been conducted in a variety of sites ranging from those where medical innovation or legal settlements take place to virtual spaces of modern financial transactions. Interest in understanding how the future is constructed in daily practices has also been spurred by various theoretical considerations. First, scholars of anticipatory knowledge are engaged in rethinking models of social change by including the temporality of social action (and the ways in which the past, present and future are differently articulated) in these models – a long neglected issue. Second, science and technology studies (STS) scholars have now extended the scope of their enquiry beyond natural science laboratories to describe the production of “softer” and more malleable forms of knowledge of the future being constructed by lawyers, social scientists, economists, demographers or environmental planners. Third, anticipatory knowledge practices are of interest to anthropologists of knowledge and STS scholars because they allow a critique of the work of legal and political theorists, who analyze the nature and role of promises, pledges and contracts in the formation of modern political communities. Thus, by studying anticipatory knowledge, anthropologists come back to the classical question of how political communities are formed. As individual ethnographic projects on anticipatory knowledge practices multiply, it becomes urgent to assess whether, and what, preliminary conclusions can be drawn. The purpose of the module is threefold: to highlight the main results of exemplar individual ethnographic projects; to compare the challenges posed by various methodologies; and to identify future lines of research and theoretical advances. The module is thus likely to be of particular relevance to PhD candidates researching topics such as technological innovation, promises held by new therapeutic treatments, the evolution of planning practices in environmentally sustainable projects, the production of expert knowledge with relation to the solution of political and military crises, the legal architecture of financial transactions, legal arbitration in cross-border exchanges.

Castasegna GR

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