Amazonian ethnofuturities
This workshop explores ‘the future’ and its significance among Amazonian peoples in South America. Ethnographic understandings often prioritise continuity and tradition from ‘the past’, overlooking how concepts of the future also shape ‘the present’. Amidst radical environmental, economic, and political change, the future becomes a crucial reference point for navigating circumstances and shaping social worlds. It serves as a horizon for imagining social realities and a gradient for transformations.
We will explore how conceptions of the future inflect temporality in ordinary times, rather than viewing it only as a response to contemporary change. Although ethnographers have largely neglected the future as a temporal focus, futurity has become an important analytical frame, ethnographic object, and methodological concern. A pressing critique of this neglect of the future has emerged with an emphasis on novel theorisations of social change (Carrithers 1992; Robbins 2004; Rollason 2014). The future emerges as a horizon upon which contemporary social formations are built (Buitron 2022), as well as a dimension of ontological transformation (Grotti 2022; Vilaça 2010; Whitaker 2024).
Recent studies interrogate how cosmologies are challenged and futures perceived in Indigenous accounts of the End of the World (Bold 2019). Scholars examine meanings and positionalities from the future (implicating futurity) alongside those from the past (implicating historicity). However, the latter remains the primary lens for understanding social change. Building upon these scholarly interventions while exploring new perspectives, the presentations in this workshop will examine the future as a way of engaging afresh with classic topics such as permanence and change, historicity, memory, openness to alterity, transformation, and sustainability.
We are particularly interested in re-thinking and re-conceptualising how time-bound concepts could be reconfigured if temporal framings were reversed, as well as exploring what happens when change takes the future, rather than the past, as its relevant anchor.