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In Search of Lost
Futures
Anthropological Explorations in
Multimodality, Deep
Interdisciplinarity, and
Autoethnography
Edited by
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston ·
Mark Auslander
In Search of Lost Futures
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston ·
Mark Auslander
Editors
In Search of Lost
Futures
Anthropological Explorations in Multimodality,
Deep Interdisciplinarity, and Autoethnography
Editors
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston Mark Auslander
School of the Arts, Media, Department of Anthropology
Performance & Design Brandeis University
York University Waltham, MA, USA
Toronto, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-030-63002-7 ISBN 978-3-030-63003-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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Foreword
When the contributors to this volume completed their chapters, they

could hardly have imagined the future in which the book would be
published. While they were thinking about future imaginaries in their
various contexts, the possibility of a global pandemic of the extent of
COVID-19 was still only a theoretical possibility, possible yet impossible
at the same time.
Images of possible future global disasters abound, and in some sense
always have done. From apocalyptical biblical visions to dystopian disaster
films, the idea of radical disruption to everyday life is actually quite
familiar. For so many people to actually live through such a disruption,
at least on the scale of the current COVID-19 pandemic, though, is a less
common experience. While some research disciplines may build on world-
visions and everyday expectations of continuity and “normality,” social
anthropology is one discipline where radical inversions and dramatic diver-
sity are relatively familiar concepts. We are well aware that narratives are
not the same as experience, and that continuity and change are unreliably
narrated. Borofsky (1987), for example, revealed how the imagination of
the past could be deeply misleading, narratives of past continuities having
been radically transformed between generations, just as Hobsbawm and
Ranger famously de-bunked nationalist ideas of timeless tradition (1983).
Anthropology and history have long formed a critical dialogue, but an
equivalent examination of the changing nature of future imaginaries has
only slowly taken hold in the discipline, despite long-standing concerns
v
vi FOREWORD
with oracles, religious salvation, reincarnation, policy, and other forms of

forward-looking temporal trajectories.
As the editors detail in the introductory chapter, a more substantial
anthropology of the future has been emergent for some time, notably
since the ASA conference and subsequent monograph published by
Sandra Wallman in 1992, but it gained new momentum with the estab-
lishment of a Future Anthropologies Network in EASA in 2014. This
network erupted with an enthusiasm not only for turning ethnographic
attention to the future, but for doing so with a politicized and activist
approach to rethinking what anthropology is for and how it can be done.
The editors in this volume caution against overestimating the powers
of anthropology to change the conditions that shape people’s lives, but
remain open for the potential for anthropology to open up new realms
for intervention, and to reshape the way that imaginative futures are
perceived, analyzed, and valued, whether or not these reach the intended
outcomes envisaged by researchers or research participants.
Where this volume takes a major step forward is in embracing the
world of performance, not only in acknowledging the notion that
sociality is performative, but also by engaging head-on with the world
of dramaturgy, theater, and visual media. The editors’ ambition of
generating a “dramaturgy of futures” is a moment of mind-opening
theoretical and practical expansion, bringing ideas for method, pedagogy,
and communication alongside new forms of sociality. Experimentation is
at the heart of this exercise, open to cross-disciplinary and collaborative
research through partnerships with trained artists. These challenge the
expectations of both ethnography and performance through a meeting
of different practices and conceptual approaches: interdisciplinarity that
generates a new object while changing established disciplines, as the
introduction makes clear. The editors’ sensory sensibility offers a deeply
reflective space in which risky ideas can be safely touched, tasted, and
explored, by the authors and their research participants too. The future
is not imagined solely through perceptual senses, but through action.
Future possibilities can be acted out, embodied in ways that allow partici-
pants to consider how possible futures might feel. What would it feel like
for a woman to cut wood with an axe or butcher a goat like a man? Jodie
Asselin (this volume) shows how mastering “masculine” skills enables
women to rethink who they are and how they are perceived by themselves
as well as by others, and doing so through a training course that holds
at bay the potential consequences of challenging gender stereotypes until
FOREWORD vii
the women feel confident with their new skills and roles. For many of the
participants Asselin describes, their motivation for reinvention calls on
imagined or possible futures where such skills might be needed.
Magnat’s chapter also shows how attention to sensory experience can
shed new light on familiar stories. Magnat’s chapter discusses how non-
discursive sensory experience allowed Indigenous People in the “new
world” to be rendered as colonized subjects, their use of voice and song
proving distinctly unsettling to the expectations embedded in the colonial
mentalities of Western settlers. Raised voices were experienced by colo-
nizers as threatening and dangerous, but also as evidence of the need for
control. Magnat demonstrates how notable philosophers and commenta-
tors used Western classifications of music to order Indigenous vocality into
a hierarchy of evolution. Understanding Indigenous song as performative
action is one way that political discourses can be decolonized, shifting
attention from the manner of performance to the desired (future) condi-
tions that songs might evoke and the reassertion of Indigenous modes of
being.
The book’s double focus on futures and imaginaries distinguishes two
dimensions that are innately attached but whose scholarship has been
remarkably distinct. The notion of imagination has lived its own life
throughout Western thought, particularly in philosophy and aesthetics,
with extended disputes over how to interpret Plato’s association of imag-
ination and representation, on whether art is technique or inspiration,
and in many discussions about the relationship between perception and
thought (see Cocking 1991). Warnock (1976) traces the idea of imag-
ination as a form of consciousness from Hume and Kant to Coleridge
and Wordsworth, highlighting the connection between image and imag-
ination in affording a means for thought. She casts doubt on Hume’s
separation of memory and imagination, for example, highlighting the
centrality of language. Yet much of this line of debate retains the connec-
tion between visual image and imagination, one that is rejected in anthro-
pology, where the aural and haptic imagination is very much included, as
amply demonstrated in this volume.
This trajectory can be seen as a foundation for anthropological elab-
orations of imagination, and notably Sneath et al’s (2009) commitment
to focusing on the technologies of imagination and the production of
imaginative effects. Distancing themselves from a notion of social imagi-
naries that appears to reproduce the limitations of the idea of culture, they
nevertheless focus on collective processes of imagination, rather than the
viii FOREWORD
internal or “mentalist” approach common to the psychological sciences.

They see imagination as an outcome of social practices, rather than a
precursor, yet in doing so they concretize imagination as a means to other
ends, pursuing imaginaries through technologies and marginalizing the
possible aimlessness of fantasy and moving imaginaries back into a realm
of discourse and practice.
Of course, some kinds of imaginative exercise serve exactly this
purpose. While I opened the preface by suggesting that the contribu-
tors here could not have imagined that their work would be overtaken
by a global pandemic, there are people whose main purpose in life is
to imagine exactly that. Those who plan crisis responses, for example,
must use different imaginative repertoires to conceptualize and preempt
possible worlds. While they may be presented as using scientific modeling,
these processes themselves rely heavily on the generative imagination of
the modeler, in anticipating possible crucial factors and in evaluating the
significance of others. This kind of exercise can be incorporated in the
more common contemporary concept of the imagination, one that can
be understood as indicating an ability to conjure the impossible as well
as the possible, to bring the absent to presence, bring life to the dead
or death to the living. Contemporary (Western) concepts of the imagina-
tion encompass both rational projection and magical thinking, reflecting
an elasticity of human possibilities common to Western understanding
of human consciousness. This concept of imagination is, like any other
concept, temporally and geographically specific. And it raises interesting
interdisciplinary questions. Given the anthropological concern with the
past and a belated interest in futures, we might ask whether the imagina-
tion of the future is qualitatively or physiologically different from evoca-
tion of the past? Is it the same exercise of imaginative speculation to recall
times past as it is to envisage times future? The editors’ nod to Proust’s
famous work encourages us to consider such possibilities and to interro-
gate the complex layers of connection between mental process, collective
narratives, social practices, and temporalities.
One of the challenges for future studies lies in the long-standing
historical tendency to equate futures with modernities, either utopian or
dystopian. For that reason, it is refreshing to see the mix of chapters in this
volume that reframe future imaginaries in modernist countries with those
that address Indigenous sovereignty or that decolonize future-making.
Berglund and Kohtala’s chapter on “Materialist Activist Communities” in
that archetypally modernist state of Finland reviews the often precarious
FOREWORD ix
alternative activist groups to be found on the fringes of many European

cities. These groups offer convivial spaces to remake material substances
and hack the systems that hold cities in their particular capitalist frame-
works. Maker groups have realized that the future and present of cities
can be remade through material reinvention, from small-scale tinkering to
more radical actions that inspire participants by embodying imaginative
possibility. It is also ultimately refreshing to hear Berglund and Kohtala
admit that “we sympathize with MACs but we do not always understand
them” (p. 232). Perhaps they do not entirely make sense, or not the kind
of sense that can be understood or explained (away). It is precisely in
the uncertainty of future visions that creativity and imagination find room
to play, offering activists the space to try out ideas that may or may not
become feasible, seductive, or convincing.
It is also refreshing to see the range of scales addressed in the volume,
from bodily experience to urban infrastructure, from single exhibition
curation (such as Falls’ installation and resultant film or Auslander et al’s
restorative exhibition project) to collective and ongoing development
processes (a Cuban house renovation for Boudreault-Fournier) or design
methodologies (in Pink, Osz, Fors, and Lanzeni’s chapter), and between
state agencies (municipalities in Pawlak’s chapter) and activist collectives,
close families (Kazubowski-Houston’s absent father and Nayyar’s dying
relatives) and whole populations (Magnat), and with the anthropologists
situated on all sides as independent researchers or embedded activists,
as producers of exhibitions, films, and theater, and as community facil-
itators. This variety reminds us that future imaginaries do not fall easily
into simple or normative taxonomies, just as imagination itself is impos-
sible to pin down (Liao and Gendler 2019). There can be no refuge
for anthropology in imagining optimism versus pessimism or aspiration
versus bare life. Instead, we see a multiplicity of futures, some norma-
tive, others exploratory, some conventional, others experimental, some
enduring, others collapsing, some anticipatory, others fearful, and some
intentional while others are accidental.
Where anthropologists have paid significant attention to notions of the
future has been in discussions of temporality, and notably those inspired
by Jane Guyer’s assertions about the future horizons of evangelical Chris-
tianity and neoliberal governance (2007). The subsequent discussions
about future horizons are apposite to current global concerns. In a time
of doubt about the future, the horizons of that doubt are significant.
Many of us have observed that declarations of climate emergency have led
x FOREWORD
to relatively little action, and only a very gradual shift in local, national,
or international policies or strategies in contrast to the rapid and radical
interventions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps the rela-
tively distant (although rapidly approaching) horizons of climate change
relate to a future whose shape continues to change, with new threats and
fears tumbling one after another into our collective consciousness, to be
rejected, denied, distanced, or acted on. The immediate consequences
of the global pandemic, on the other hand, radically usurp the imme-
diate future, raising doubt about the endurance of everyday life, of “nor-
mal” expectations of travel, of the acceptability of aspirations to fly long
distances for leisure or to travel across continents to have a conversation
(or “attend a conference”) while leaving the medium and more distant
future potentially to resume. For many, death suddenly appears imminent,
and health fragile, everyday life easily overturned and work re-evaluated.
The pandemic response has also hastened the adoption, for many, of
future-oriented or hitherto fantastical technologies, moving our sociality
online and bringing dramatic consequences in relation to the infrastruc-
tures required to support these online lives. Investment in data centers
suddenly seems more secure, expansion more likely, energy demands more
urgent, and the pattern and shape of energy distribution suddenly shifting.
Yet despite the temporary reprieve in greenhouse gas emissions, all the
time, in the background, expectations about a “return” or “bounce back”
suggest the continuation of the structural forces that encourage capitalist
growth and climate catastrophe. Now, many people are discussing the
idea of “bouncing forward” rather than back, but it remains to be seen
whether the demonstration of global change we are living through at the
time of writing is one that allays fears about the changes needed to combat
climate change, or one that merely makes them even more palpable and
frightening.
Whatever the world will be like once this book reaches print or reaches
the library, the volume offers a welcome set of examples and ideas about
how future orientations are not only imagined but embodied. They
demonstrate the flexibility of future imaginaries, and the degree to which
futures can and do change, often radically, whether as cities are rebuilt
and redefined (Ringel’s chapter), as activists conjure the possibility of
remaking society, or as performers enact the restoration of the disap-
peared who they know must already be dead (Batchelor’s chapter). They
show us the fine line between knowing and not-knowing, the mech-
anism of re-imagining oneself, and the power of theater in reopening
FOREWORD xi
possibilities that have been closed elsewhere, and the vital role of humor
in both enabling transgressive imaginative thought and articulating it.
This is a volume packed with ideas that will inspire and invigorate new
ethnographic enterprises.
Simone Abram
Durham University
Durham, UK
References
Borofsky, R. 1987. Making History: Pukapukan and Anthropological Construc-
tions of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cocking, J. M. 1991. Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas. London:
Routledge.
Guyer, J. I. 2007. Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic,
evangelical, and punctuated time. American Ethnologist 34 (3): 409–421.
Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Liao, S., and T. Gendler. 2019. Imagination. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philos-
ophy (Winter 2019 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/
entries/imagination. Accessed 29 April 2020.
Sneath, D., M. Holbraad, and M. A. Pedersen. 2009. Technologies of the
Imagination. Ethnos 74 (1): 5–30.
Warnock, M. 1976. Imagination. London: Faber and Faber.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Simone Abram for her invaluable insights and
editorial support.
xiii
Contents
1 Introduction: In Search of Lost Futures 1

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston and Mark Auslander
Part I Multimodality
2 Possibilities and Impossibilities in Acción 25

Brian Batchelor
3 Put Your Body into It: Exploring Imagination

Through Enskillment in Outdoor Women’s Camps 51
Jodie Asselin
4 Staging Care: Dying, Death, and Possible Futures 75

Rajat Nayyar
5 Impossible Ethnography: Tracking Colonial

Encounters, Listening to Raised Voices, and Hearing
Indigenous Sovereignty in the “New World” 97
Virginie Magnat
xv
xvi CONTENTS
Part II Deep Interdisciplinarity
6 Future-Making in Times of Urban Sustainability:

Maintenance and Endurance as Progressive
Alternatives in the Postindustrial Era 129
Felix Ringel
7 Knowing and Imagining with Sustainable Makers 151

Eeva Berglund and Cindy Kohtala
8 Anticipating Crisis as Affective Future-Making

in Iceland 173
Marek Pawlak
9 Simulating and Trusting in Automated Futures:

Anthropology and the Wizard of Oz 195
Sarah Pink, Katalin Osz, Vaike Fors, and Debora Lanzeni
Part III Autoethnography
10 Intimating the Possible Collapse of the Future:

Digging into Cuban Palimpsests Through Innovative
Methodologies 227
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier
11 Absence, Magic, and Impossible Futures 255

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston
12 Projections and Possibilities: An Installation About

HuMilk Now 279
Susan Falls
CONTENTS xvii
13 Exhibition Development as Restorative

Future-Making: Community Co-Curation
in the Struggle Against Sexual Violence 303
Mark Auslander, Denice Blair, Alexandra Bourque,
Chong-Anna Canfora, Jordyn Fishman, Teresa Goforth,
Kelly Hansen, Trinea Gonczar, Ellen Schattschneider,
Amanda Smith, Amanda Thomashow,
Brianne Randall-Gay, and Mary Worrall
Index 327
Notes on Contributors
Jodie Asselin, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the

University of Lethbridge, Canada. She has a background in human geog-
raphy and cultural anthropology, with a Ph.D. from the University of
Alberta where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the depart-
ment of family medicine. Dr. Asselin’s area of interest is in environmental
anthropology with a focus on rural/urban relations, place, policy, land use
planning, and historical ecology.
Mark Auslander, Ph.D. is Research Scholar in the Department of
Anthropology, Brandeis University. A sociocultural and historical anthro-
pologist, he works at the intersection of ritual practice, aesthetics, envi-
ronmental transformation, kinship, and political consciousness in Africa
and the African Diaspora. His book The Accidental Slaveowner: Revis-
iting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family (University of
Georgia Press, 2011) re-reads American racial politics under slavery and
post-slavery through structuralist approaches to mythology and kinship.
His curatorial work engages with art, race, environmental crisis, gender,
and memory politics. He has directed museums of science and culture
at Central Washington University and Michigan State University, and
currently serves as director of special projects at the Natural History
Museum.
Brian Batchelor is a settler scholar and a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre &
Performance Studies at York University in the area now named Toronto.
xix
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
His SSHRC supported research explores the city of San Cristóbal de las
Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, as an interpretive space shaped by the local-global
tensions involved in tourism. His work has been published in Canadian
Theatre Review and Theatre Research in Canada, as well as in the edited
volume Dancing with the Zapatistas. He dreams of better, more just
worlds, but he is unsure of how we might make it there.
Eeva Berglund is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Design, Aalto
School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Her work deals mostly with
environmental activism, social movements, and the politics of nature. She
also teaches research methods. Since 2016, she has been exploring and
developing these with #Colleex collaboratory for experimental ethnog-
raphy, which is organized as a network of the European Association of
Social Anthropologists. She has a doctorate in social anthropology and
an M.Sc. in planning, both from the UK. Since 2010, she has lived in
Helsinki where she also participates in and tries to better understand
urban activism.
Dr. Denice Blair is the Director of Education at the Michigan State
University Museum. Her interests include learning in informal environ-
ments and primary source-based teaching and learning. Blair’s recent
research work has focused on issues of access in museums.
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier is an Associate Professor at the
University of Victoria. She teaches visual culture, visual anthropology,
and the anthropology of sound. She conducts research on electronic
music, media infrastructure, and digital data consumption and circulation
in Cuba since the year 2000. She wrote the book Aerial Imagination
in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops (2019), co-edited the volumes
Urban Encounters: Art and the Public (2017) and Audible Infrastructures
(forthcoming), and is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Anthropologica.
Alexandrine directed the film Golden Scars (2010), in part funded by the
National Film Board of Canada, and co-directed the films Guardians of
the Night (2018), Fabrik Funk (2015), and The Eagle (2015).
Alexandra Bourque is a sister survivor and owner of the “Brightly
Twisted,” business and studio in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. She
is the creator of the installation “Turned into Butterflies (Ten Feet Tall)”
in the exhibition, “Finding Our Voice.”
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi
Chong-Anna Canfora is Executive Director at Michigan Community

Action and Board President at the Firecracker Foundation, an organiza-
tion that advocates for survivors of childhood sexual violence.
Susan Falls is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on agency,
semiotics, and political economy. Interested in exploring how meaning-
making works within the production, circulation, and use of material
culture, Falls has worked with communities of dissent forming around
diamonds, public art, ikat silk, breast milk, and robots. She is the
author of White Gold: Stories of Breast Milk Sharing (2017) and Over-
shot: The Political Aesthetic of Woven Textiles (with Jessica Smith [forth-
coming]). Currently working on an ethnography of plant life, Falls teaches
Anthropology at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Jordyn Fishman is a Brooklyn based artist working with painting and
interactive installation. Her work is concerned with the interconnected
themes of gendered control, labor, and violence.
Vaike Fors is Associate Professor in Pedagogy at the School of Informa-
tion Technology at Halmstad University, and her area of expertise lies
in studying how people learn with emerging technologies through visual
and sensory ethnography. She has an extensive experience of working
in projects that straddle academia and industry and tailoring interdisci-
plinary collaborative research methods. New books include Theoretical
Scholarship and Applied Practice (Berghahn Books, 2017) and Imag-
ining Personal Data. Experiences of Self-tracking (Bloomsbury Academic
Publishers, 2020).
Teresa Goforth is Director of Exhibitions at the Michigan State Univer-
sity Museum. She holds an M.A. in American History from Michigan
State University and is working toward her Ph.D. in American History.
She has worked in the museum field since 1993 and has taught museum
studies at Michigan State University and Central Michigan University for
over a decade.
Trinea Gonczar is a sister survivor and Director of Advancement at
WC-SAFE, Wayne County Sexual Assault Forensic Examiners in Detroit,
Michigan.
Kelly Hansen is a graphic designer and exhibit designer for Michigan
State University Outreach and Engagement. She holds an M.A. in Arts
and Cultural Management and a B.A. in Advertising.
xxii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of

Theatre with graduate appointments in Theatre and Performance Studies
and Social Anthropology at York University, Canada. Her book, Staging
Strife (2010), was awarded the International Congress of Qualitative
Inquiry Outstanding Qualitative Book Award and the Canadian Associa-
tion for Theatre Research Ann Saddlemyer Book Prize (2011). Her article
“quiet theatre: The Radical Politics of Silence” was awarded the Cana-
dian Association for Theatre Research (CATR) 2019 Richard Plant Prize
for the best English-language article on a Canadian theater or perfor-
mance topic. She is a co-founding member of the Centre for Imaginative
Ethnography (CIE), which received the American Anthropological Asso-
ciation General Anthropology Division’s 2019 New Directions Award in
Public Anthropology.
Cindy Kohtala is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Design,
Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. She studies
materialist activists exploring new peer-to-peer ways to design and
produce locally and more sustainably. Her research focuses on fab labs
and makerspaces, grassroots communities who explore digital fabrication
technologies and processes in shared community technology workshops,
and how they address sustainability issues in their ideologies and practices.
She also lectures and writes about design-for-sustainability, open design,
co-design, distributed economies and design activism, and she has been
involved in several urban activism initiatives in Helsinki.
Debora Lanzeni is Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies
Research Lab at Monash University, Australia. She has been working at
the intersection of STS and anthropology and participated in many inter-
national and interdisciplinary research projects. Her research focuses on
understanding how emerging technology and its processes of creation,
imagination, and production are being made in the Smart City and
AI context. Her work has been published in a range of interdisci-
plinary journals such as Media and Society, including with Bloomsbury in
Future Anthropologies and Digital Materialities (of which she is also co-
editor). Currently, she is co-convenor of the EASA Future Anthropologies
Network.
Virginie Magnat, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Creative
and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia and works at the
intersection of performances studies, cultural anthropology, experimental
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxiii
ethnography, and Indigenous research methodologies. Her new mono-

graph, The Performative Power of Vocality (Routledge, 2020), employs
an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to explore vocality as a
vital source of embodied knowledge, creativity, and well-being, grounded
in process, practice, and place, as well as a form of social and political
agency. Research for this book was funded by two grants from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Rajat Nayyar is an anthropologist and a filmmaker with an M.A. in
Audiovisual Ethnography from Tallinn University. As a Vanier Canada
Graduate Scholar, he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Theatre and Perfor-
mance Studies at York University. His research focus is on vocality,
everyday acts of resistance, collaborative fiction filmmaking, and futures
anthropology. Rajat is currently developing Emergent Futures CoLab,
a transdisciplinary laboratory that aims to map collaborative future-
making methodologies. He is also co-editing the Performance Ethnog-
raphy section of Centre for Imaginative Ethnography and founder of
Espírito Kashi, a project that facilitates performative spaces for rural
Indian communities to critically re-imagine folklore, envision new social-
ities, decolonize archives, and film futures. His recent film ‘Kashi Labh’
was screened at RAI film festival and numerous other anthropological film
festivals and conferences.
Katalin Osz is a User Researcher with a Design Anthropology focus
in the User Experience Center at Volvo Cars and an affiliated Design
Researcher in the School of Information Technology at Halmstad Univer-
sity, Sweden. She has a mixed background in cultural anthropology and
design. She holds a M.Sc. in Culture and Society from the London School
of Economics and Political Science and a Ph.D. in Built Environment
from Loughborough University.
Marek Pawlak, Ph.D. is an anthropologist working as Assistant
Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology,
Jagiellonian University in Cracow. In his research, he focuses on crisis,
migration, futures, and emotions. He has been conducting an ethno-
graphic fieldwork on affects and temporalities of crisis in Iceland and
social class, national identity and cultural intimacy among Polish migrants
in Norway. He is an author of the book Zawstydzona tożsamość. Emocje,
xxiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
ideologie i władza w życiu polskich migrantów w Norwegii [Embar-

rassing Identity. Emotions, Ideologies and Power among Polish Migrants in
Norway] (Jagiellonian University Press, 2018).
Sarah Pink (Ph.D., FASSA) is Professor and the Founding Director of
the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, in the Faculties of Computer
Science, and Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University,
Australia. Sarah is a design anthropologist and methodological innovator
who develops futures ethnography methods and ethnographic video in
interdisciplinary collaboration with partners inside and outside academia.
Her current focus is on engaging a design anthropology of emerging tech-
nologies to bring new human and societal perspectives to bear in research
and debate concerning emerging technologies, including automation and
digital data in everyday life.
Brianne Randall-Gay is an advocate for survivors of sexual violence.
Felix Ringel is an Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at Durham
University. His work on time, the future, and urban regeneration has been
published in leading anthropological journals such as The Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute, Critique of Anthropology, and Anthro-
pological Theory. He is the author of Back to the Postindustrial Future:
An Ethnography of Germany’s Fastest-Shrinking City and the co-editor of
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology’s special issue on “Time-Tricking:
Reconsidering Temporal Agency in Troubled Times.”
Ellen Schattschneider is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. She is
specialized in psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and practice approaches
to culture. She studies ritual performance, gender and embodiment, spirit
mediumship, sacred landscapes, visuality and the power of images, popular
religious experience, and comparative historical experiences of trauma
and mass violence. Her book, Immoral Wishes: Labor and Transcen-
dence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain (Duke University Press, 2003),
explores healing, self-fashioning, and embodied psychodynamic processes
on a sacred landscape associated with a Shinto shrine founded by a rural
Japanese woman in the 1920s.
Amanda Smith is an independent Victims’ Advocate.
Amanda Thomashow is a sister survivor and Executive Director of the
organization Sister Strong.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxv
Mary Worrall is Curator of Textiles and Social Justice at the Michigan

State University Museum. Her research interests include quilts and
quilt makers, dress, and craftivism. Worrall works with developing and
managing exhibition, research, collections, and educational programs.
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Students construct a public memorial to the 43

disappeared Ayotzinapa normalistas while a small boy
looks on in San Cristóbal’s Plaza de la Paz (Photo
by Brian Batchelor) 27
Fig. 2.2 Students construct the memorial by placing pine needles
and flower petals in a circle shape on the plaza floor
(Photo by Brian Batchelor) 32
Fig. 2.3 Two students place identification photos of four of the 43
missing normalistas on the aciculas (Photo by Brian
Batchelor) 33
Fig. 2.4 Images depicting two of the normalistas (one
a photo and the other a silhouette) lay interspersed
with the students’ messages to them. The messages
read (from right to left) “We are with you” and “more
than one year without answers” (Photo by Brian
Batchelor) 37
Fig. 2.5 A student sits in silence on the acción’s periphery (Photo
by Brian Batchelor) 42
Fig. 2.6 The culmination of acción with flowers and petals
intermingling with photos of the missing, messages
from the students, demands for justice, and pebbles
anchoring them to the plaza’s floor (Photo by Brian
Batchelor) 45
xxvii
xxviii LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 7.1 Open-Source Circular Economy Days Helsinki 2016

at Kääntöpöytä, Photo by Cindy Kohtala. “OSCE Days”
is a global grassroots initiative that links local organizers’
events to promote open-source design, closing material
loops, and alternative economies 154
Fig. 10.1 Trench dug in the living room toward the front façade
of the house (Photo by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier) 236
Fig. 10.2 Plumbers working long shifts until night
to avoid the summer heat (Photo by Alexandrine
Boudreault-Fournier) 237
Fig. 10.3 Remaining foundation made of bricks probably
from a previous house built under the current house
(Photo by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier) 239
Fig. 10.4 Sample of artifacts found in the ground while digging.
Bottles made of ceramics (Photo by Alexandrine
Boudreault-Fournier) 239
Fig. 10.5 Second floor of the RCA building before its demolition
(Photo by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier) 246
Fig. 10.6 Close up on some of the artifacts found on the floor
of the RCA building before its demolition (Photo
by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier) 246
Fig. 11.1 Photograph of author’s father holding his model airplane
(Source unknown) 261
Fig. 11.2 First communion photograph of author’s father (Source
unknown) 263
Fig. 11.3 Front view of author’s gold cross (Photo by Magdalena
Kazubowski-Houston) 264
Fig. 11.4 Back view of author’s gold cross (Photo by Magdalena
Kazubowski-Houston) 265
Fig. 12.1 Image of Speculative Ad for Liquid Gold Humilk
Tetra-Pak Carton, rendered by Zteven Zang bang (2017) 285
Fig. 12.2 Exhibition 291
Fig. 12.3 Golden Coronet (after Milk Drop Coronet, Harold
Edgerton, 1936). 2017. Vellum. Edgerton’s stop-motion
photography allowed us to see into previously unseen
worlds. As Walter Benjamin suggested, new technologies
have both repressive and critical potentials 292
LIST OF FIGURES xxix
Fig. 12.4 Windows are lit by projections from the outside. At first,
the images were not visible from the inside, but as the sun
sets and darkness emerges, the strength of the images
increased. The effect is not unlike that of stained glass
only here images strengthen as the sun sets rather
than the other way around. Motion media artist Wes
Nelson engineered all still and video projections 294
Fig. 12.5 Here, projections of drawings by Lebbeus Woods seen
in the background darken as night falls then fade
as the sun rises, underscoring the powerful but ephemeral
nature of sharing communities 295
Fig. 12.6 Final Sets of Images in Projections and Possibilities 296
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: In Search of Lost Futures
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston and Mark Auslander
From February 2018 through January 2019, the Rubin Museum in New
York featured an immersive installation, R.T./S.R./V.S., by German artist
Matti Braun as part of a larger exhibit titled A Lost Future. This multi-
media assemblage of contemporary works explored how histories and
speculative futures are shaped by globalization, technology, and economic
development. Braun’s installation, inspired by the lotus pond from an
unproduced film—The Alien, by Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray—is a
room transformed into a lake. Visitors “search for a future” by traversing
haphazard paths composed of tree stumps sticking out of the water.
Because the floor beneath the reflective surface of the water is black,
walking from stump to stump feels vertiginous and mysterious; visitors
see their own reflections floating above unknown depths and possibilities.
Pathways meander until they eventually lead into the art worlds of other
M. Kazubowski-Houston (B)
School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, York University, Toronto,
ON, Canada
e-mail: mkazubow@yorku.ca
M. Auslander
Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA
e-mail: markauslander@icloud.com
© The Author(s) 2021 1

M. Kazubowski-Houston and M. Auslander (eds.),
In Search of Lost Futures,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_1
2 M. KAZUBOWSKI-HOUSTON AND M. AUSLANDER
galleries. The installation, a meditation on lost futures, has the potential

to evoke myriad moods, emotions, and powerful imaginings about what
has been lost, what remains, what is hidden beneath surfaces, what is still
to come, and what path needs to be taken.
These moods and emotions were especially intensified at the time of
writing, in March 2020, when most of the world came to an unprece-
dented halt because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With newly imposed
measures of social distancing, lockdowns, and rising deaths worldwide,
the future evoked a plethora of new meanings. It seems we may yet need
to traverse many more haphazard paths before we find—if ever—that
which has been lost.
Taking the immersive installation as a cue, In Search of Lost Futures
asks: How can we study people’s forays into the future ethnographically?
Anthropologists can expound on the contested terrains of the past, exca-
vating struggles that have been erased or ignored or bringing to light
marginalized voices that should be foregrounded. We are keen to decolo-
nize historical narratives of all genres—from films and novels to museum
exhibitions and performances—and to propose new strategies for recon-
figuring how we frame the past, with particular emphasis on uncovering
the creative agency of the underrepresented. But hopeful explorations of
the future seem to be in short supply.
Young people often find it difficult to articulate optimistic trajectories
for near or distant futures. They can easily describe dystopic scenarios
born of climate change, rising sea levels, genetic technologies run amok,
artificial intelligence, or even the zombie apocalypse. In contrast, they
often dismiss positive visions of the future as naive. The dominant assump-
tion has often seemed to be that individuals or local communities will
have relatively little creative agency when it comes to redirecting or
ameliorating global forces. The future is often imaged as an unstoppable
tsunami, flattening everything in its path. Yet, clearly, the vast majority
of human beings are still actively planning on there being a future.
Babies are still being conceived and birthed, crops planted, mortgages
signed, couples married, education pursued, investments made, and cities
planned.
Not all of these plans are supported within the dominant protocols
of neoliberal capitalism. Around the globe, we have reports of nonnor-
mative futures being cultivated and anticipated by those who choose
to reduce their carbon footprint, live off the grid, forge new kinds of
community online and in face-to-face proximity, build powerful social
1 INTRODUCTION: IN SEARCH OF LOST FUTURES 3
movements, spearhead artistic initiatives, and develop revolutionary tech-

nologies. Against the odds, alternative futures are being conceived and
even birthed, albeit often far from the media spotlight. Futures are firmly
grounded in the different ways we anticipate them, fear them, hope for
them, or pilfer from them for our own profit. Today, in the age of
COVID-19, our understandings and imaginings of the future are being
tossed in even more vertiginous directions. Politicians, scientists, and the
media are telling us that the future of this world lies in our own hands that
by taking appropriate measures of social distancing and staying at home
we can divert the tide of the pandemic. The future is suddenly presented
as ours to change, despite the fear, panic, and hopelessness that many of
us might feel in these uncertain and surreal times.
The future has been lost to the discipline of anthropology, and we are
urgently in need of analytic frameworks, approaches, and field methods
to tease out these emergent yearnings for divergent futures. Appropri-
ately, then, our volume title inverts that of Marcel Proust’s multivolume
masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. Our contemporary predicament often
seems to be a continuing quest in search of once-grand futures that may
seem forever beyond our reach. Like a visitor navigating through the
R.T./S.R./V.S. installation, this volume maps out the first steps toward
a rigorous and responsible anthropology of the future. The idea emerged
out of a panel presentation for the Future Anthropologies Network
(FAN) titled “Possible/Plausible/Probable/Preferable: Concepts and
Techniques for Realizing Futures” convened by Magdalena Kazubowski-
Houston and Simone Abram at the 2016 European Association of Social
Anthropologists’ annual meeting in Milan, Italy. The volume is a sequel
to FAN’s first volume, Anthropologies and Futures, published in 2017
by Bloomsbury and edited by Salazar et al. It also came out of work
conducted by members of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography—
an international cybercollective committed to advancing transdisciplinary
research that bridges anthropology, ethnography, the creative arts, and
digital media and concerns itself with questions of social justice and trans-
formation. Here, we ask: How can we capture the contours of worlds yet
to be when the people with whom we work find it difficult to articulate
their visions of the future? How do we characterize a habitus that is not
yet fully realized, that is only in the process of becoming? How do we
map a matrix of anticipated outcomes, proximate and distant, even (and
especially) when there are no blueprints on how to get us from here to
there?
Anthropological Forays into the Future

Anthropology has traditionally neglected the future as a subject of inquiry,
even though the future has always been part and parcel of the anthropo-
logical imagination. A concern for the future was evident in the salvage
anthropologists’ colonial project to document “cultures” and “traditions”
for posterity (Pels 2015: 779) and in Margaret Mead’s recognition, back
in the 1970s, of the importance of studying future possibilities and poten-
tials (Mead 1971, 2005). There were also some early attempts, largely
bypassed by the mainstream, to envisage the role that anthropology might
play in studying life beyond Earth (Maruyama and Harkins 1975). And
in the 1980s, an anticipatory anthropology briefly emerged, but because
it focused on microlevel processes, it had very little impact (Riner 1987;
Salazar et al. 2017: 6–7; Textor 1978).
Anthropology’s neglect of the future can be attributed to the disci-
pline’s preoccupation with the past, evident in its early focus on the
classification of “cultures,” “customs,” and “traditions” according to
Western conceptions of technological progress, which, to this date, rever-
berate in the discourses of development (Escobar 1991; Pels 2015: 787).
American anthropology in particular has been vested in history since
Franz Boas critiqued social evolutionism and adopted historical partic-
ularism in the early twentieth century. For Boas, “the whole problem of
cultural history appears to us as a historical problem. In order to under-
stand history, it is necessary to know not only how things are, but how
they come to be” (Boas 1920: 314). Although anthropologists today have
problematized “culture” and “tradition” as sets of practices, processes,
and actions that are co-emergent with history, power, and politics, the
discipline’s focus on the past is deeply entrenched and has been cemented
by its ongoing project of self-reflexivity, of exposing and critiquing its own
colonial and imperialist legacy (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Pels 2015:
779).
When anthropologists do shift their focus away from the past toward
the future, they tend to be preoccupied with demarcating—according to
Western notions of time as linear—ontological differences in approaches
to time. They ask, for instance, how the past has influenced the present
and, by default, the future. Analyses of memory, nostalgia, the past, and
history and how they inform societal transformation have been the focus,
while the future continues to lurk in the margins (Bryant and Knight
2019: 7–8). These works frequently engage with the future as problem-
atic and uncertain, displaced, or as a site of nostalgia and yearning (Guyer
2007; Hell and Schönle 2010; Piot 2010; Rosenberg and Harding 2005;
Wallman 1992). Even in recent studies on prediction (Puri 2015), divina-
tion (Stein Frankle and Stein 2005), and dreaming (Stewart 2012), the
future has been tackled predominantly through the lens of historicity
(Bryant and Knight 2019: 10). Charles Stewart (2012: 2), for example,
explores the future as part of historical consciousness—namely, as “basic
assumptions a society makes about the shape of time and the relationship
of events in the past, present, and future.” Anthropology’s neglect of the
future can also be attributed to the fact that the future is often problem-
atically associated with modernity and progress. In addition, some of the
approaches that emerged in 1990s and early 2000s failed to gain traction
because, rather than building their own theoretical basis, they primarily
supported existing theoretical turns (Salazar et al. 2017: 8–9).
Only recently has the future grabbed the attention of anthropologists.
It surfaced assertively in recent debates on the cosmos, extraterrestrial
travel, and alien life forms and arguments that make room for hope,
anticipation, and speculation (Battaglia 2005; Doyle 2005; Valentine
2016, 2017). This interest in futurism and science fiction (Rosenberg and
Harding 2005), however, has rarely translated into an exploration of how
futures are imagined, anticipated, and lived in everyday contexts (Bryant
and Knight 2019: 12). The future also figures prominently in works
that grapple with urban planning (Abram and Weszkalnys 2013), world
mappings (Messeri 2016), scientific modeling of climate change (Hastrup
and Skrydstrup 2013; Kirksey 2015; Schneider-Mayerson 2015), envi-
ronmental politics (Mathews and Barnes 2016), biotechnology and the
life sciences (Helmreich 2009), economentality (Mitchell 2014), design
anthropology (Gunn et al. 2013; Akama et al. 2018), and the uncanny
(Lepselter 2005, 2016). Similarly, studies on the impact of globalization
on life opportunities have begun to seriously consider humans as future
makers (Appadurai 2013; Bear 2014; Miyazaki 2004; Nielsen 2014;
Pandian 2012; Wallman 1992). Anand Pandian (2012: 508), drawing on
his work with South Indian popular filmmakers, stresses the importance
of paying attention to the ways “the time yet to come” emerges and is
experienced in the present moment. He conceives of time as “the genera-
tive weave of what we feel and do, trespassing any clear line that might be
drawn between subjects and objects of anthropological research” (ibid.:
549).
Anthropologists have also documented how people anticipate the

future through the affective prism of hope (e.g., Miyazaki 2004; Robbins
2013). Hirokazu Miyazaki (2004: 157), for example, asserts that people’s
actions in the present are inherently shaped by their imaginaries of
the future, a kind of a process of reimagining “the present from the
perspective of the end.” His main focus is hope, not as a subject of anthro-
pological investigation but as a “method for self-knowledge” that has
the potential to temporally reorient present actions toward the future.
“The method of hope,” Miyazaki argues, “is predicated on the inheri-
tance of a past hope and its performative replication in the present” (ibid.:
139). Consequently, the method relies on repeating hopeful moments as
imaginaries of future fulfillments.
While these approaches have drawn attention to the future, it is Arjun
Appadurai’s (2013) consideration of time that has had the most influ-
ence on our project and this volume. For Appadurai, the project of future
making is ultimately entangled in the ethics of probability versus the
ethics of possibility (ibid.: 295, 299). He links the ethics of probability
to what Michel Foucault identified as the “modern regimes of diagnosis,
counting, and accounting” that support capitalist interests (ibid.: 295).
The ethics of probability is “the domination of techniques and mentalities
oriented to manipulating or withstanding risk, understood as the statis-
tical representation of any and all of life’s uncertainties” (ibid.: 4). For
example, risk is a central concern in the field of economics, which seeks
to intervene in the future through its calculations of projected risk (ibid.:
4–5).
In contrast, Appadurai defines the ethics of possibility as an ethics
that works through democratic politics to build a “navigational capacity
through which the poor can redefine the terms of trade between recog-
nition and redistribution, and through their confrontations and negotia-
tions with state and market powers demonstrate and perform their ability
to construct collective hope” (ibid.: 126). For him, the politics of possi-
bility—which is ultimately a politics of hope—is a response to the imposed
politics of “catastrophe, exception, and emergency” (ibid.: 126, 198); it
is a kind of “vernacular cosmopolitanism” that works from the ground
up (ibid.: 198). That form of cosmopolitanism seeks to build relations
beyond the local in order to resist the dominant practices of exclusion
(ibid.: 189). The role of anthropology of the future, Appadurai stresses,
is ultimately to enhance the politics of possibility over the politics of
probability by building people’s capacities to aspire. In Appadurai’s view,
the wealthy possess a stronger capacity to aspire than the poor because
they have more resources, opportunities, and social and economic priv-
ileges. Unlike the poor, they can extract benefits from the future and
exchange their knowledge with others of their class (ibid.: 188). The
capacity to aspire “draw[s] on the habit of imagining possibilities, rather
than giving in to the probabilities of externally imposed change” (ibid.:
213). Individuals can improve their well-being by strengthening their
collective capacity to aspire (ibid.). Appadurai argues that anthropologists
need to redirect our attention away from humans as “bearers of the force
of history, custom, and habit” to “make the future as a cultural fact an
equally important part of [our] mission” (ibid.: 267). To craft a robust
anthropology of the future, we need to take into consideration the inter-
play between “imagination, anticipation, and aspiration” because, rather
than a neutral space, the future is “shot through with affect and with
sensation” (ibid.: 287). People’s everyday archives—as “critical sites for
negotiating paths to dignity, recognition”—“provid[e] a map for negoti-
ating and shaping new futures” (ibid.: 288). He sees hope as an integral
part of imagining futures, as it is ultimately hope that drives such imag-
inings (ibid.: 293). The ethics of possibility, he argues, constitutes “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” (ibid.: 295).
Building on Appadurai’s insights, we have also been inspired by the
volume Anthropologies and Futures. Much like Appadurai, Salazar and
colleagues posit that an anthropology of the future should be “an engaged
anthropology that actively responds to the moral obligation for us to
implicate ourselves in futures” and that seeks to develop “a renewed, open
and future-focused approach to understanding the present, anticipating
the unknown, and intervening in the world” (Salazar et al. 2017: 3). The
editors call for reorienting anthropology away from its focus on the past
and its traditional approach of long-term fieldwork, both of which, they
argue, have largely curtailed the discipline’s engagement with futures. In
their view, anthropology can make a significant contribution to the study
of futures because of its critical theoretical positioning and “its capacity to
engage with a world and people at a depth and moral perspective” (ibid.:
4).
In particular, they call for an interventionist anthropology, one that

will craft novel epistemological, theoretical, and methodological tech-
niques of inquiry and intervention by reaching out beyond its disciplinary
confines to take into account the particularities of the field and the
experiences of people on the ground (ibid.: 5). They hope that the
developed techniques—drawing on the creative arts, digital technologies,
and participatory and improvisational strategies—will enable anthropolo-
gists “to account for the contested politics of uncertain, emerging, and
as yet unknown worlds” (ibid.: 5). Their interest in inventing novel
techniques for researching futures is ultimately directed toward problema-
tizing anthropology’s epistemological groundings, ethnographic practice,
and theoretical insights (ibid.: 10–11).
The Three Approaches

In Search of Lost Futures is a specific experiment in three approaches to
the study of futures: (1) multimodality, (2) deep interdisciplinarity, and
(3) autoethnography. These approaches or techniques have emerged as
increasingly vital ways of conducting ethnography; however, their poten-
tial in the anthropological study of the future still needs to be investigated.
Although each part of this book is devoted to one of the three approaches,
we recognize that these approaches are not mutually exclusive; on the
contrary, many of the contributors employ all three. We associated each
of their contributions with one of the three parts based on their level
of engagement with a given approach; to construct a clear road map
through the volume; and to highlight the interconnectedness of the three
approaches.
Part I, “Multimodality,” examines approaches that employ different
types of media to prioritize collaborative, affective, embodied, and critical
modes of engagement to reach beyond the academy. Brian Batchelor’s
Chapter 2 examines a collaborative street performance in San Cristóbal de
las Casas, Chiapas, and Mexico, as a form of public memorial that strives
to realize an impossible future. He investigates how a public, performative
memorial can constitute a form of embodied ethnography of impossi-
bility that enacts politics at the level of the imagination. Jodie Asselin,
in Chapter 3 examines how an ethnographer’s embodied participation
in a community-training program, such as rural enskillment training in
northern and western Canada, can facilitate novel, ethnographic ways of
imagining the future through touch and smell. Chapter 4 by Rajat Nayyar
considers an audiovisual research approach as a form of creative and

improvisatory ethnography. By positioning participants sensorially within
a given environment, it is possible to stage their imaginings of what may
or may not be possible. Finally, Virginie Magnat, in Chapter 5, proposes
an imaginary ethnography of heightened vocality as an entry point to
understanding how futures are imagined and acted upon in everyday
life, beyond the spoken and written word, in ways that subvert colonial
regimes of power and knowledge construction.
Part II, “Deep Interdisciplinarity,” brings together contributors
who draw on different disciplinary fields to craft novel sensibilities
for conducting ethnographic research. They not only draw on pre-
existing approaches but also devise unique, context-specific techniques of
engaging with futures. Felix Ringel’s Chapter 6, based on his fieldwork
in Germany’s poorest city, Bremerhaven, makes a case for cultivating a
research sensibility that would allow the participants’ imaginaries of the
future to question and challenge the researcher’s own perspectives and
analytical tool kits. In Chapter 7, Eeva Berglund and Cindy Kohlata draw
on scholarship in anthropology and design (specifically material-semiotic,
new materialist, or more-than-human thought) to craft a novel ethno-
graphic sensibility that harnesses collective imagination, creativity, and
improvisation to study the future. In Chapter 8, Marek Pawlak draws
on interdisciplinary affect theory and his fieldwork in Iceland to consider
anticipation as an affective and future-oriented theoretical, epistemo-
logical, and methodological sensibility. Sarah Pink and collaborators in
Chapter 9 discuss an interdisciplinary, collaborative research project that
draws on design research employed in the automotive industry, research
that relies on deception and experimental testing and prototyping. They
demonstrate that anthropology can benefit from similar approaches and
techniques, even if they are seemingly incompatible with the discipline’s
own ethical and methodological commitments.
In Part III, “Autoethnography,” we explore autoethnography as a
highly reflexive ethnographic process and style of representation that
draws on the ethnographer’s own life story and experiences in the field
and critically interrogates the conditions that underly a project’s construc-
tion of knowledge (Kazubowski-Houston 2010, 2017). Alexandrine
Boudreault-Fournier’s Chapter 10 provides insights generated through
her autoethnographic study of excavations taking place below her fami-
ly’s colonial house in Cuba, and through a collaborative and reflexive
audiovisual ethnography conducted in a crumbling house in Havana. She
demonstrates that researchers’ critical engagement with their own posi-

tionality should constitute a basis for anthropological conceptualizations
of time and forays into the future. Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston’s
Chapter 11 uses critical ethnographic memoir writing to draw attention to
the ways that the emplaced, embodied, imaginative, and agentic capacity
of the author’s own lived experience of absence and grief can serve as a
springboard for reimagining and acting upon the future. In Chapter 12,
Susan Falls draws on autoethnographic insights generated through the
author’s own participation in the human milk-sharing network and inter-
rogates the speculative potential of reflexive multimodal approaches to
ethnography, especially their ability to engage audiences beyond the
academy. Finally, in Chapter 13, Mark Auslander and collaborators discuss
a museum exhibit based on the collaborators’ personal experience of
sexual violence, presenting it as a process of restorative future making
in which the impossible is rendered possible.
Imagining and Intervening in the Future

Although the contributors to this volume have different approaches and
perspectives, we share the view that, in these uncertain times, anthro-
pologists must urgently concern themselves with the future. This means
attending to how people engage with future worlds in their everyday
lives and how anthropology might intervene in the future. Appadu-
rai’s understanding of the future as the capacity to aspire lies at the
heart of several chapters in this collection. While not always addressed
directly, it is certainly evoked, albeit in different ways, by each contributor.
However, we extend the notion of the capacity to aspire beyond the poli-
tics of possibility. We believe that imagination—on which the capacity to
aspire relies—cannot be conceptualized solely in positive terms. Typically,
anthropologists have been less concerned with imagination as a concep-
tual category and have instead attended to diverse imaginative effects,
outcomes, or technologies (Appadurai 1996; Crapanzano 2004; McLean
2007; Rapport and Overing 2000; Robbins 2010; Sneath et al. 2009).
But much of this theorizing has associated imagination with possibility,
freedom, hope, artistic expression, and transformation or transgression.
Appadurai (1996: 53), for example, suggests that in the era of glob-
alization, “the imagination has now acquired a singular new power in
social life” and constitutes “a space of contestation in which individ-
uals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the
modern” (ibid.: 4). For him, collective imagination can become “a staging
ground for action, and not only for escape” (ibid: 7). Vincent Crapanzano
(2004: 19) argues that the imagination ultimately allows us “to project
our ‘fables’ in a direction that does not have to reckon with the ‘evident
universe.’” And for Jean and John Comaroff (1999: 8) is a “civil society
[that] serves as a tool of the social imagination.” Others have defined
imagination as a ground upon which people can reinvent their temporal-
ities and identities apart from the constraints of their everyday realities
(Rapport and Overing 2000; Robbins 2010: 305–6).
There are those, however, who recognize that imagination—part and
parcel of experience and perception—is difficult to pin down (McLean
2007: 6), as it constitutes a “thinking feeling [involving] the mutual
development of thought and sensation, as they arrive together, pre-what
they will have become, just beginning to unfold from the unfelt and
unthinkable outside: of process, transformation in itself” (Massumi 2002:
134). Some approaches, drawing on Kant’s understanding of imagination
as pervasive and processual, consider imagination as an outcome rather
than a condition and focus on the “technologies of the imagination” that
generate, without determining, such outcomes (Sneath et al. 2009: 19).
These approaches stress that the diverse technologies of the imagination
frequently afford random and unpredictable imaginings and that ethnog-
raphy’s focus on the peculiarities of the everyday is imperative to studying
and analyzing the workings of these technologies (Sneath et al. 2009: 22,
25).
Building on these latter perspectives, we inquire into the diverse imag-
inative effects, outcomes, and technologies of imagination. We engage
with imaginations, imaginaries, and imaginings in their plural forms as
a multiplicity of emergent, dynamic, shifting, intersubjective, embodied,
and affective experiences, modes of being and expression, processes, and
actions. We argue, however, that imagination cannot be reduced to a
positive force, intentionality, or strategic action because it plays out some-
where between intent and outcome, freedom and constraint, hegemony
and resistance, private and public, and real and fantastical. This is evident
in Kazubowski-Houston’s chapter in this volume, for example, which
demonstrates how imagination as an agentic action can operate unpre-
dictably through absence, magical thought, and the lived experience of
grief. Consequently, the capacity to aspire cannot be seen as tied solely to
the politics of possibility—it can also express itself in different registers,
moods, and sensibilities.
For young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, for example, the
capacity to aspire dwells in hopelessness, dejection, panic, and fear. She
asserts, “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them
hope. But I don’t want your hope, I don’t want you to be hopeful. I
want you to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel every day” (The
Atlantic, September 20, 2019). Thunberg’s words resonate even stronger
today in the world of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global panic.
Our capacities to aspire, our desire to live to see a “normal” future again,
seem to be vested in our very ability to harness fear and panic for the
good of all. Brian Batchelor’s chapter in this volume, for example, by
describing a public street-performance memorial that calls for the return
of the disappeared normalistas in Mexico, demonstrates how the capacity
to aspire can be tied to the politics of impossibility.
Expressions of the capacity to aspire can also possess many unpre-
dictable and messy consequences, contingent on specific historical and
political particularities playing themselves out in and through individual
and social lives. Felix Ringel’s contribution, for example, brings to light
how people’s capacities to aspire can be vested in seemingly conservative
efforts aimed at sustaining the status quo. This volume, consequently, is
concerned not only with the different registers, moods, and sensibilities
through which people express their capacity to aspire but also with the
capricious consequences of their actions.
The goal of an interventionist anthropology of the future is not neces-
sarily to build people’s capacities to aspire—as all people, even the most
underprivileged, possess their own dreams, aspirations, and goals. In
fact, the chapters in this collection demonstrate that our interlocutors’
imaginings of the future can be incompatible with, and even radically
challenge, our own notions of intervention. Marek Pawlak’s chapter,
for example, which is based on his study of Icelanders’ anticipations of
the future in the post-2008 economic crisis era, reveals how people’s
imaginaries of the future can clash with our own in ways that cannot
be easily anticipated. We acknowledge that these notions, in much of
the current anthropological theorizing, largely equate intervention if
not exclusively with strategic action then at least with “a standpoint of
self-aware commitment” (Horton and Kraftl 2009: 17). While in some
cases we, indeed, might be able to assist our interlocutors in mobilizing
resources to bring their aspirations to fruition, more often than not, we
cannot easily overcome the systemic inequalities that impact people’s lives.
Overstating the power of anthropology—or any academic discipline—to
directly affect lives will only serve the mandate of neoliberal academia,
which masks its entrepreneurial intent with narratives about social justice
and transformation (Kazubowski-Houston 2018: 418).
The chapters in this volume show how intervention can unfold in the
field in ways that are not always intended, foreseen, or accounted for.
Ethnographic research may have major transformative potential, but its
effects might not be easily accessible, apparent, or understood. In Search
of Lost Futures stresses the importance of paying attention to how futures
are made and unmade beyond a goal-oriented action. It foregrounds
intervention that does not adhere to an explicit understanding of poli-
tics and change (Horton and Kraftl 2009: 14) but instead takes many
different forms; for example, they can emerge from the depths of quiet,
affective, and embodied practice (Kazubowski-Houston 2018). In fact,
the contributors to this volume demonstrate that intimate, embodied
imaginings can be central catalysts—not merely effects—of geopolitical
processes. Imaginings may constitute an important intimacy politics (Pain
and Staeheli 2014) that builds bonds of reciprocity, undoing customary
divisions between the global and the local, the private and the public, and
the real and the fictional.
These politics may, at times, provide the only possible means through
which people can work toward a dignified life. Rajat Nayyar’s audiovi-
sual ethnography of death and dying conducted in a salvation home in
Kashi, India, for instance, lays bare how such intimacy politics can stage
themselves as practices of care that strengthen kinship ties and familial
bonds, albeit in ways that cannot be easily ascertained. Magnat’s imag-
inary ethnography of heightened vocality also reveals that intervention
can work as an affective force of chanting and singing, constituting an
important, if not always apparent, form of subverting power.
The challenge lies in figuring out how to go about crafting sustainable
and politically feasible futures from the multiplicity of diverse and not
always compatible imaginings. Here, we follow Salazar and colleagues’
(2017: 17) call for “creating generative forms of not knowing with
others, which might involve imagining, planning, designing, enacting,
intervening, or anticipating the future on an everyday basis.” This call
for “not knowing with others” strongly reverberates in Berglund and
Kohlata’s ethnographic research, which involved collaborating with mate-
rialist activist communities in northern Europe and fully opening oneself
up to their collective initiatives of imagining the future on the ground.
However, we are also mindful that looking to our interlocutors for
inspiration to “imagine/do/think/be otherwise dances a fine line of re-

exoticizing them” (de Sá 2019). We agree with Celina de Sá (2019) that
in the project of imagining and intervening in futures, we should always
“be grounded in the assumption that our interlocutors are unremarkable”
and may not have readily available insights into how the future might be
crafted.
Thus, In Search of Lost Futures proposes an anthropology of the future
that would constitute a kind of “dramaturgy of [affective, sensory, and
embodied] voices from the field” (Madison 2018: xxxi), a dramaturgy
that forges connections between multiple and disparate imaginings of the
future. As early as the 1990s, Faye Ginsburg (1995: 65) argued that to
account for the complexities of social life, anthropology must adopt a
parallax effect, or “different angles of vision,” which could be achieved
by juxtaposing different modes of visual representation, such as ethno-
graphic film and Indigenous media. Our proposed dramaturgy of voices
strives to achieve this parallax effect not simply by juxtaposing different
angles of vision. It also juxtaposes different multisensory, haptic, and
multimodal networks of “seeing” through which the capacity to aspire
is imagined. In their contribution, Pink and collaborators argue that, in
order for anthropology to engage with the future, it needs to seriously
engage with people’s future-making activities and strategies, even if this
means a profound rethinking of our epistemological and methodological
tool kits.
We are committed to tracking the myriad imaginings of futures as they
emerge on the ground in different temporal and affective orientations. As
all the chapters in this volume demonstrate, these imaginings may span—
in various combinations and iterations—the possible and the impossible,
the probable and the improbable, the certain and the uncertain, and
the hopeful and the hopeless. Such a dramaturgy of futures is certainly
in need of developing novel epistemological, theoretical, and method-
ological approaches. Yet, despite the inspiring work that has burgeoned
in recent years, we still have theoretical and methodological questions
about how to study and intervene in the imaginative aspects of futures
that are not easily accessible to us ethnographically. In Search of Lost
Futures addresses this knowledge gap by exploring autoethnography,
multimodality, and deep interdisciplinarity as three potential approaches
to the anthropological study of futures.
The deeply interdisciplinary dramaturgy of the future that this book
proposes tracks diverse capacities to aspire as they sprout close to the
ground, in the stories people tell us, in how they tell these stories
(through actions, gestures, movements, speech, and so on), and in how
they live and enact these stories in their everyday lives. It is a traversing
anthropology. Like Matti Braun’s immersive installation, it is vertiginous.
It leads us through unknown depths and possibilities. It pays attention
to what futures may sound like, smell like, and feel like. It accounts for
those experiences that go beyond words because it is through those expe-
riences that futures frequently stage themselves within the galleries of our
imaginations.
Our work hearkens back to one of the foundational texts of modern
anthropology, Marcel Mauss’s The Gift ([1954] 2011). In this work,
Mauss famously argues that in precapitalist or archaic societies, gift rela-
tionships manifested themselves as total social facts and structured a
vast range of social practices, states of being, aesthetics, and spiritual
conceptions. The gift carried with it a double obligation: to acknowl-
edge the gift and to reciprocate at some future point in time through
a counter-presentation that would be roughly equivalent to, but not
precisely identical to, the original gift. Even the seemingly disenchanted
modern contract, Mauss maintained, contains within it the buried spirit
of the gift, implicating networks of persons in bonds of reciprocity that
are inherently future-oriented. Many of the essays in this volume could be
read as explorations of struggles in contemporary communities to reclaim
that buried, future-oriented spirit of the gift, to reenter into the ethos
of seemingly lost but life-giving economies. In diverse locales around the
world, even under seemingly inescapable neoliberal structures, individ-
uals and emergent collectivities are actively imagining and reconstituting
dramas of future-oriented reciprocity, insisting that there is more to life
than the frozen, sterile tallies of the balance sheet.
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PART I
Multimodality
In recent years, multimodality—approaches and practices that employ

diverse media forms to work collaboratively with communities (Collins
et al. 2017; Edwards 1997; Pink 2011; Postill 2011; Stewart 2013)—has
gained cachet in the field of anthropology. Techniques such as perfor-
mance, film, photography, digital media, and social media have been
employed both as ethnographic modalities to challenge the conventional
ways of disseminating research, practicing reflexivity, and engaging in
community collaboration. The popularity of this approach is evident
in the recent proliferation of transdisciplinary research and education
centers, ventures, and networks, including
• the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography;
• the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, which focuses
on the intersection of ethnography and aesthetics;
• the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at Manchester
University, which heads projects that bridge ethnography and
multimedia;
• the two new European Association for Social Anthropologists
networks: FAN, which is committed to developing new approaches
and techniques to the study of futures, and #colleex–Collaboratory
for Ethnographic Experimentation, which is devoted to
experimenting with field methods and techniques
(Kazubowski-Houston and Magnat 2018: 384);
20 PART I: MULTIMODALITY
• and Ethnographic Terminalia, a collective of international artists and

ethnographers that exhibits works situated at the intersections of
ethnography and contemporary art practice.
The contributors to this volume draw inspiration from these types
of cross-disciplinary pollinations and have personally participated in
some of these initiatives. In particular, they draw on and extend work
carried out by the members of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnog-
raphy (CIE) and the European Association for Social Anthropologists’
(EASA) Future Anthropologies Network (FAN). The cofounders and
cocurators of the CIE have engaged with multimodality through prac-
tices of imaginative ethnography (Elliott and Culhane 2017)—approaches
to research that are attuned to people’s “imaginative lifeworlds” (Irving
2011: 22) and employ transdisciplinary affective, embodied, and critical
research methods (Kazubowski-Houston 2017). Like members of FAN,
the contributors to this volume explore creative approaches to an inter-
ventionist anthropology working in collaboration with interlocutors on
the ground (Salazar et al 2017). In particular, they examine how street
performance, affective and embodied enskillment training, audiovisual
ethnography, and an ethnography of vocality might set up the conditions
of ethnographic knowledge in ways that render it especially useful to the
anthropological study of the possible and the impossible.
Although anthropologists have explored creative modalities primarily
at the representational level, as a way of disseminating fieldwork data
through embodied and sensory ways to diverse audiences, experimenta-
tions at the level of ethnographic process and analysis continue to be rare.
The chapters in this section address this research gap by engaging with
multimodality at the level of ethnographic process, analysis, and repre-
sentation. They pay particular attention to how creative modalities might
transform the research field, the interlocutor-ethnographer relationship,
and audience engagement. They also consider how, in working across
disciplines and fields, anthropologists might capture and convey other
possibilities and forms of agency that reside in imaginaries, senses, and
emotions. They are united in exploring how a multimodal anthropology
of the future might help us do away with disciplinary turf claiming, which
has prevented anthropologists from truly engaging with the concerns of
our interlocutors and seriously embracing theoretical and methodological
experimentations.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Humperdinck—The Fairy Tale Man—Germany
Outside of the operas of Richard Strauss, of which we have written

elsewhere, there have been few outstanding opera writers in
Germany since Wagner. Among those are Ludwig Thuille (1861–
1907), whose Lobetanz was given at the Metropolitan Opera House
in 1911; Eugene d’Albert (1864), who has lived in Germany most of
his life, although he was born in Scotland, and wrote the lovely
Tiefland which was performed in America; Max Schillings (1868),
whose Mona Lisa was performed at the Metropolitan; Hans Pfitzner
(1869), who wrote an operatic legend based on Palestrina; Siegfried
Wagner (1869), son of Richard; and Leo Blech (1871).
The one great exception was Engelbert Humperdinck (1854–1921),
born in Bonn, Beethoven’s birthplace. He is perhaps closer to the
hearts of children than any one else who ever wrote music. This
seems much to say, but when you hear that it was he who wrote that
beautiful little fairy story Hansel and Gretel, we are sure you will
agree. The San Carlo Opera Company has given special performances
of it in English. Would it not be nice if operas were given in the
language you best understand? You would then find out for
yourselves that this is the story of Babes in the Woods. How fine it
would have been too, if you had been able to hear in your own
language the other opera written by Humperdinck! This was
Koenigskinder (Children of the King), which gave one of the loveliest
rôles to Geraldine Farrar, and brought a large flock of real geese on
the stage to take part in the performance. The other name of the
opera is The Goose-Girl, which explains the presence of the geese.
Geraldine Farrar always brought one or two with her when she
acknowledged the applause and there was always an awful squawk!
In this opera too, there is a horrid old Witch. Humperdinck found joy
and inspiration in the folk music of Germany, much of which deals
with fairies, elves, witches and inhabitants of the world of
imagination.
Humperdinck was a great musician and he had the honor of being
asked to prepare the score of Parsifal for the publishers.
Because of the beauties of his melodies, the lovely subjects he
selected and his sympathy with the finer and higher things of life, it
is a pity that Humperdinck left so few works.
He was attracted to the theatre and wrote much music as theatre
music for plays. This is called incidental music, that is, it is incidental
and the play’s the thing! Just before he died Humperdinck wrote the
incidental music for the Miracle which is a great spectacle in
pantomime. This means that there is no speaking, only tableaux and
acting. He did not live to finish it, but it was completed by his son,
for the production made by Max Reinhardt.
CHAPTER XXVII
Some Tone Poets
Probably you think that any music on a program is program music!

Of course it is, but not in the special use of the word, for when it is
program music, it has a story of its own and has to be described in
more or less detail so that the audience can understand what it is
about. Therefore, we find two classes of music—absolute music,
which needs no story to explain it, and—program music, which does.
Beethoven’s best works are known by their opus number while most
of Schumann’s have descriptive titles. Early composers sometimes
wrote music describing or imitating something, like Daquin’s
Cuckoo, Jannequin’s Battle of Marignan, The Carman’s Whistle, etc.
These pieces were program music in a way, but the modern tone
poets went further by writing music with rather extended stories and
with music not as simple as it used to be, but nevertheless an
outgrowth of ballad form, sonata and the symphony.
Suppose you wanted to write a tone poem! First you must have a
subject and then you must write music to explain it. Let us say you
were going to write a Subway Tone Poem, your program notes might
read something like this: The hero rushes away from his office, into
the hurrying, scurrying street, down the slippery, crowded subway
steps, and when he reaches the noisy turnstile slips in his fare and
meets his young lady. He leads her through the crowd, protecting her
from the jostling mob. Then they enter the train and above the noise
and bustle they cast sweet glances at each other and converse. The
train stops occasionally and finally they get off at their station. They
walk to her home, along an empty side street where it is quiet and
charming. He doffs his cap and we leave them, both thinking lovely
things about each other.
Don’t you think you’re ready now to write a tone poem?
Berlioz, Innovator
Up to Hector Berlioz’ time (1803–1869), there was no definite

attempt to write a tone poem with an elaborate story. This man, one
of the most complicated in musical history, did much to help music
and future musicians, for he started to tell stories in music without
scenery or dialogues.
He was born near Lyons, France, the son of a doctor who wanted
him to study medicine, but as he almost fainted several times in the
dissecting room, he gave it up. This was his first rebellion and all his
life he struggled against nearly everything that existed. His was a
noble discontent in many ways, for he believed deeply in his own
ideas and suffered much putting them into practice. He lived shortly
after the French Revolution when everything was topsy-turvy. Many
of the old things that people had looked upon with reverence had
vanished and he tried, as other young men of his day, to forge new
ideas according to his sense of right.
One day he saw some musical score paper and realized in a
moment, what wonderful things might be done with it and
exclaimed: “What an orchestral work one might write on that!” and
quite suddenly, he decided to write music! He could only play the
guitar, the flute and the flageolet and knew practically nothing of
harmony. He certainly paid well for his decision, for he had a hard
struggle with himself and circumstances.
He took one of his compositions to Professor Lesueur at the Paris
Conservatory, and was admitted.
Berlioz Versus Cherubini
Cherubini, Director of the Conservatory, made a rule that men and

women should use separate doors leading into the library. Not
knowing this rule, Berlioz entered by the door reserved for the
women and sat down to read a score of his beloved Gluck. Cherubini,
thin, pale-faced, with tousled hair and fiercely shining eyes, came up
to Hector and reprimanded him for breaking the rule. They had a
noisy fight, chasing in and out among the desks and when Berlioz
reached the door, he looked back at Cherubini and called out: “I am
soon coming back to study Gluck again.” Being a determined boy, he
did come back, but Cherubini, on whom his future depended, was his
staunch enemy for life.
His parents were infuriated with Hector for his conduct in and out
of school. His mother, a pious woman, practically disowned him and
his father gave him but a small allowance with the stipulation that
unless he could soon prove his ability in music, he should have to go
back to medicine. So he tried desperately to earn money, by singing
in choruses, playing the flute and teaching, hoping that he could win
the Prix de Rome, which would give him a few years in Rome and
three thousand francs. After terrific opposition by Cherubini and
held back, too, by his own lack of diplomacy, either by submitting
works that were written too poorly or too well, he lost many chances
for the prize and finally, after four attempts, he won the coveted
award with his cantata Sardanapalus. The amusing thing about this
is, that he left out the parts then looked upon as modern, and
difficult, which would have lost him the prize, but the first time it
was played in public, he put them all in, and the piece was successful.
Then he fell in love, and after much posing and strutting about and
foolish behavior, he married the young Irish actress, Harriet
Smithson. They were very unhappy and unfortunate, but he was
good to her and even gave up composing to earn a living by writing,
and he proved an exceptionally gifted writer and critic.
His autobiography, too, is most interesting for he sees himself as a
romantic hero and tells the tale with great dramatic energy and
exaggeration.
With Intent to Murder!
At one time he was engaged to another woman who was unkind to

him and he wrote: “Two tears of rage started from my eyes and my
mind was made up on the spot to kill without mercy.” But being
impetuous and quick tempered, he never reached the scene of
murder, for, when about to sail to where she was, he either fell or
jumped into the water, which very much dampened his ardor for
killing.
One night, Chopin and Schumann followed him because he had
threatened to kill himself. But, at the crucial moment Berlioz
changed his mind!
Life for Berlioz was a drama in which he was the leading man, and
he watched his own performance, as if he were a part of the
audience. He craved novelty at every turn. He was sensitive, high-
strung and vain, and yet withal, he had the dignity of being loyal to
his beliefs in himself, and did not want to deceive anybody. He wrote
with humor, brilliancy and understanding, he had faith in his work,
and was sufficiently heroic to stick to his course whatever the cost.
He was a martyr, for he suffered in order to do what he wished in
music, and was never appreciated.
Although he went to England, Germany, Austria and Russia, and
was very successful, Paris, only, interested him. In 1863, his opera
The Trojans in Carthage failed and in 1868, he died, a broken-
hearted man.
Berlioz’s Contribution to Music
It seems strange, but Berlioz disliked Bach and Palestrina and

worshiped Beethoven, Gluck and Weber. He was jealous of Wagner
and did everything he could to make Tannhäuser a failure in Paris.
Berlioz invented new ways, as do our Jazz Bands today, to make
the instruments produce different sounds. He put bags over the
horns, hung up the cymbals and had them struck with sticks instead
of clapping them together, dressed up the drumsticks in sponges,
and was much pleased at the effect made when a trombone played a
duet with a piccolo. He made propaganda for new instruments
especially for the horn, invented by Adolphe Saxe, which was called
Sax Horn, and from which descended the Saxophone, so behold
Berlioz, the founder of the Jazz Band!
Where other composers would use four trombones or one, he used
sixteen! In his Requiem for example, he used sixteen trombones,
twelve ophicleides (cornets with extra levers or keys), eight pairs of
kettle drums, two bass drums, a gong and of course, all the regular
string and reed instruments. He boasted after the first performance,
that a man had a fit from the excessive noise!
The Intimate Friend of Instruments
He wrote the sort of melody that showed off each particular

instrument to its best advantage. He studied them as if they were
human beings, and he understood their characters and
temperaments, what they could do and at what they would balk. He
showed the possibilities of the choirs of wood wind instruments, a
rich heritage for us today. The orchestra playing a piece of his,
directed by him was matchless in its effect. Effect was the keynote of
his writings. As the first great master of tonal effect, he is
unsurpassed, and his book on orchestration is still one of the most
practical text books on the subject.
Berlioz used the idée fixe (fixed idea) or leit-motif, not as Wagner
used it later, but quite definitely, twisting a theme in many ways to
bring out different phases of the same subject. Thus, Berlioz founded
the dramatic in music, without scenery and without words, which is
the Symphonic Tone Poem.
The majority of the people did not understand him any more than
they understand Stravinsky today. His greatest work was his
Symphony Fantastic written in 1829, in which he used the idée fixe
to tell about the life of the artist, in true program music style for
which he fought and almost bled. In Harold in Italy, he makes a
departure by giving to the viola, the rôle of the “leading lady” which
had not been done up to his day. He often used voices with the
orchestra as he did in his tone poems Romeo and Juliet, and The
Damnation of Faust.
The noisy Requiem is one of the finest things he did, and his
overtures, the best of which is the Benvenuto Cellini, are fine works.
The oratorio, The Infancy of Christ, written in classic style, was well
received, but his operas never succeeded.
He paved the way for new orchestral effects and prepared the
ground for Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and all the
other orchestral composers. He was a musical Byron, for he was
more interesting than beautiful, more vivid than noble, a sincere
poseur, faithful to his ideas and always searching for romance.
Hector Berlioz.
(Father of the Tone Poem.)

Franz Liszt.
Sympathetic Teacher, Composer, Pianist

and Friend to Young Musicians.
He was well versed in literature, always carried Virgil in his pocket,

and loved and admired Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Walter Scott
and other great writers on whose works he based many
compositions. In his fascinating autobiography, he said, “The
dominant qualities of my music are passionate expression, internal
fire, rhythmic animation and unexpected change,” and he was right.
And so we leave this romantic man, craving sensation in his life
and in his music, exaggerated in word and tone, and thank him for
what Daniel Gregory Mason calls, “His contribution to the unresting
progress of art.”
He was not appreciated in Paris until after his death, and some one
said that the stones hurled at him in contempt were soon piled up for
him in the pedestals of his monuments.
Franz Liszt
Another Mozart seems about to appear, for Franz Liszt (1811–

1886), too, was an infant prodigy!
He was born in Raiding, Hungary, and his father, Adam Liszt, who
was steward to Prince Esterhazy, gave Franz piano lessons and
managed his first concert tours.
At nine Liszt played in public, then went to Vienna and took
lessons from Carl Czerny and Salieri. When twelve years old he
played in Paris and “set the world on fire” with his brilliancy. Some
one said that after his first concert that he had a triumphal progress
to fame over the laps of great ladies, for he was petted and “bon-
bonned” and kissed by all.
Liszt wanted to go to the Conservatory in Paris, but as he was a
foreigner, Cherubini, though a foreigner himself, would not admit
him.
Advertising Liszt
Here is a handbill used for advertising the little boy Liszt:

“An Air”
With grand Variations by Herz, will be performed on Erard’s
New Patent-Grand Pianoforte, by:
Master Liszt
Who will likewise perform an Extempore Fantasia and
respectfully requests two written Themes from any of the Audience
upon which he will play his Variations
This illustrates two interesting things. The first, the mention of the
grand pianoforte, which had not been in use very long; the second,
the fashion in Liszt’s day of improvising before an audience, a “stunt”
almost like solving a cross-word puzzle without a dictionary!
For a long time, he was advertised as two years younger than he
was, and his father carried him to the piano; but he soon rebelled at
this pretense and it was discontinued.
Liszt Shows His Unselfishness
After Liszt’s father died in 1827, he gave up concert tours for a

while, and settled down with his mother for eight restful years to
study and teach the piano. Liszt generously gave his mother all the
money he had made in his successful tours because, he said, she had
made so many sacrifices for him. At this time he grew spiritually
deeper and well fitted for the glories to come. Like Berlioz, Liszt was
born a short time after the French Revolution, when new ideas were
coming into literature, religion and art, through which this young
and gifted artist tried to guide himself in a wholesome way that
shaped his future life.
Liszt again made concert tours through Europe (1839), and
astounded everyone with his playing and the charm of his
personality. Musicians and audiences were at his feet! He made a
great deal of money, too, and grew so popular that artists painted
him, ladies knelt before him in adoration, tableaux were given in his
honor, monuments erected to him and societies named after him.
His kindness to the poor and needy was unfailing. When Pesth was
inundated by a flood, he sent a generous gift to the sufferers; he
established a fund for the poor in Raiding and completed the
necessary sum for the Beethoven monument at Bonn. He never
accepted money for teaching after he was “grown up” for he wanted
to be a help to his some three hundred pupils. It is said that after
1847 he never gave a concert for his own benefit! An extraordinary
character!
In 1843, he went to Weimar, as a visiting artist. Soon he met
Princess Von Sayn Wittgenstein of Russia who realized his great gifts
and influenced him to become more than a pianist. Later in the year
we see him as Choir Master living at Weimar and attracting the
greatest people of the musical world to him. Here Liszt was able to
help young musicians who came from all over the world. Wagner
would never have been so successful, had not Liszt aided him during
his exile. He stood by him with patience and loving kindness and
helped him to produce his operas. He was of untold assistance to
Schumann and Berlioz, Rubinstein, Cornelius and countless others
by performing their works when nobody else dared to. Liszt was in
high favor with society, and having a love for the new in music, he
used his popularity to help music grow. Wagner himself said: “At the
end of my last stay in Paris, when ill, broken down and despairing, I
sat brooding over my fate, my eye fell on the score of my Lohengrin,
totally forgotten by me. Suddenly I felt something like compassion
that this music should never sound from off the death-pale paper. I
wrote two lines to Liszt; his answer was the news that preparations
for the performance were being made on the largest scale the limited
means of Weimar would permit.” Liszt’s motto was, “First Place to
the Living.”
Liszt’s Professional Life
Liszt’s services were demanded for concerts and festivals in many

towns from 1852–1859. The people, however, could not understand
how their idol could believe in Wagner and Berlioz, and there were
many rabid discussions. Very soon Liszt brought out his own
symphonic poems, Tasso, Prometheus, Mazeppa, Les Preludes, and
his two piano concertos (1855–1857), utilizing his romantic ideas.
After leaving Weimar, which some biographers claim was because
of the adverse criticism of Cornelius’ opera, The Barber of Bagdad,
Liszt went to Rome. Here his deep mystical nature and his need for
rest and time for contemplation, led him to enter one of the Holy
Orders of the Church, and the Pope gave him the honorary title of
Abbé. Pope Pius IX adored him and called him his Palestrina. The
church music which he composed there included his oratorios St.
Elizabeth, The Christus, his unfinished Stanislaus, the Hungarian
Coronation Mass and the Requiem.
Liszt returned to Weimar every spring and summer and conducted
many festivals and concerts, including the Beethoven centenary. He
was also much interested in the National Academy at Pesth, so now
he divided his time between Rome, Pesth, and Weimar.
He wrote many brilliant piano pieces, among them his nineteen
remarkable Hungarian Rhapsodies based on the melodies he heard
from the gypsies. Besides composing music, teaching and helping
other musicians and giving to the needy, he wrote essays and
criticisms.
In appearance Liszt was tall and thin with deep-set eyes and bushy
eyebrows and a mouth which turned up at the corners when he
smiled. His charm of manner won all who came in contact with him.
A story is told of him that he as a youth was sitting to the artist
Scheffer for his portrait, and fell into a theatrical pose, probably with
his head thrown back and one hand thrust into the breast of his
buttoned coat, which was characteristic. As this did not impress the
painter, Liszt, realizing it, cried with much embarrassment, “Forgive,
dear master, but you do not know how it spoils one to have been an
infant prodigy.”
In spite of Liszt’s outward affectation and posing, he had a noble
character. He was simple and whole-souled, free from jealousy and
the love of money. He died highly honored in 1886 at the age of
seventy-five at a Wagner festival in Bayreuth. In fact it was difficult
to tell who received more honor at Bayreuth, Liszt in the audience or
Wagner at the conductor’s desk.
Liszt’s Accomplishments
As a pianist, no one has surpassed Liszt and he revealed the

piano’s possibilities. In addition to his pianoforte compositions, he
made “arrangements” of symphonies, chorals, operas, songs and
every other form, which brought them closer to the people. His
arrangements are so brilliant, although over-decorated and cheap in
effect, that he shows that the piano can almost reproduce the
orchestra.
Liszt was not as great a composer as he was a pianist and
stimulator of other musicians, and much of his music was written for
effect. Yet he was a great critic and his love of music for the future
rather than of the past, led him to be sympathetic with young
composers, for whom he opened the way. The people who gathered
about him disliked old forms and were looking for new music in
which he encouraged them. Among the musicians who were friends
and pupils at Weimar, were: Joseph Joachim Raff, Peter Cornelius,
Eduard Lassen, who took Liszt’s place when he left Weimar, Leopold
Damrosch, the father of Walter and Frank Damrosch of New York,
Alexander Ritter, the pianist and inspirer of so many great people,
and hundreds of others.
Liszt wrote many symphonic and choral pieces which showed
marked originality. Although not as profound as Wagner, he helped
Wagner so much that their names would be forever linked, even if his
daughter Cosima had not been Wagner’s wife.
Rubinstein and Von Bülow
Among other friends of Liszt of value to musical history were

Anton Rubinstein (1829–1894) (page 443), the Russian, and Hans
von Bülow (1830–1894), a German. Both these men were great
pianists and wrote noteworthy compositions. Liszt was a great
stimulus to them and they had many points in common. Rubinstein
was romantic and von Bülow, classic. Rubinstein did much to link
Germany and Russia musically, which was a help to both nations.
Von Bülow was an illustrious pianist, friend of Wagner, famous
conductor, and editor of many musical scores, among them an
edition of Beethoven’s Sonatas, still in constant use. Both these men
did much for pianists all over Europe.
Other great pianists and composers of their day were: Nikolai
Rubinstein (Anton’s brother) (1835–1881); Theodor Leschetizky
(1830–1915), trained by Carl Czerny, and he in turn trained
hundreds of pianists; Karl Tausig and many others.
Of course, the effect of these pianists was to make music and the
piano more popular, thus adding greatly to the musical culture of the
world.
Tchaikovsky
You probably know of Piotr (Peter) Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (1840–

1893) as a great symphony writer, but he was also a successful writer
of tone poems such as The Tempest, Francesco di Rimini, Manfred,
based on Byron’s Manfred, Hamlet, The Storm, Romeo and Juliet
and two incomplete poems, Destiny and Voievoda. Tchaikovsky was
born in Russia, he went to the school of Jurisprudence and later
entered the Ministry of Justice but soon began to compose music and
took a medal for composition for a piece which he wrote on Schiller’s
Ode to Joy, the poem Beethoven used in his 9th Symphony. He also
wrote The Nut Cracker Suite for orchestra, adapted from the score of
a Ballet, which includes a Russian dance, an Arab dance, a Chinese
dance, flower waltz, and other fascinating, whirling, delightful
dances.
Many of Tchaikovsky’s things not called tone poems have very
definite programs, such as The Snow Maiden (Snegovrotchka) a
favorite legend and music to a fairy tale—the parts are named Chorus
of Blind Gusslee Players, Monologue of the Frosts, Appearance of
the Wood Demons and so on.
Sergei Rachmaninov
Boecklin’s painting Isle of Death, inspired Sergei Rachmaninov

(1873) to write a most beautiful musical poem about its sombre trees
and the sea. As a distinguished pianist he has glorified the art in all
countries, especially in America. He was a student of Siloti and of
Zvierev, a friend of Tchaikovsky. His masters in harmony and theory
were Taneiev and Arensky. He has held musical posts of honor and
has written remarkable piano concertos, chamber music works,
choruses and one opera, Aleko. You probably know his much played
C minor Prelude which has been a sort of visiting card of
Rachmaninov to the public.

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In Search of Lost Futures 1st Edition

ISBN 978-3-030-63002-7 ISBN 978-3-030-63003-4 (eBook)

Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com

When the contributors to this volume completed their chapters, they

with oracles, religious salvation, reincarnation, policy, and other forms of

internal or “mentalist” approach common to the psychological sciences.

alternative activist groups to be found on the fringes of many European

1 Introduction: In Search of Lost Futures 1

2 Possibilities and Impossibilities in Acción 25

3 Put Your Body into It: Exploring Imagination

4 Staging Care: Dying, Death, and Possible Futures 75

5 Impossible Ethnography: Tracking Colonial

Part II Deep Interdisciplinarity

6 Future-Making in Times of Urban Sustainability:

7 Knowing and Imagining with Sustainable Makers 151

8 Anticipating Crisis as Affective Future-Making

9 Simulating and Trusting in Automated Futures:

Part III Autoethnography

10 Intimating the Possible Collapse of the Future:

11 Absence, Magic, and Impossible Futures 255

12 Projections and Possibilities: An Installation About

13 Exhibition Development as Restorative

Jodie Asselin, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the

Chong-Anna Canfora is Executive Director at Michigan Community

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of

ethnography, and Indigenous research methodologies. Her new mono-

ideologie i władza w życiu polskich migrantów w Norwegii [Embar-

Mary Worrall is Curator of Textiles and Social Justice at the Michigan

Fig. 2.1 Students construct a public memorial to the 43

Fig. 7.1 Open-Source Circular Economy Days Helsinki 2016

Introduction: In Search of Lost Futures

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston and Mark Auslander

© The Author(s) 2021 1

galleries. The installation, a meditation on lost futures, has the potential

movements, spearhead artistic initiatives, and develop revolutionary tech-

Anthropological Forays into the Future

Anthropologists have also documented how people anticipate the

In particular, they call for an interventionist anthropology, one that

The Three Approaches

considers an audiovisual research approach as a form of creative and

demonstrates that researchers’ critical engagement with their own posi-

Imagining and Intervening in the Future

inspiration to “imagine/do/think/be otherwise dances a fine line of re-

In recent years, multimodality—approaches and practices that employ

• and Ethnographic Terminalia, a collective of international artists and

Outside of the operas of Richard Strauss, of which we have written

Probably you think that any music on a program is program music!

Up to Hector Berlioz’ time (1803–1869), there was no definite

Cherubini, Director of the Conservatory, made a rule that men and

At one time he was engaged to another woman who was unkind to

It seems strange, but Berlioz disliked Bach and Palestrina and

He wrote the sort of melody that showed off each particular

(Father of the Tone Poem.)

Sympathetic Teacher, Composer, Pianist

He was well versed in literature, always carried Virgil in his pocket,

Another Mozart seems about to appear, for Franz Liszt (1811–

Here is a handbill used for advertising the little boy Liszt:

After Liszt’s father died in 1827, he gave up concert tours for a