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ANTHROPOLOGICAL OPTIMISM

This book theorizes the roles of optimism in anthropological thinking, research,

writing, and practice. It sets out to explore optimism’s origins and implications,
its conceptual and practical value, and its capacity to contribute to contemporary
anthropological aims. In an era of extensive ecological disruption and social dis-
tress, this volume contemplates how an optimistic anthropology can energize the
discipline while also contributing to bettering the lives, communities, and envi-
ronments of those we study. It brings together scholars diverse in background,
career stage, and theoretical approach in a collective attempt to comprehend
the myriad intersections of anthropology and optimism. The challenges of the
COVID-19 pandemic have recently underscored the larger, longer-term catas-
trophes of climate change, ecosystemic collapse, social injustice, and antipathy
toward scientific knowledge and those who produce it. In this context, exceed-
ingly few anthropologists feel comfortable observing and documenting passively
while their research communities face unrelenting waves of (un)natural disasters.
We need to act. But we also need to hope. Discontent with the state of the world
and cultural anthropology’s turn to increasingly positive, future-oriented, and
engaged work have converged to unleash a courageously optimistic anthropol-
ogy. This book is a timely springboard for this impactful and emergent approach.

Anna J. Willow is Professor of Anthropology at The Ohio State University, USA.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL
OPTIMISM
Engaging the Power of What Could
Go Right

Edited by Anna J. Willow

Designed cover image: sutthiphorn phanchart, Getty Images
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 Anna J. Willow
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material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Willow, Anna J., editor.
Title: Anthropological optimism : engaging the power of what could go right
/ edited by Anna J. Willow.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2023. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022046075 (print) | LCCN 2022046076 (ebook) | ISBN
9781032386430 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781032386447 (Paperback) | ISBN
9781003346036 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Applied anthropology. | Optimism.
Classification: LCC GN397.5 .A652 2023 (print) | LCC GN397.5 (ebook) |
DDC 301--dc23/eng/20221024
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046075
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046076
ISBN: 978-1-032-38643-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-38644-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-34603-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/b23231
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For my mom,
because we can always find hope.
CONTENTS

List of Contributors ix
Foreword xiii
Joel Robbins

Introduction: Why Optimism? 1

Anna J. Willow

1 A World Made Safe for (Future) Difference:

Anthropology and Utopian Possibility 29
Samuel Gerald Collins

2 Vertiginous Optimism: Optimistic Orientations in a

Field of Chronic Crisis 46
Daniel M. Knight

3 “Moving on and Moving Up”: Productive Angles

of Exploring Optimism 62
Kelly A. Yotebieng

4 Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Planting Optimism

in a Disrupted Ecology 71
Mankei Tam

5 Indigenous Optimism in the Colonialcene 88

Natasha Myhal and Clint Carroll
viii Contents

6 Putting the Pieces in Place: Optimistic Futuring in

Transition Culture 104
Anna J. Willow

7 Optimism at Scale: Exploring Everyday Activism in

Atlanta’s Alternative Food Networks 117
Hilary B. King

8 Fusing Outrage and Hope into Acts of Resistance,

Volunteerism, and Allyships 131
Patricia Widener and Gail Choate

9 Optimistic Anthropology in the Work of Systems

Changemakers 147
Alison Gold

10 China 2060: Envisioning a Human-Centered Approach

to Energy Transition 164
Bryan Tilt

11 Doing Anthropology Forward: Emerging Technologies

and Possible Futures 177
Sarah Pink

Afterword: Optimism as Capacity 192

Rebecca Bryant

Index 197
CONTRIBUTORS

Rebecca Bryant is a Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University

who studies forced migration, borders, and unrecognized states. Through those
subjects, she investigates the state and sovereignty, with a special focus on tempo-
rality, historicities, and the future. Much of Bryant’s ethnographic work focuses
on ethnic conflict and displacement, border practices, post-conflict reconcilia-
tion, and contested sovereignty on both sides of the Cyprus Green Line and in
Turkey. She studied Philosophy (BA) and Cultural Anthropology (MA, PhD) at
the University of Chicago and has held teaching and research positions at the
London School of Economics, George Mason University, and the American
University in Cairo.

Clint Carroll is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the

University of Colorado Boulder. He received his doctorate from the University
of California Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management,
and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona in Anthropology and
American Indian Studies. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, he works at the
intersections of Indigenous studies, anthropology, and political ecology. His first
book, Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance
(University of Minnesota Press, 2015), explores how tribal natural resource man-
agers navigate the material and structural conditions of settler colonialism, and
how recent efforts in cultural revitalization inform such practices through tra-
ditional Cherokee governance and local environmental knowledge. He is an
active member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and
the Society for Applied Anthropology. He also serves on the editorial boards for
Cultural Anthropology and Environment and Society.
x Contributors

Gail Choate is a PhD candidate in the Culture, Society, and Politics track of
Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Her research examines the
interaction of social movements and political behavior. Specifically, she analyzes
the role of social movements in the election of women to high public office and
how women in office mediate their position with the social movements that
contributed to their success. Prior to candidacy, Choate was an adjunct professor
teaching American Government and Comparative Politics. In that role, she wove
community activism into the classroom as part of her commitment to empower
students as changemakers.

Samuel Gerald Collins is a Professor of Anthropology at Towson University

in Baltimore, Maryland, where he researches and teaches on urban studies, social
media, design anthropology, and information technologies in the United States
and in South Korea. Among other books and articles, he is the author of All
Tomorrow’s Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future (Berghahn, 2021)
and co-author (with Matthew Durington) of Networked Anthropology (Routledge,
2015).

Alison Gold is passionate about sharing her unique combination of skills and
experiences as an anthropologist, systems changemaker, culture-builder, strate-
gist, and facilitator with organizations and collaborations seeking to create a
positive and equitable world. After 15 years working in nonprofits, philanthropy,
and government, she founded Optimistic Anthropology LLC in 2017 to help
organizations and multi-sector partnerships understand how complex social,
economic, and environmental problems came to be and develop the cultures,
processes, and strategies to move systems that produce these outcomes to health-
ier states. She calls Washington, DC, and Sarajevo home. Learn more about her
work and connect with Alison at www.OptimisticAnthro.com.

Hilary B. King is Associate Director of the Master’s in Development Practice at

Emory University, a professional degree grounded in the anthropology of devel-
opment. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Emory University.
She uses ethnographic research methods to explore business practices, knowl-
edge flows, definitions of sustainability, and emerging political and social net-
works in the realm of sustainable agriculture. Her current research focuses on
the anthropology of organizations and bureaucracy, interrogating the impact of
non-profit professionalization on direct market agriculture in the United States.
Her work has been supported by the US Department of Agriculture, Fulbright,
and the Watson Foundation.

Daniel M. Knight is a Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology

and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St.
Andrews, Scotland. He is the author of four books on crisis, temporality, and
 Contributors xi

future-making, most recently including Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of

Time and the Unforeseen (Berghahn, 2021) and The Anthropology of the Future
(Cambridge, 2019, with Rebecca Bryant). He has edited numerous collec-
tions, including Emptiness (2020) and Alternatives to Austerity (2017). Daniel is
­co-editor of History & Anthropology journal and convenor of the Association of
Social Anthropogists’ Anthropology of Time network.

Natasha Myhal is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the

University of Colorado Boulder. She received her master’s degree in Indigenous
Studies from the University of Kansas, and her bachelor’s degree from the
University of Minnesota–Morris in Environmental Studies and American Indian
Studies. She is a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Her
current research seeks to understand barriers to practicing traditional lifeways,
where the fields of anthropology and Indigenous studies point to three objects of
concern: legal relationships, political ecologies of health, and gender practices.
As such, Myhal’s doctoral work seeks to contribute to global biodiversity efforts
to renew and restore the ecosystems and cultural systems upon which Indigenous
people rely.

Sarah Pink is Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Research

Lab at Monash University and co-leads the People Programme in the Australian
Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and
Society. She is a design anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, specializing in
futures, emerging technologies, and innovative methodologies. Her recent books
include Emerging Technologies/Life at the Edge of the Future (Routledge, 2022), Design
Ethnography (Routledge, 2022) and Everyday Automation (Routledge, 2022).

Joel Robbins is Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the

University of Cambridge. He is author of the books Becoming Sinners: Christianity
and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (University of California Press,
2004), and Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life (Oxford University
Press, 2020). His work focuses on issues of values, ethics, religion, and anthro-
pological theory.

Mankei Tam is currently Research Grants Council Postdoctoral Fellow in

Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research concerns
citizens’ self-empowering practices in critical assessments of radiation risks and
their collaborations to explore new forms of agriculture after the Fukushima
nuclear disaster. His research interests include political ecology, science and
technology studies, multispecies ethnography, and studies in social movements.
Since 2005, Mankei has engaged in environmental activism in Asia through
Greenpeace and Earthwatch. He was the Director of Amnesty International
Hong Kong from 2019 to 2020.
xii Contributors

Bryan Tilt is a Professor of Anthropology at Oregon State University. He is an

environmental anthropologist who specializes in natural resources and energy
development in contemporary China. Tilt also engages in interdisciplinary proj-
ects related to natural resource issues in the United States, including sustainable
agriculture, water resources, fisheries, energy production, and coastal develop-
ment. Among many other works, he is the author of Dams and Development in
China: The Moral Economy of Water and Power (Columbia University Press, 2015).

Patricia Widener is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Florida Atlantic

University and the author of Toxic and Intoxicating Oil (Rutgers, 2021) and Oil
Injustice (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011). Her research examines the conflicts
and collaborations of climate and environmental groups, oil corporations, and
communities impacted by oil disasters and oil extraction and transportation
projects in Ecuador, New Zealand, and the United States. She studies these
dynamics through the lenses of environmental justice, political economy, and
visual analysis. Currently, she is researching how social justice advocates publicly
framed their grievances and demands following the 2016 presidential election.
She teaches courses on the environment, poverty, and disaster.

Anna J. Willow is a Professor of Anthropology at the Ohio State University.

An environmental anthropologist who studies how individuals and communities
experience and respond to externally imposed resource extractive development,
she is the author of Strong Hearts, Native Lands: The Cultural and Political Landscape
of Anishinaabe Anti-Clearcutting Activism (SUNY Press, 2012) and Understanding
ExtrACTIVISM: Culture and Power in Natural Resource Disputes (Routledge,
2018). Willow received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of
Wisconsin–Madison as well as a MS in natural resources and environment from
the University of Michigan.

Kelly A. Yotebieng is a practicing medical anthropologist interested in the

intersections of global health, marginality, hope, and risk. She has received rec-
ognition and support for her work from the Fulbright Institute of International
Education, US Institute of Peace, and National Science Foundation, among oth-
ers. Prior to completing her PhD at the Ohio State University in Anthropology,
she received a Master of Public Health from Tulane University in collabora-
tion with the United States Peace Corps in Cameroon. Dr. Yotebieng teaches
courses on social and emotional determinants of health with Hunter College’s
Department of Human Biology and is a Program Director focusing on ending
neglected conditions that drive global health disparities with the END Fund.
FOREWORD

This is a brave and important book. Anthropology is once again working hard to
find a new footing for itself, asking more insistently than it has in at least three
decades why it matters and if it should even continue to exist in any way that
would be recognizable from the point of view of its past. When I told my mater-
nal grandmother in the mid-1980s that I wanted to be an anthropologist, she
replied by asking me, “What is that?” I told her that anthropologists went to stay
with people in other places—this was back when the otherwise was still thought
to be tightly correlated with an elsewhere—to try to learn about what they cared
about and how they lived. “Why,” she quickly replied with another question, “is
that any of your business?” Back then I had the kind of answers the potentials and
contradictions of which Samuel Gerald Collins so ably surveys in his chapter:
A mix of well-rehearsed lines about documenting the range of options open to
human beings and a youthful zeal to jump onboard a train carrying what E. B.
Tylor had from virtually its first run promised was, in relation to its own home
environment, a “reformer’s science” that would use what it learned about other
people’s lives to unsettle taken-for-granted ways of thought and life among the
members of its audience at home.
The question rarely asked at that time, at least in my own youthful experience,
was what was in it for the people the anthropologist learned from that made it
worthwhile for those people to treat that learning as the anthropologist’s busi-
ness. There was some sense that anthropology might increase understanding and
tolerance in the metropole in ways that could benefit the people anthropologists
studied, but such claims were not well worked out, did not directly challenge the
world-systemic status quo (the going salvation of the discipline back then was
experimenting with new high-modernist and postmodernist forms of writing),
xiv Foreword

and did not foresee the soon to be rapidly tightening grip of the global political-
economic system on almost all the elsewheres anthropologists were at that time
in the habit of making their business. By now, for many in the discipline, these
kinds of rationales for making other people’s lives anthropologists’ business have
started to seem at the very least threadbare and more often unacceptable, even if
not straightforward, cases of bad faith. So, the discipline finds itself asking again,
and with some urgency: What does anthropology have to offer now?
The answer to this question that this book puts on the table is that what anthro-
pology might have to offer is…optimism. This is not the kind of answer one
would predict. For one thing, optimism is not really having a moment these days.
To my eye, at least, it rarely goes out in public without Lauren Berlant’s (2011)
“cruel” riding adjectival shotgun to protect it from coming off as a Pollyannaish
failure to reckon with the actual state of the world. Terry Eagleton, for his part,
is so pitched against optimism that he wants to purify even the notion of hope of
any optimistic elements. He finds optimism a fatalistic “quirk of temperament”
that “spreads a monochrome glaze over the whole world.” (2015, 2). It breeds a
kind of confident, passive waiting for the inevitable improvement of things that
Eagleton finds pernicious. Even Christianity, Eagleton tells us, is built around
“hope…but no callow optimism” (2015, 3). The same is true of what he takes to
be genuine Marxism. Whatever hope is, Eagleton thus concludes, “it is certainly
not a question of optimism” (2015, 12). Without a doubt, anthropologists these
days are quick to conjure with hope as a focus of study if not a personal stance,
but if they are holding on to any optimism while they do so, they rarely tip their
hands. So, optimism is a genuine candidate to count as a truly new reason to do
anthropology, and its novelty, when combined with its appearing now, so seem-
ingly out of season, is what makes this book’s promotion of it both brave and
important.
In her elegant and unusually substantial introduction, Anna Willow makes a
number of moves to prepare optimism for its close-up in the volume as a whole.
One of these is offering a novel definition of optimism that limbers the concept
up so it can shake off the look of passivity that so bothers Eagleton and become a
bit more assertive. Thus, Willow tells us, for the purposes of this book, optimism
is defined as a “belief in the human capacity to create positive change.” Among
other advantages, this definition has the benefit of such beliefs being something
anthropologists can study effectively with their field methods, since identifying
beliefs and how they shape action has long been a core part of the discipline.
This is, as they used to say, an operational definition—we really can explore how
people think about and try to carry out positive change. Willow then goes on
to acknowledge that as a topic for anthropology, optimism is going to have to
reckon frankly with the very difficult, often catastrophic conditions in which
many people live today. This new kind of anthropology cannot be a complete
turning away from the world’s darkness (to adopt Ortner’s [2016]) term). Rather,
optimistic anthropology will illuminate that darkness from a direction that is
 Foreword xv

different from, though in Willow’s reckoning not a substitute for, the much
more well-developed traditions of critical anthropology. In common with many
versions of the latter, optimistic anthropology also holds that objective research
is not enough to make anthropology matter; it must also be involved in “pro-
moting justice, wellbeing, and sustainability.” Finally, Willow situates optimistic
anthropology in relation to four other recent areas of disciplinary interest: The
anthropology of the good, the future, design, and activist engagement.
As Willow mentions in her Introduction, of the members of that set, I am most
aligned with the anthropology of the good, and my brief remaining remarks will
consider the relation of the anthropology of optimism to that strand of thinking
(Robbins 2013). Inasmuch as in my own formulation the anthropology of the
good is in important respects about focusing anthropological attention on the ways
people define the good and seek to realize it in the course of their social lives, it
clearly shares much with an optimistic anthropology that “amplifies and celebrates
the diverse ways in which people around the world use the power of positive vision
to build their own best lives” (Willow, Introduction). But there is another aspect
of my argument about the anthropology of the good that is sometimes left to the
side in people’s readings of my original 2013 article (though it is taken up quite
thoughtfully by Daniel Knight in Chapter 2 of this volume). This is the emphasis
on the way that focusing on the differences between models of the good that are
prevalent in varying social worlds might allow anthropology to recover some of
the critical force of its original interest in the range of variation in human ways of
life. I hoped, that is, that an anthropology of the good could alert its audience to
the existence of goods that are indeed worth pursuing but that are not highlighted,
or sometimes even formulated, in their own traditions (see Robbins 2019). This is
an important part of that article’s argument because, pace Sherry Ortner’s claims in
her 2016 piece on dark anthropology, I do not think that studying people’s efforts
at resistance will be enough to present our audience with viable alternative models
of the good (Robbins n.d.). Instead, following the critical theorist Maeve Cooke,
I suspect that “without some, more or less determinate, guiding idea of the good
society, critical social thinking would be inconceivable” (2006, 197). This means,
as musicologist Simon Frith puts it, we need to explore “how people come to
believe, imaginatively, in something more than resistance” (1998, 20). Focusing on
optimism is a promising approach to doing what Frith recommends—to finding
our way, that is, toward people’s varied versions of the good.
Yet there is a potential complication that this aspiration to use ethnographic
research to find alternative models of the good inevitably confronts, though I did
not reckon with it in my original formulation of my version of this position. This
complication comes up when one asks how ethnographers ought to approach the
study of people who are committed to versions of the good that many anthro-
pologists are inclined to think of as bad. The analogous question for optimistic
anthropology would be: What are anthropologists to do when they are not opti-
mistic about some of the things the people they study are optimistic about?
xvi Foreword

Joseph Webster (2020) limns the issue of goods about which many anthro-
pologists are not optimistic in his book on the militantly anti-Catholic Orange
Order of Scotland. The sectarianism of the Orange Order makes them stand as
a clear example of a group whose most vocal definition of the good is hard for
many anthropologists to embrace, but there are also less obvious cases of trouble-
some goods coming to light in the anthropological literature that are perhaps
more challenging for anthropology by virtue of not being as cut-and-dried as
the Orange Order one first appears (at least before reading Webster’s account of
it, which does not treat it as being so simple). Consider for example the recent
upsurge in work arguing that in many parts of the world people highly value
hierarchical patron-client relations, defining a good world not as one where
everyone is equal, but as one where everyone has relations both with those
above themselves in some or other hierarchy and with those below (Ferguson
2013; Haynes and Hickel 2016; Peacock 2016; Keeler 2017; Piliavsky 2021).
Could this vision of a valuable way of ordering society be a productive alter-
native to some taken-for-granted anthropological definitions of the good, so
many of which focus on equality between individuals (Tidey 2022, 20)? To test
this point against one work in this growing tradition, would optimistic anthro-
pologists be able to share with Zimbabwean prosperity gospel followers their
optimism about the potential of their religion to allow people to formulate and
move upward within valued hierarchies in spiritual terms at a time when the
collapse of the Copperbelt economy has made it difficult to do so in material
ones? (Haynes 2017). Related issues come up in this volume in Knight’s eth-
nography of the individual, vertiginous success stories that he discovers amidst
broad austerity-based social suffering in Greece—and in the pushback he reports
greeting him when he recounts his discoveries in somewhat optimistic tones to
other anthropologists.
Such clashes between versions of the good that elicit optimism from anthro-
pologists and those that do so from some of the people that anthropologists study
raise tricky questions of judgment, questions that used to be muted by a broad
if not deep disciplinary acceptance of relativism but that are more rarely treated
this way now (Langlitz 2020). Having spent some time the last few years com-
paring anthropology and Christian theology as disciplines, I have been struck
by one thing: theologians are carefully trained in how to make judgments about
the various expressions of Christianity (academic and otherwise) that they study.
They have well-thought-out routines of testing such expressions against scrip-
ture, against various hermeneutic approaches to scripture, and against tradition
in formulating and arguing for their judgments. Anthropologists, by contrast,
receive little or no training in judgment (and indeed, given relativism’s place in
the canon of anthropological thought, they are generally carefully taught how
at first to withhold judgment, at least until they can understand any given belief
or practice in its cultural context) (Robbins 2020). What this means for anthro-
pology, I worry, is that as a discipline we tend to educate scholars who anchor
 Foreword xvii

their strongest judgments concerning which among other people’s goods really
are good in their own local definitions of the good (which, even when they
are oppositional in their own social contexts, are still homegrown). The risk is
that we will make the same rather thinly considered judgments in determining
which among other people’s optimistic projects are worthy of our optimism.
Approaching the task of judgment this way effectively short-circuits the most
specifically anthropological part of the discipline’s critical potential: its ability to
open its audience up to new formulations of such phenomena as “justice, well-
being, and sustainability” that bear consideration.
I hope the slightly cautionary tone of this final paragraph does not suggest
any lack of optimism in my own response to the exciting and thought-provoking
project this very original book inaugurates. Even as it offers details on some cases
that do indeed foster optimism about the human ability to create change for the
better, it raises profound questions about why anthropology matters now. It is
a great resource to think with in our current moment and surely beyond, and
it lays the groundwork for a new generative stream of anthropological thought
and work that can stand side-by-side with those of the anthropology of good,
the future, design, and activist engagement in whose company it situates its ini-
tial formulation. One does not have to be an optimist to see that it has a bright
future.
Joel Robbins

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Haynes, Naomi. 2017. Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt.
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xviii Foreword

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Robbins, Joel. 2019. “Why is it Useful to Compare Cultural Definitions of the Good?”
Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 2: 219–223.
Robbins, Joel. 2020. Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Robbins, Joel. n.d. “On the Prospects for a Comparative Study of the Good: Beyond the
Dark in Anthropological Relativism.” Unpublished paper.
Tidey, Sylvia. 2022. Ethics or the Right Thing? Corruption and Care in the Age of Good
Governance. Chicago: Hau Books.
INTRODUCTION
Why Optimism?

Anna J. Willow

These days, optimism is in short supply. The racial and regional disparities and
the extreme income inequality on display in the twenty-first century are under-
lain by the same extractivist thinking responsible for the ecocidal overshoot that
now undermines the Earth’s ability to support life as we once knew it. The stable
climate our predecessors took for granted is changing rapidly, bringing rising sea
levels and extreme weather events (IPCC 2018), and we anticipate an unprec-
edented number of plant and animal extinctions within our lifetimes (IPBES
2019; Ceballos et al. 2020). These predicaments are both attributable to and
detrimental to humans, with impoverished and otherwise marginalized com-
munities both disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of climate change and
ecological decline and disproportionately innocent in their causation. As I write
these words, war rages in Ukraine, triggering a humanitarian crisis, destabiliz-
ing global security, and threatening the world’s already precarious food supply
(Katser-Buchkovska 2022). There is good reason for despair.
Headlines proclaiming that the societal collapse predicted in the well-known
Limits to Growth report is running “right on schedule” do little to inspire con-
fidence in what the future will bring (Ahmed 2021). Five decades ago, Donella
Meadows and her team published the results of computer simulations (known as
World3) for a dozen possible scenarios based on a diverse array of assumptions
about resource use, technology, and societal values. The report concluded that the
relentless pursuit of economic growth would lead to steep declines in productive
capacity and human population in the twenty-first century (Meadows et al. 2013
[1972]). These findings have been revisited several times, most recently by Gaya
Herrington, who discovered a strong fit between two of the modeled scenarios
and contemporary reality: Both the “Business as Usual 2” (BAU2; i.e., business

DOI: 10.4324/b23231-1
2 Anna J. Willow

as usual, but using double the amount of resources as in the original model) and
“Comprehensive Technology” (CT, which assumes technological developments
to reduce pollution, improve efficiency, and increase yields) scenarios appear
consistent with current conditions (Herrington 2021). Notably, while the BAU2
scenario does lead to the kind of steep decline that portends a societal “collapse,”
the CT scenario offers a much softer landing, even as economic and population
growth come to an end. Far from a declaration of doomsday, Herrington sees
her findings as a call for change. Following the CT path demands that we avoid
ecological tipping points while embracing beneficial technological and social
ones. And even a “Stabilized World” (SW) scenario, in which a widespread shift
in values heralds sustainable choices and policies, is not out of reach. “It’s not yet
too late for humankind to purposefully change course to significantly alter the
trajectory of future data points,” Herrington writes, “a transformation of societal
priorities which, together with technological innovations specifically aimed at
furthering these new priorities, can bring humanity back on the path of the SW
scenario” (2021, 623).
As this brief example illustrates, optimism exists, yet it is often eclipsed by
fear. Purveyors of dystopian drama have, to date, managed to yell above those
who proclaim: “We can do this, because we must.” Quieter still are the voices
that declare the end of industrial society something to celebrate. But increas-
ingly, leading public intellectuals argue that attention to positive possibilities is
necessary to counter the notion that socioecological catastrophe is inevitable
(e.g., Monbiot 2017; Goodall and Abrams 2021). It now appears that making
attractive alternatives visible and accessible may be the best way to convince
people to trade destructive practices for more sustainable and just options (ISSC/
UNESCO 2013). Not only is this trend evident in public, activist, and policy
circles, but it also reflects a broad shift in the humanities and social sciences away
from critique for its own sake toward projects with more immediate applications
and more positive implications (Anker and Felski 2017). This volume enters into
and furthers this conversation by considering what anthropological optimism
might mean for the discipline and the world at large. In this context, we ask:
Where does optimism come from? What assorted forms does it take? What is its
conceptual and practical value? And how might embracing optimism contribute
to anthropological aims?
Anthropological Optimism: Engaging the Power of What Could Go Right catalyzes
a vibrant conversation about the role of optimism in anthropological thinking,
research, writing, and practice. The recent COVID-19 pandemic underscored
the intertwined and longer-term catastrophes of climate change, ecosystemic
collapse, social injustice, and antipathy toward scientific knowledge and those
who produce it. Exceedingly few anthropologists now feel comfortable passively
observing and documenting while their research communities face unrelent-
ing waves of (un)natural disasters. Increasingly, scholars recognize (and utilize)
their positions of relative privilege, while at the same time realizing that today’s
 Introduction 3

monumental challenges will leave no one untouched and demand a comprehen-

sive, collaborative response. We need to act. But we also need to hope. As human-
ity’s collective sense of risk and unpredictability has intensified, anthropological
attention to various forms of optimistic future-making has increased (Kleist and
Jansen 2016). In an era of extensive ecological disruption and social distress, this
volume contemplates how anthropological optimism can energize the discipline
while also enriching the lives, communities, and environments we study.
Eschewing outmoded illusions of objectivity and moving beyond reflexive
cultural critique, the authors featured in this volume acknowledge their ­ability—
and ponder their ethical duty—to contribute to relevant policy debates and
work toward more fulfilling futures (see Speed 2006; Bryant and Knight 2019).
Anthropology has long specialized in making alternatives visible and convincing
our various audiences that other worlds are within our reach. Taking inspiration
from ethnographic practice, this volume demonstrates anthropology’s capacity
to illuminate an affirmative tapestry of global opportunities and imagine self-
determined desirable futures as a first step toward achieving them (Collins 2007).
Capturing a range of optimism-infused scenarios for the future, the authors fea-
tured here draw on diverse perspectives and voices as they put forward concep-
tual and concrete recommendations for collaboratively enriching the world we
share.

What Is Optimism and Why Does It Matter?

In day-to-day discussions, the term optimism typically denotes confidence in
favorable outcomes, either for a specific occurrence or for the future in gen-
eral. More broadly, it implies a positive attitude and the perception that one’s
metaphorical glass is half full (as opposed to half empty). Psychology, the field
that has spent the most definitive energy on the topic, identifies optimism as a
personal trait reflecting “the extent to which people hold generalized favorable
expectancies for their future” (Carver et al. 2010, 879). Psychologists have dem-
onstrated that whether individuals expect positive or negative things to happen
is a significant determinant of outcomes in mental and physical health, relation-
ships, resilience, and many other dimensions of wellbeing, with optimists faring
far better than pessimists. In the world of philosophy, optimism is associated with
the work of seventeenth-century German thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
who argued that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds (Craig 2005). Fittingly,
the English word optimism is derived from the Latin optimus, meaning “best”
(OED Online 2021b).
Given this (heavily Western) intellectual history, it behooves us to take
stock of how optimism’s implicit association with linear temporalities and
goals of progress over time accord with the global repertoire of cross-culturally
­relevant—and culturally relative—positive expectations. The former, we con-
tend, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient component of optimism. Given that
4 Anna J. Willow

notions like “favorable” and “best” are determined by beholders with very dif-
ferent proclivities, constant questioning of optimism’s structures of value (opti-
mism for what?) and power (who decides what is good?) is a vital pursuit (see
Knight, this volume). In this light, optimism is revealed as plural, multiple,
and mutable. An anthropological approach compels our optimisms (and the
resultant responses to the challenges we face) to be guided by the people we
work with at local levels, as opposed to more conventional methods that permit
powerful outsiders to formulate assumptions (and make decisions) on behalf of
entire communities.
While relatively few anthropologists have written about optimism per se, the
closely overlapping topic of hope has garnered considerable attention in recent
years. Indeed, Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight’s conception of hope as “a way
of pressing into the future that attempts to pull certain potentialities into actual-
ity” (2019, 134) is closely aligned with this volume’s interpretation of optimism,
most significantly in the shared recognition that people possess the agentive
capacity to create new possibilities and shift desired likelihoods from possible to
probable through deliberate action (anthropological treatments of hope—along
with other elements of “the good”—are examined in more detail below). As
“desire combined with expectation” (OED Online 2021a), hope demands opti-
mism. It requires believing that things could go right.
Optimism, however, should not be taken to imply passive faith or compla-
cency. Our optimism is infused with uncertainty. Just because things could go
right does not mean they necessarily will. The conditional and subjunctive nature
of the word could is significant here; optimism denotes a state of becoming, a
process, a direction. It signifies a relationship to a future that is tractable but still
unknown (see Tilt, this volume). It is up to people—reflexive, creative human
actors—to design and implement the diverse futures they desire, whether they do
so alone or in conjunction with others (a category that may sometimes include
anthropologists and analogous partners). In this way, our version of optimism
runs parallel to the notion of active hope popularized by resilience scholars Joanna
Macy and Chris Johnstone; it is about identifying desired outcomes “and then
playing an active role in bringing them about” (2012, 37). While recognizing
that both the futures people strive for and the means through which they seek
them are diverse, we define optimism for the purposes of this volume as belief in
the human capacity to create positive change.
This volume considers how a distinctively anthropological emphasis on opti-
mism can further understandings of the rich range of human experience while
simultaneously promoting justice, wellbeing, and sustainability. Anthropological
optimism centers positive human capacity, but it is not naïve. It refuses to obscure
injustice and despair. Grounded in ethnographic observation and analysis and
tempered by a bifocal view of humanity’s dark/bad and bright/good sides,
anthropological optimism is distinguished by its nuanced consideration of the
tensions that punctuate and complicate this continuum. Far from positioning
 Introduction 5

optimism as an antithesis or antidote to dark anthropology (Ortner 2016), we

intend it as a complementary form of ethical engagement.
We also recognize that attention to optimism is not without potential pit-
falls. Our positivity—like that of our research participants—should not be inter-
preted as a dismissal of the profound and pervasive suffering present in the world
today, nor should it be permitted to obscure the power imbalances that perme-
ate contemporary relationships (including those between researchers and those
they study). Optimism, we concede, can be cruelly ironic; in some cases, the
very things that people desire become obstacles to their flourishing and long-
term success (Berlant 2011). Anthropological optimism does not justify cultural
movements that twist optimistic rhetoric to promote socially and/or ecologically
destructive causes (e.g., white supremacy, greenwashing), although it may be
well positioned to better comprehend their subjectivities. Optimism does not
sugarcoat historical and contemporary traumas flowing from colonialism, racism,
and environmental decline; it instead amplifies and celebrates the diverse ways in
which people around the world use the power of positive vision to build their
own best lives.
Generally speaking, ours is not an optimistic time. In stark contrast to the
future of prosperity and progress imagined in the 1950s, popular sentiment
increasingly foresees global ecological and civilizational collapse (e.g., Oreskes
and Conway 2014; Scranton 2015). Faced with this grim reality, many individu-
als struggle to find a constructive way forward. A quick glance at our own friends,
family members, and neighbors may serve to illustrate the polarity of reactions
to the onslaught of bad news; as some pacify themselves with hedonistic excess,
others plunge into paralyzing despair. Especially concerning is the number of
young people suffering severe anxiety as a result of the climate/ecological crisis
(Panu 2020). In a 2019 survey of American teens, 57% said they were scared
about climate change and 52% reported feeling angry about it (Plautz 2020). In
the same year, a survey in the UK revealed that nearly one in five young people
does not feel that life is worth living—double the rate recorded a decade earlier
(Booth 2019). In the intervening years, the pace of change and the prevalence
of despair—exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic—has only increased. A
more recent survey of youth in ten countries between the ages of sixteen and 25
found that of 45% of respondents were so worried about climate change that it
affected their daily life and ability to function (Hickman et al. 2021). We stand
with those—young and old alike—searching for ways to move courageously
forward in the face of pervasive cynicism and sociopolitical inertia. Optimism, in
this context, is a mode of resistance.
This volume is founded upon three simple premises.
First, we affirm the ethical responsibility of scholars to use their knowl-
edge, skills, and resources in ways that contribute to the resolution of critical
contemporary challenges. Cognizant of the conjoined catastrophes of climate
change, ecological degradation, and social injustice, most researchers no longer
6 Anna J. Willow

feel comfortable calmly conducting “objective” social science while we bear

witness to immense suffering and the biosphere we share continues to deterio-
rate. Increasingly, engagement in public debates and campaigns have become
accepted—and in some cases expected—aspects of academic life (Checker et al.
2014; Willow and Yotebieng 2020).
Second, we believe that one significant way for anthropologists (and those
with overlapping proclivities) to engender positive change is to present compel-
ling alternatives to the destructive and dissatisfying ways of life now widely nor-
malized within industrial societies. With firsthand experience of diverse realities
and relationships, anthropologists are uniquely situated to amplify a vibrant array
of visions for humanity—along the way dispelling notions that dominant nar-
ratives, assumptions, and arrangements are the only or best option (Egan 2013).
As Margaret Mead declared toward the end of her career, one of anthropology’s
greatest contributions to the world is its ability to keep people’s imaginations
open (2005, 275). Discovering that other worlds are both possible and within
reach inspires individuals to imagine how things could be different, which
makes them much more likely to invest their time, energy, and determination
in the realization of desirable futures (Hopkins 2019). When publicly engaged
scholars observe, analyze, and communicate about diverse (sub)cultures, they
illuminate a hopeful assortment of possible futures, thereby transforming not
only how the world is understood but also the world itself (Gibson-Graham and
Roelvink 2010).
Third, accepting the inherent dynamism of all cultural beliefs and practices
means having faith that people can change—and catalyze change. From our
individual values (which are molded by the cultures we learn to inhabit) to our
shared economic and political systems (which are extrapolations of repeated daily
decisions), the circumstances we confront today are not inevitable. Humans have
the ability to imagine and anticipate multiple futures. Contrary to the neoliberal
doctrine of “no alternative,” our attentive agency enables us to make conscious
decisions in order to evade negative fates and encourage more desirable ones.
Even as many prognosticators envision dark days ahead, Paul Raskin and his
colleagues see it otherwise. “Humanity has the power to foresee, to choose and
to act,” they affirm, and even if we are skeptical, “a future of enriched lives,
human solidarity and a healthy planet is possible” (Raskin et al. 2002, ix, emphasis
added). Recognizing humans as reflexive elements of a system that is simul-
taneously social and ecological demands that we view ourselves not simply as
antagonists driving global environmental destruction, but also as “protagonists
who can influence the future” in positive ways (O’Brien 2013, 77). This change
of mind has important consequences: Thinking of ourselves as “creative agents
of deliberate change” opens doors to myriad possibilities for positive, proactive
response (ISSC/UNESCO 2013, 7). We can—and we must—enact sweeping
societal transformations. A journey of this magnitude cannot commence with-
out optimism.
 Introduction 7

In recent decades, anthropological approaches emphasizing the good, the

future, engagement, and design have cleared a path for this volume’s ventures
into the intersection of anthropology and optimism. It is to these precedents that
we now turn.

The Anthropology of the Good

For those of us who came of academic age in the 1990s and early 2000s, focusing
on adversity was par for the course. Graduate students were encouraged to prove
their worth through incisive critique. Those of us who hoped to get academic
jobs selected research topics and field sites riddled with systemic inequities and
their tangible consequences, which we then proceeded to illuminate through
nuanced ethnographies and discerning analyses. Joel Robbins synopsized this
trend in an influential 2013 article tracing the replacement of pre-1980s anthro-
pology’s “savage” Other with a disciplinary centering of suffering subjects—people
“living in pain, in poverty, or under conditions of violence or oppression” (2013,
448). The phrase dark anthropology (coined by Sherry Ortner in her theoretical
overview of anthropology since the 1980s) likewise captures the field’s collec-
tive focus on “the harsh and brutal dimensions of human experience, and the
structural and historical conditions that produce them” (2016, 49). Reacting to
conditions created by neoliberal globalization, Ortner says, anthropologists came
to see the world “almost entirely in terms of power, exploitation, and chronic
pervasive inequality” (2016, 50).
Gradually, however, this dark curtain has begun to lift. While careful never
to downplay the difficult circumstances confronting large portions of the world’s
population, both Robbins and Ortner observe that anthropology has recently
expanded its focus to include a vibrant array of optimistic themes. Robbins
goes so far as to call for a “new focus on how people living in different societies
strive to create the good in their lives” (2013, 457). He shares further reflec-
tions on this topic in this volume’s Foreword. The anthropology of the good is
now a robust genre, notes Ortner, one that is well complemented by the field’s
advancing emphasis on resistance and alternatives (2016) and that requires no
compromise of theoretical complexity (Laidlaw 2016). Increasingly, contem-
porary anthropologists appreciate the analytical and practical value of investi-
gating cultural processes that support functioning communities and landscapes
(Osterhoudt 2021).
Wellbeing, happiness, hope, and aspiration figure prominently among the
interconnected themes taken up by anthropologists of the good. In The Good
Life, for example, Edward F. Fischer argues that wellbeing involves far more than
just material conditions: Physical health and safety, family and social relation-
ships, aspiration and opportunity, dignity and fairness, and commitment to a
larger purpose also play important roles. Seeking to understand “the good life”
as people themselves conceive of it, Fischer suggests embracing the “constructive
8 Anna J. Willow

possibilities of a positive anthropology” capable of offering genuine solutions

to complement the discipline’s characteristically critical stance. “In addition to
documenting structural inequalities,” he states, such an anthropology “would
look at cultural norms and social structures that seem to work well and from
which lessons could be extrapolated” (Fischer 2014, 215).
The even more subjective notion of happiness has also attracted anthropo-
logical attention. Beginning with the premise that how diverse groups of people
comprehend, assess, and pursue happiness reveals much about how they wish to
live, what they see as worthwhile, and what they believe matters most, Harry
Walker and Iza Kavedžija call for ethnographic investigations into “how happi-
ness figures as an idea, mood, or motive in people’s day-to-day lives” (2015, 5).
While long dismissed by anthropologists as an elitist concern that detracted from
the discipline’s critical social justice focus, it now appears that examining hap-
piness can help us understand “what gives lives a sense of purpose or direction,
or how people search for the best way to live—even in dire or hostile circum-
stances” (Walker and Kavedžija 2015, 17). Construed (as it often is) as some-
thing to strive for, happiness is closely connected to motivation and the feeling
that “one is headed in the right direction” (Walker and Kavedžija 2015, 15). In
this sense, happiness evokes two additional foci within the anthropology of the
good—hope and aspiration.
While the existence of hope has long been implicitly recognized in social-
scientific explorations of revolution, revitalization, and utopian movements, it
was only following Vincent Crapanzano’s reflective essay on hope’s conceptual
parameters and possible ethnographic uses that it entered the scene as an explicit
topic of anthropological inquiry. Crapanzano posits hope as a passive counterpart
to desire; whereas one acts on desire, “hope depends on some other agency—a
god, fate, chance, an other—for its fulfillment” (2003, 6). Seeking to more fully
“bring hope into view as a method or means as well as an end of anthropological
analysis,” Hirokazu Miyazaki uses in-depth ethnographic research to guide his
considerations of hope as a social resource in Fiji and Japan (2005, 289). Hope,
for him, is a “reorientation of knowledge” that enables individuals to envision
better futures and shift their present actions accordingly (2006, 149).
A similarly grounded approach to hope appears in Jarrett Zigon’s work,
which draws on the experiences of Moscow residents to argue that hope is
both passive and active and that it is capable of evoking continuity and stability
as well as movement toward an ideal future goal. As Zigon suggests, hope slips
constantly between serving as “the background attitude that allows one to keep
going” and the drive to resolve problems through “conscious and intentional
action” (2009, 258). Writing from the very different ethnographic context of
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Morten Pedersen extends these conceptions of hope
to account for the seemingly irrational optimism exhibited by his economically
precarious informants. For them, he argues, hope is “a distinct form of work”
(2012, 3), a practice that “enables people to calibrate their dispersed internal
 Introduction 9

capacities (souls, life forces, and luck) with their equally dispersed outer capaci-
ties (loans, credits, and collateral)” (2012, 6).
More recently, a special issue on the topic of “hope over time” appeared in the
journal History and Anthropology. In their introduction, guest editors Nauja Kleist
and Stef Jansen extol the proliferation of anthropological research and writing
on the diverse range of things people hope for, the ways in which they hope,
and how they strive to make the possible real. Much of the current scholarship
on hope, Kleist and Jansen observe, takes it as something desirable to seek out
and affirm—even when surrounded by hardship and despair. As such, scholar-
ship on hope is “often written against disillusion and malaise; against fatalistic
convictions that there are no alternatives to the current order; against pessimistic
diagnoses of the present political moment as preventing any meaningful emanci-
patory intervention” (Kleist and Jansen 2016, 378). Hope counters the despair of
dark anthropology by celebrating the possibility of positive action.
Aspiration (our final “anthropology of the good” theme) is often accepted
as synonymous with hope, although its connotations are more active: If hope
means believing that something can happen, aspiration lends energy to that
belief. Edward Fischer, introduced above, views aspiration as a core element of
wellbeing that crosses cultural contexts. For him, aspiration is “a hope for the
future informed by ideas about the good life [that] gives direction to agency—
the power to act and the sense of having control over one’s own destiny” (Fischer
2014, 207). Probably the best-known treatment of aspiration comes from Arjun
Appadurai’s 2013 book, The Future as Cultural Fact. Here, Appadurai focuses
on the capacity to aspire, arguing that although yearnings for the good life exist
everywhere, the ability to work toward their realization is unevenly distributed
within and between societies. Appadurai sees aspiration as “a navigational capac-
ity” that begets opportunities for future exploration and a pragmatic appreciation
of how aspirations are realized (2013, 188). Significantly, he also distinguishes
between “ethics of possibility” that “expand the field of the imagination” and
lead to a more equitable capacity to aspire and “ethics of probability” that con-
tinually remind us that the odds are stacked against us (Appadurai 2013, 295).
Favoring the former, Appadurai argues, “can offer a more inclusive platform
for improving the planetary quality of life and can accommodate a plurality of
visions of the good life” (2013, 299–300).
While a full review is neither possible nor necessary here, this brief overview
offers a taste of recent anthropological work emphasizing the positive aspects
of human life and the prospect of favorable outcomes. It is essential, however,
to highlight one additional inspiration for anthropology’s turn to the good—
Indigenous scholars’ appeals to trade apocalyptic gloom for a more generative
outlook. This topic is considered in more depth in Chapter 5, in which Natasha
Myhal and Clint Carroll explore the origins and implications of a distinctively
Indigenous optimism. For the broad purposes of this introduction, it is impor-
tant to understand how Indigenous scholarship has served to encourage a more
10 Anna J. Willow

optimistic anthropological stance. In 2009, Aleut scholar Eve Tuck advised

Indigenous peoples to suspend the long tradition of “damage-centered research”
(2009, 409) that depicted their communities as riddled with pathology and loss.
Communities, she declared, need to stop thinking of themselves as broken.
Research should instead aim to “capture desire” and underscore the rich realities
of Indigenous lives (2009, 216). Tuck’s point resonated far beyond her original
audience. Anthropologists who conduct research among (and largely sympathize
with the goals of) Indigenous and other marginalized communities saw them-
selves reflected in her critique. Many have since committed to more positive and
collaborative agendas.
Indigenous scholars have also pointed out that dystopian futures—now at the
center of mainstream climate change discourse—have been an unrelenting ele-
ment of their peoples’ actual experience. As Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi)
argues, “the hardships many nonindigenous people dread most of the climate
crisis are ones that Indigenous peoples have endured already due to different
forms of colonialism: ecosystem collapse, species loss, economic crash, drastic
relocation, and cultural disintegration” (2018, 226). If the Indigenous apocalypse
has already occurred, it is imperative that we attend to the generative hope culti-
vated in its aftermath. Such hope, according to William Lempert, is “hope with
grit, hope that neither avoids the history of colonial dispossession nor has been
rendered misanthropic by it” (2018, 204). From this perspective, the collapse
of the extractive/colonialist/capitalist system is not the end of the world: It is a
brilliant new beginning. Demonstrated in settings ranging from contemporary
cultural revitalization campaigns to Indigenous science fiction, post-apocalyptic
hope opens doors to optimistic (re)imaginings of circumstance reversal and cre-
ative alternatives that use new understandings of the past to build a better future
(Dillon 2012). In this way, Indigenous scholarship—like the anthropologies of
the good described above—inspires us to research, write, and act against despair.

Time and the Future

An upswelling of recent attention to the future has also set the stage for anthro-
pological work that investigates and/or incorporates optimism. The emerging
anthropology of the future genre illuminates how people in diverse cultural set-
tings conceive of the future as well as what they perceive as possible or desirable.
Along the way, this work has generated new interest in processes of cultural
change and its concomitant contestations.
For most of its history, anthropology was a past-looking discipline (Wallman
1992). Even as generations of anthropologists considered the cultural vagaries of
time and persuasively portrayed present moments as amalgamations of memory,
perception, and anticipation (Gell 1992), the discipline’s enduring emphasis on
human origins, traditions, cultural reproduction, and social memory led to a
widespread “anthropological neglect of the future” (Munn 1992, 115). Sporadic
 Introduction 11

engagements with time and temporality did little to prevent the discipline from
“shortchanging the future” (Bryant and Knight 2019, 7). Exacerbated by the
modernist presumption that diverse non-Western ways of life—the mainstay of
classic anthropological work—would soon be replaced and therefore had no
future worth considering, it was possible for many decades to describe anthro-
pology and the future as ships passing in the night (Razak and Cole 1995, 277;
Collins 2007, 76). This is no longer the case.
The current focus on the future was foreshadowed by Margaret Mead, who,
in her later years, reflected repeatedly on both the forms the future might take
and our ability to influence it. In a 1977 lecture entitled “Our Open-Ended
Future,” Mead argued that “our future is neither pre-determined nor predictable:
it is, rather, something that lies within our hands, to be shaped and molded by
the choices we make in present time” (2005, 329). Furthermore, Mead recog-
nized that

how hard we are willing to work for the future depends largely upon our
image of what that future will be like. If we take the pessimistic view that
human nature is getting progressively worse and our future will be grim, it
is tempting to just give up, refuse to bring more children into the world,
and to live out our lives consuming all the gasoline we can. If, on the
other hand, we feel that it is possible to master our present-day problems,
we can summon up the dedication and political will necessary to create a
better world.
(Mead 2005, 331)

Visions of the future, in short, have a profound impact on here-and-now choices,

which in turn give rise to the realities that ultimately ensue.
While typically less enthusiastic about their ability to direct change, subse-
quent scholars of the future abided by the same foundational premise that the
future “is still being made” (Bell 1996, 28). In the 1980s, Robert B. Textor pio-
neered an approach he called Ethnographic Futures Research, which employed
anthropological methods to anticipate cultural change. Future scenarios that
interviewees considered optimistic, pessimistic, and most probable were elicited
and analyzed with the ultimate goal of developing sound policies and effec-
tive programs (Textor 1985). By the early 1990s, anthropologists investigating
cross-cultural conceptions of time had made a compelling case for investigating
culturally specific understandings of the future and their consequences (Munn
1992; Wallman 1992). Rejecting notions of the future as categorically empty (as
had often been assumed), anthropologists came to appreciate that “our lives are
constructed around knowledges of the future that are as full (and flawed) as our
knowledges of the past” (Rosenberg and Harding 2005, 4).
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the trickle of anthropologi-
cal attention to futurity became a steady flow. Invigorated by the perception of
12 Anna J. Willow

global unpredictability and collective anxiety—heightened by climate change,

financial insecurity, and political instability—many anthropologists turned to
future-making as a research focus (Kleist and Jansen 2016). Significantly, Arjun
Appadurai called on anthropologists “to place futurity, rather than pastness, at
the heart of our thinking about culture” (2013, 194). “By bringing the future
back in,” he argued, “we are surely in a better position to understand how people
actually navigate their social spaces” (Appadurai 2013, 195).
Ethnography has since proven a powerful tool for comprehending how ordi-
nary people design their own futures and how diverse future-making projects
are organized and experienced. Anthropologists working on a wide range of
topics and geographical regions have embraced the future as a guiding frame,
as demonstrated by the appearance of several edited collections. For example,
contributions to Environmental Futures (Barnes 2016) explore diversely situated
deliberations on future environments in settings ranging from scientific modeling
of Antarctic ice sheets to anticipated resource extraction in Ecuador, Bangladesh,
and São Tomé and Príncipe. Contributions to Anthropologies and Futures (Salazar
et al. 2017) explore an even broader array of topics; from quests to make the
future bureaucratically manageable through urban planning; to contested imag-
inings of future landscapes that infuse conservation debates; to more experimen-
tal ethnographic interventions that use immersive artifacts, dramatic storytelling,
film, and fiction to propel research participants into the unknown.
The future has also become a frequent focus of ethnographies and articles,
which are too numerous to cover in any comprehensive manner. A recent
Anthrosource query for the term “future” as a keyword or title component
returned over 250 hits since 2015 (these hits include numerous short-format
articles in Anthropology News that reflect current thinking and trends within the
discipline). Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight’s Anthropology of the Future (2019)
is one notable example of essential reading in this genre; it is not coincidental
that both authors are among this volume’s contributors.
Within this rapidly expanding body of work, two interrelated points stand
out as particularly pertinent to anthropological optimism. First is the relativistic
realization that individuals and groups hold very different opinions as to what
constitutes an ideal, acceptable, or abhorrent future. Indeed, one person’s dream
may be another’s nightmare. As futures are made (and remade) in the eyes of
their beholders, not only are contrasting worldviews revealed, but the future also
becomes a profoundly contested domain. When groups with contrasting ideas
of what constitutes a positive future claim the same physical or symbolic terrain,
attempts to convert one’s own future vision into reality are inevitably also efforts
to impede others’ visions (see Tam, this volume). Second is the insight that
future images inspire present actions. These actions, in turn, determine how the
future unfolds. This explains why future-making practices (even those that at first
glance seem benign) are often rife with political struggle. Capable of expressing
and shaping how people perceive a desirable future, future-oriented practices
 Introduction 13

and movements “become powerful tools for creating (new) orders, empower-
ing or excluding actors, and even for preserving or transforming fundamental
values” (Knappe et al. 2019, 891). Anthropologies of the future shed light on
the future-creation process by documenting how people envision the future and
then considering how these visions reflect their cultural beliefs and influence
their current behavior.
Political ecology, in particular, sheds light on contestations that arise when
groups with mutually contradictory visions of the future compete to control the
same landbase and/or resources. For example, Clinton Westman’s critical exami-
nation of social impact assessments in the tar sands region of northern Alberta,
Canada, outlines how the industry captures the future by presenting information in
ways that satisfy technical and isolationist rubrics. In this case, it is not simply about
differently constructed visions of the future—articulated by Indigenous residents
on the one hand and industry consultants on the other—but also raises the pro-
foundly political question of “who has the power to tell the story of the future and
then to enact it” (Westman 2013, 112). In the tar sands and far beyond, divergently
optimistic futures and the conflicts they generate have far-reaching results.
While anthropological considerations of the future are not necessarily or
inherently optimistic in nature, much recent work has taken this tack and, as
such, frequently overlaps with the “anthropologies of the good” described above.
People everywhere think about the future; anthropology is uniquely situated to
comprehend both the intricacies and the implications of diverse future visions.
The future is no less important—and no less consequential—for our own cul-
tures and subcultures. It is this reflexive version of futurity that led Margaret
Mead to insist that her listeners imagine a better future—and that underlies
this volume’s contention that anthropology can be a positive force for change.
Anthropology proves that other worlds are possible. Echoing Mead, anthropo-
logical futurist Samuel Gerald Collins sees raising the possibility of radical alterity
as one of anthropology’s most essential contemporary roles. “We need—more
than ever—to revisit the idea that anthropology might provide material and cri-
tique for cultural futures,” Collins observes, “for the imagination of different
lifeways less premised on exploitation and ecological degradation” (2007, 8).
Formerly found in tales of coeval cultural Others, such alternatives also exist in
our own visions of futures worth striving for. When we draw attention to the
possibility of other futures, Collins suggests, we create “an anthropology that
can change the world” (2007, 115). Collins further examines the influence of
Mead and other early anthropologists as they inform hope for anthropology and
anthropological optimism in Chapter 1 of this volume.
Recent shifts in anthropology’s temporal gaze can be traced to changes in the
questions the discipline asks about the human condition as well as to changing
beliefs about the feasibility—and ethics—of using social science to influence the
future. While one could ostensibly study how people think about the future
in a detached scientific manner, the majority of scholars who place the future
14 Anna J. Willow

at the center of their analyses do so because they are committed not only to
understanding how people imagine what lies ahead but also because they hope
to craft a more satisfying and sustainable world. Whether premeditated or by
happenstance, the creation of academic knowledge alters the future—sometimes
in unpredictable ways. Given this, Sarah Pink and Juan Francisco Salazar argue
adamantly that the time has come to face head-on our role in future-creation
processes and accept that we have a “moral obligation…to implicate ourselves in
futures” (2017, 15). It is to these obligations that we now turn.

Engagement, Advocacy, and Activism

If anthropologists’ temporal sensibility has shifted in recent years, so too has our
sense of scholarly responsibility. Instead of conceiving of ourselves as experts
who generate objective knowledge and theory, increasing numbers of contem-
porary social scientists are undertaking research that aspires, first and foremost,
to create better circumstances for the people we study. The ongoing quest to
determine how we might best direct our distinctive skill-sets to the resolution
of multi-scaler socioecological problems has yielded a wide variety of valuable
work. We commence and continue this work energized by our own optimism—
the conviction that our efforts can make a positive difference—and by our col-
laborators’ diverse visions of better days ahead.
The foundational goal of anthropology—understanding how others live
and find meaning in their lives—makes it an intrinsically empathetic discipline.
Often working within marginalized communities and reliant upon “methodol-
ogy that emphasizes personal attachment,” anthropology lends itself to involve-
ment in issues of interest to the individuals and groups we study (Checker
et al. 2014, 408). While societal engagement has long been an integral part of
anthropology, it has not always been openly embraced. Over one hundred years
ago, Franz Boas deployed the anthropological principle of cultural relativism to
denounce anti-Semitism and racism. His most famous student, Margaret Mead,
was a vocal early feminist with a resolute belief in the power of citizen action
(Low and Merry 2010). In the McCarthy era of the 1950s and for years after,
however, anthropologists who worked for racial, gender, and economic equality
were political targets. In the years that followed, many censored themselves to
avoid controversy, which had lasting impacts on the field’s development (Price
2004; Mullings 2015).
In the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, anthropologists reentered the public
fray, speaking out against the Vietnam Conflict and organizing teach-in protests.
The counterculture movement’s anti-war, civil rights, and feminist politics were
accompanied by a widespread embrace of activism, which invigorated anthro-
pological thinking. Worried that anthropology would wane into irrelevance if
it remained confined to the academy, Dell Hymes convened a volume entitled
Reinventing Anthropology in 1972, in which he and his colleagues argued for an
 Introduction 15

anthropology dedicated to “confronting the powerful and seeking to transform

the structures of power” (1972, 52). At the same time, Sol Tax was promot-
ing an “action anthropology” that recognized solving social problems, advanc-
ing knowledge, and generating theory as inseparable projects (1975). Instead of
aiming for dispassionate analysis, academics began to reconsider their goals. It
became imaginable that publicly engaging with political issues could become
“integral to American academic practice in the future” (Checker and Fishman
2004, 8).
Inspired by the observation of inequities and the desire to assuage them, the
decades that followed saw a steady increase in engaged anthropological research
and writing. While a comprehensive inventory of this work would fill an entire
volume, a few select examples will suffice.
In the realm of medical anthropology, Nancy Scheper-Hughes broke new
ground in Death without Weeping, in which she elucidates mothers’ nonchalant
response to infant mortality in a Brazilian shantytown. As she examined inter-
sections of desperate economic conditions, maternal care, and religious coping
mechanisms, Scheper-Hughes proved to herself that it is possible to be both
a researcher and a deeply dedicated companheira. She ultimately contends that
anthropology, if it is to be useful, must “begin to think about cultural institu-
tions and practices in moral or ethical terms” (1992, 21). Diverging from the
ethnographic mainstream, Scheper-Hughes is candid about the influence she
exerts on her informants/teachers. Anthropology, she argues, is “both active and
committed. [It] exists as both a field of knowledge (a disciplinary field) and a field
of action (a force field). Anthropological writing can be a site of resistance” (1992,
25). More recently, prominent work in medical/human rights anthropology has
heeded this bold call, as demonstrated by Paul Farmer’s analysis of the structural
violence that underlies economic despair, human rights violations, and disease
(2004) and by Seth Holmes’s incisive work on the rights and health of migrant
laborers in the western United States (2013).
Environmental anthropology, too, has contributed to the development and
popularity of engaged anthropology. For example, in her study of environmental
injustice afflicting a Black community in Georgia, Melissa Checker sought not
merely to shed light on how residents comprehend and react to connections
between pollution and race, but also to contribute to the community that wel-
comed her (2005). In her quest to simultaneously understand, amplify, and sup-
port those who face the effects of environmental degradation firsthand, Checker
is far from alone. Stuart Kirsch’s work among Papua New Guineans, whose land-
scapes and livelihoods have been destroyed by toxic mine waste (2014, 2018),
and Susan Crate’s work with Sakha pastoralists confronting the realities of cli-
mate change in northeastern Siberia (2008, 2022) are but two of the more recent
engaged environmental ethnographies that take this approach.
For all its benefits, engaged work is not without challenges. Even as respected
anthropologists call their colleagues to action, an opposing disciplinary contingent
16 Anna J. Willow

has long insisted that anthropology remain an objective scientific field of study
(e.g., Hastrup and Elsass 1990; D’andrade 1995). This skepticism has abated
over time but still persists in some academic departments. Reflective of ongo-
ing debates regarding the relationship and relative merits of “scientific” versus
“applied” work, a perceived tension between sound scholarship and engagement
has created related impediments. While some anthropologists position academic
critique and activist anthropology as separate projects, characterized by different
strategies and commitments (Hale 2006), others argue that academic contribu-
tions and engagement can “be productively practiced together, as part of one
undertaking” (Speed 2006, 71). Increasingly, engaged scholars have embraced
the latter perspective, proceeding under the assumption that it is possible—even
essential—for their research to concurrently contribute to both their academic
discipline and the world at large (in this volume, this theme is especially promi-
nent in chapters by Yotebieng, Willow, King, and Widener and Choate). Other
challenges are pragmatic in nature. The substantial time commitment demanded
by engaged work is often at odds with the pressure to publish early, often, and
in highly ranked peer-reviewed journals (Kirsch 2018). Similarly, the struggle
to obtain grant funding for engaged research results in barriers to success in the
academic system as currently designed. As a consequence, some anthropolo-
gists who wish to conduct engaged work compromise their ambitions for more
standard academic fare, while others burn out under the strain (Checker 2014).
For the increasing number of anthropologists who embrace it, engaged research
takes myriad forms. Indeed, there are many ways to “do” anthropology and “be”
an anthropologist (see Gold, this volume). In addition to scholarly writing, some
anthropologists publish nonacademic essays and editorials in support of their
chosen cause. Others participate in global justice alliances, act as expert witnesses
(Kirsch 2002), or find ways to generate crucial material aid for the communi-
ties they study (Schuller 2014). Still others become what Jeffrey Juris and Alex
Khasnabish call “militant ethnographers,” which implies immediate involvement
in organizing political and/or direct action (2013, 26; see also Graeber 2009;
Maeckelbergh 2009). These roles are by no means mutually exclusive. Not only
may engaged anthropologists serve concurrently as facilitators, networkers, crit-
ics, mediators, media producers, campaigners, witnesses, advocates, advisers, and
partners, but these roles also shift in accordance with particular projects and
career stages (Johnston 2010; Low and Merry 2010). Through it all, anthropolo-
gists often find themselves serving as “strategically placed allies with access to
cultural and material skills, tools, and resources,” thus fulfilling a desperate need
in many marginalized communities (Juris and Khasnabish 2013, 25). In chal-
lenging times, moreover, the simple potency of moral support, friendship, and
respect across difference should not be underestimated.
Considering the connection between anthropology and engagement leads
us to ponder what our roles can and should be, both as anthropologists and as
citizens of the world. What contributions might we make? And how? It reminds
 Introduction 17

us that what we choose to illuminate, how we tell our stories, and the mes-
sages we convey all matter a great deal (see Yotebieng, this volume). Accepting
our responsibility as responsible anthropological citizens means doing “problem-
focused participatory research” that entails “working with [not just in] communi-
ties to understand and address issues of mutual concern” (Johnston 2010, S235).
In our troubled times, presenting material that is meaningful and constructive
qualifies as an essential service. Emphasizing and encouraging expressions of
optimism—peoples’ hopes for the future and the creative actions they inspire—is
an opportunity to make the positive difference we seek.

Design Anthropology
One additional inspiration warrants attention. Design anthropology is a synergy
between two formerly separate fields of study with distinct practices and goals.
While design traditionally involved the purposeful creation of images, items,
and structures, anthropology pursued a rich understanding of diverse cultural
beliefs and practices. The former created, while the latter comprehended. For
anthropologists, the forward-facing energy of design illuminates the realm of the
possible and shifts the focus from societal reproduction to societal transforma-
tion (Smith and Otto 2015). For designers, the addition of anthropology directs
attention to cultural specificity and underscores the necessity of accounting for
diverse beliefs, practices, and values. Given its explicit objective of altering the
future (and its implicit objective of improving it) via the addition of artifacts and/
or the conscious shaping of systems, viewing the cultural world through the lens
of design generates new possibilities for anthropological optimism.
While design is typically associated with the manufacture of material objects,
design anthropology casts a much wider creative net. According to Ton Otto
and Rachel Charlotte Smith, “by designing objects, technologies, and systems,
we are in fact designing cultures of the future” (2013, 13). It is not only trained
modernist practitioners but all people, argues Arturo Escobar, who engage in
design and have the capacity to design their lives—even if not always under con-
ditions of their own choosing. As we seek to create richer and more sustainable
relationships, we necessarily find ourselves redesigning not merely “structures,
technologies, and institutions but our very ways of thinking and being” (Escobar
2018, 118). When we create new tools, narratives, and thought processes, we are
concurrently creating new perspectives and new realities.
Despite its recent emergence as an independent subgenre, design anthropol-
ogy has strong ties to both the anthropology of the future and engaged anthro-
pology. Refusing to artificially separate scholarship from processes of future
creation, design anthropologists believe that design and anthropology can work
together to become “significant agents of social, material and ecological change
for the better” (Anusas and Harkness 2016, 55). Like the engaged anthropology
introduced in the previous section, design anthropology owes its existence to
18 Anna J. Willow

changing scholarly expectations and roles. No longer are we mere “observers,

analysts, and interpreters of social structure and culture,” affirms design anthro-
pologist Christine Miller; researchers now operate as “participants and agents in
the processes of social and cultural transformation” (2018, 57). By corresponding
and collaborating with community members, design anthropologists position
themselves as partners in change. They facilitate collective thinking about pos-
sible worlds in order to become “co-creators of desirable futures” (Otto and
Smith 2013, 13).
Beyond borrowing from the standard methodological repertoires of both
fields, design anthropologists have developed hybrid methods that enable them
to draw out and articulate what people see as possible and to “facilitate and guide
dynamic transformative action” at the same time (Miller 2018, 60). Techniques
such as directed role play, elicitation of experience and opportunity maps, and
visioning/backcasting interviews bring the imaginary then-and-there into a
tangible here-and-now. In a study of waste production/reduction practices in
Denmark, for instance, Joachim Halse and his colleagues developed miniature
doll scenarios and full-scale enactments that allowed research participants to
perform imagined worlds in real time, thus revealing how grand narratives of
environmental sustainability, recycling, and participatory decision-making could
play out at a concrete level. Such ethnographies of the possible “render the
imaginative directly available” for observation and inquiry; imagined worlds are
converted into observable present phenomena that are amenable to social scien-
tific study (Halse 2013, 190).
Other design anthropologists have directed more conventional participant-
observation to the task of elucidating divergent design temporalities and their
implications. For example, Mike Anusas and Rachel Harkness conducted com-
parative research contrasting the “close-present” that configures work in con-
ventional commercial design studios with the “far-reaching-present” observed
in alternative Earthship communities. They discovered that different design pro-
cesses are associated with contrasting senses of the present and perceptions of
temporal flow. Furthermore, these divergent presents “are indicative and gen-
erative of different socio-material ecological relationships with/in the world”
(Anusas and Harkness 2016, 67). With this finding in mind, the authors posit an
eminently hopeful, socially aware, and ecologically oriented design anthropology
that places long-term transformational thinking at its center.
Design anthropology is an inherently optimistic undertaking. Still in its early
years and diverse in its specific forms, it entails not only envisioning alternative
futures but also intentionally crafting the world we wish to see. It accepts anthro-
pology’s potential as a catalyst for positive change and develops tools for collect-
ing information and informing appropriate action, a process Sarah Pink refers
to as “doing anthropology forward” (this volume). In engaging with change as
something that is both plausible and desirable, design anthropology differentiates
itself from other forms of future-oriented research that regard people’s hopes
 Introduction 19

and fears as interesting (or even influential) but still hypothetical, thus remain-
ing temporally ensconced in the ethnographic present. Because thinking of the
future as different from the present also raises questions concerning what should
change and who should change it (Mazé 2016), political contestations are likely
to become a major focus of design anthropology in the years ahead.
The world today is beset by a complex multitude of challenges. Moving
toward their resolution requires profound transformations in how we relate to
the world and to one another. We need, according to Arturo Escobar, a com-
pletely new civilizational model and must reconfigure “an entire way of life and
a whole style of world making” (2018, x). Escobar uses the term disoñar (which
he borrows from his Afro-Columbian interlocuters) to denote the process of
dreaming with the intention of creating (2018, 216). We dream (soñar)…and
then we design (diseñar). The tools and methods of design can be used to gener-
ate the compelling future visions we so desperately need and also to “inform and
inspire projects in the present” (Irwin 2015, 233). We design not simply new
artifacts, but also new relationships and values. The open embrace of design as
the creation of future cultures offers exciting options for an effectively engaged
and powerfully optimistic anthropology.

Anthropological Engagements with Optimism

Anthropology is not separate from the world in which it operates. As Sherry
Ortner reminds us, “academic work, at least in the social sciences, cannot be
detached from the conditions of the real world in which it takes place” (2016,
47). Even as anthropology seeks to illuminate the global diversity of circum-
stances and experiences, practitioners are themselves caught in a swift current of
world events. Anthropology studies those who are situated in the culture of their
time and place, but we are no less situated. Conscious of our shifting playing field
and reflexive about the roles we play both within and outside of the academy,
we continuously (re)evaluate if, when, where, and how we might contribute. As
such, the changing zeitgeist of the world beyond anthropology has an indelible
influence on our work.
Much of the impetus for anthropological work on optimistic topics is a reac-
tion to widely circulated images of natural, health, financial, and political disas-
ters, which have “added to a widespread sense of crisis and unpredictability, to a
sense of not knowing where the world is or could be going” (Kleist and Jansen
2016, 375). Anthropological training is not needed to recognize that times are
tough and likely to get tougher. We are but a minute fraction of those who seek
to be part of the solution. We resist despair by directing our skills to the creation
of the more fulfilling lives our research participants—and we ourselves—seek. As
anthropologists, concerned citizens, and fallible human beings, we (along with
so many others) find hope where we can, even when we must search in dark
places (Solnit 2004, 2010).
20 Anna J. Willow

This volume arose out of the circumstances of 2020–2021—a time when cat-
astrophic climate change and ecological decline seemed inevitable, the COVID-
19 pandemic felt never-ending, and injustice appeared ubiquitous despite
decades of amelioratory efforts. Discontent with the state of the world and cul-
tural anthropology’s turn to increasingly positive, future-oriented, and engaged
work have converged to unleash a courageously optimistic anthropology.
Anthropological Optimism: Engaging the Power of What Could Go Right was con-
ceived in advance of the 2021 annual meeting of the American Anthropological
Association (held in Baltimore, Maryland, and virtually in November of that
year) as a way to (1) bring scholars with diverse research interests together for a
collective, comprehensive, and current consideration of the roles optimism plays
in contemporary anthropology and (2) produce an accessible text that brings this
imperative perspective to a broad audience of students and scholars. A round-
table session on the theme was accepted with invited status from the Society
for Cultural Anthropology, indicating the topic’s increasing prominence. While
several of the chapters that follow have origins in the November 2021 discussion,
additional contributions were sought to further expand the included perspec-
tives. The Society for Applied Anthropology’s 2022 meeting (held in Salt Lake
City, Utah, and virtually in March of that year) offered further opportunities for
conversation and collaboration.
Contributors to this volume bring trends in the discipline and the world at
large to bear on questions of optimism’s conceptual and practical value to the
field of anthropology. Not only do contributors come from a diverse range of
personal backgrounds, theoretical perspectives, professional positions, and career
stages, but chapters are also informed by research conducted in a wide variety
of ethnographic settings (including Australia, Cameroon, China, Greece, Japan,
Mozambique, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities across North
America). While not divided into arbitrary parts or sections, this volume’s flow
of chapters gradually proceeds from disciplinarily situated theoretical consider-
ations of optimism, to ethnographically grounded empirical pieces that reveal
how optimism is being engaged in contemporary anthropological research, to
demonstrations of how optimistic anthropological perspectives can contribute
to the resolution of real-world problems. Each in their own way, authors reflect
on the juxtaposition (and occasional tension) between optimism and pessimism
in their own work; as it relates to anthropology’s unique potential; as it is reflected
in the discipline’s past, present, and future; and as it plays out in global events.
The volume opens with a consideration of optimism’s associations with
the field of anthropology and its characteristic ethnographic endeavor. Samuel
Gerald Collins offers a fresh take on the history of anthropology and the lessons
it contains for conveying anthropological optimism into the present moment. In
Chapter 1, entitled “A World Made Safe for (Future) Difference: Anthropology
and Utopian Possibility,” Collins revisits the work of Ruth Benedict and Margaret
Mead (along with other key texts and ideas), ultimately arguing that in spite of its
 Introduction 21

problematic past, anthropology can be viewed as a profoundly hopeful enterprise

with the capacity to disclose future worlds very different from the dystopian
present.
In Chapter 2 (“Vertiginous Optimism: Optimistic Orientations in a Field of
Chronic Crisis”), Daniel M. Knight continues to probe the paradox of anthro-
pological optimism. Informed by a rich body of social theory and by fieldwork
conducted in the aftermath of the Greek financial crisis, he ponders the analytic
value of anthropologists’ positive focus amid circumstances marked by chronic
suffering, social degradation, and apathy. Knight interrogates the intersection
where ethnographic reality and social theory grind together, proposing that ver-
tiginous optimism may be found in the micro-utopias of everyday life, even in the
most pessimistic of fields.
A similar perspective guides Kelly A. Yotebieng’s contribution. In Chapter 3,
entitled “‘Moving on and Moving Up’: Productive Angles of Exploring
Optimism,” Yotebieng assesses her own fieldwork experiences and the realiza-
tions they catalyzed. She takes cues from citizens of war-torn communities in
Mozambique and survivors of gender-based violence to suggest that focusing
only on suffering reduces people with hopes, dreams, and aspirations to their
troubled circumstances. Attention to optimism, she argues, orients us to the
future and offers a way to address the grim realities of life while also underscor-
ing human dignity and providing opportunities for engaged solutions.
The chapters that follow confirm that optimism is indeed plural, multiple,
and mutable. Mankei Tam’s chapter focuses on fostering optimism in the wake
of disaster. In Chapter 4, Tam presents a nuanced ethnography of the return
to Iitate, a Japanese village heavily impacted by the earthquake, tsunami, and
nuclear meltdown of March 2011. In “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
Planting Optimism in a Disrupted Ecology,” he elucidates how flowers symbol-
ize optimism in the midst of the region’s ecological and social devastation. Tam
argues that, in this instance, villagers use flower cultivation as an optimistic mode
of resistance that contrasts with outside observers’ declarations that their village
remains uninhabitable.
Chapter 5, by Natasha Myhal and Clint Carroll, is also contextualized by
disaster, resistance, and resurgence—in this case the long-term catastrophe of
North American settler colonialism and the enduring effort to overcome it. In
“Indigenous Optimism in the Colonialcene,” Myhal and Carroll explore what a
distinctively Indigenous optimism looks like and how it is enacted and expressed
within contemporary US Indigenous communities. Informed by engaged field-
work projects related to (1) land education and resource access in the Cherokee
Nation and (2) the maintenance of reciprocal relationships with lake sturgeon
(nmé) among the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, the authors view opti-
mism through the lens of Indigenous futurity. This perspective acknowledges
the tragedies of colonialism, underscoring the reality that numerous Indigenous
apocalypses have already transpired. As Indigenous peoples sustain (and, in some
22 Anna J. Willow

cases, create or re-create) relationships with the land and its beings, optimism
means hope—and work—for continued flourishing in relationship with land
and more-than-human relatives into the distant future.
Subsequent chapters feature authors who, like Myhal and Carroll, conduct
research on communities of which they are part and to which they seek to
contribute. As they consider optimism’s diverse forms, these chapters take an
explicitly reflexive approach, examining how optimism intersects with indi-
vidual anthropologists’ experiences, roles, and capacities to make a positive
difference. In Chapter 6 (“Putting the Pieces in Place: Optimistic Futuring
in Transition Culture”), Anna J. Willow explores optimism’s role in guiding
how participants in the Transition movement for climate change resilience
approach the future and the actions they take to create it. Drawing on engaged
ethnographic research and experience as a native anthropologist (Bunzl 2004)
in the Midwestern United States, she describes conceptual and concrete ways
in which Transition participants express optimistic futuring, which is charac-
terized by a positive, purposive, and active relationship with the future as a
temporal frame. Ultimately, she posits optimism as a significant force behind
the everyday activism that distinguishes Transition from other contemporary
environmental social movements.
Working in a similar ethnographic setting, Hilary B. King considers the ques-
tion of scale in Chapter 7 (“Optimism at Scale: Exploring Everyday Activism
in Atlanta’s Alternative Food Networks”), specifically asking how optimism can
flow from individual to organizational levels—and potentially beyond. Drawing
on long-term research and involvement with alternative food systems networks
in metropolitan Atlanta (Georgia, USA), she explores how the COVID-19 pan-
demic catalyzed change and growth at multiple scales. She argues that iterative
self-making enables people to rethink their ability to effect meaningful transfor-
mations by connecting small, community-based change to larger social ecosys-
temic projects, emphasizing horizontal replication, and framing social change as
a practice rather than a solution. The ongoing self-making process and everyday
activism undertaken by food systems participants makes it possible to maintain
optimism in the face of large-scale crises.
Chapter 8, “Fusing Outrage and Hope into Acts of Resistance, Volunteerism,
and Allyships,” by Patricia Widener and Gail Choate, speaks to the enduring
hope and optimism conveyed in three types of action. The authors present case
studies drawn from their personal and professional experiences—which range
from ecological restoration, protests against gun violence in the United States,
and higher education alliances—to illustrate how positive efforts create spaces
for hope to inspire additional work toward social well-being, ecological sustain-
ability, and cultural and political transformation.
Alison Gold comes to the topic of anthropological optimism from the per-
spective of a practicing anthropologist who works outside of the academy, as
we learn in Chapter 9 (“Optimistic Anthropology in the Work of Systems
 Introduction 23

Changemakers”). Recognizing the far-reaching relevance of anthropology, she

examines how individuals and organizations (sometimes unknowingly) use per-
spectives and methods that are distinctively anthropological as they seek to cre-
ate positive systemic change. Drawing on stories of changemakers working to
improve outcomes in prisons, educational institutions, and racial justice move-
ments, Gold’s chapter identifies how optimistic anthropology can offer a more
holistic, proximate, inclusive, and informed approach to policy change.
While all of the included chapters have numerous potential applications,
the volume closes with chapters that follow Gold’s emphasis on the utility of
anthropology for the resolution of real-world problems. In Chapter 10, “China
2060: Envisioning a Human-Centered Approach to Energy Transition,” Bryan
Tilt explores the roles and meanings of optimism in China’s anticipated renew-
able energy transition, which he describes as a future conditional process. Looking
beyond the technicalities—and sheer immensity of the transition—he cites the
associated human values, experiences, and consequences to argue that anthro-
pology’s creativity, critical capacity, theoretical engagement, and methodological
rigor have much to contribute to the realization of this essential undertaking.
Finally, Sarah Pink engages the question of “what could go right” through
the prism of an interventional design anthropology of emerging technologies
in Chapter 11 (“Doing Anthropology Forward: Emerging Technologies and
Possible Futures”). Drawing on interviews with Australian construction industry
experts, she demonstrates the potential of anthropological research that attends
to and surfaces how and where encounters with automation and artificial intel-
ligence can be generative, collaborative, hopeful, and ethical. Arguing for a
future-focused anthropology rooted in design and futures anthropology, Pink
suggests that beyond simply studying what has gone right, “doing anthropology
forward” engages an essential new mode of optimism.
This volume is a collective celebration of the possible and a testament to
our ability—as anthropologists and as concerned world citizens—to create posi-
tive change. The conviction that present efforts can produce a better future is
a potent and necessary force for action. As the chapters you are about to read
attest, optimism opens practical pathways by which action can triumph over
despair. Anthropology has an important role to play in this process; illuminating
the countless alternatives that exist not only in distant times and places but also all
around us reminds us that we, too, can live differently. Anthropological optimism
reveals what we might do and where we might start.

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Another random document with
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Ralph walked home. The child's face haunted him. That likeness was so
perplexing. Annie had fair straight hair and grey eyes; this girl had brown
eyes and dark curly hair, yet her smile was like Annie's, and her quiet
voice was like Annie's too, in spite of the accent.

Ralph longed to see the child again, he could not help thinking of her.
He determined to offer to make further and more efficient inquiries than
had as yet been made about the relatives the poor father had evidently
expected to find at Fairford. In other ways, too, he thought he could be
of use; and the fancy he had taken to the girl made it easier for him to
determine to keep his half-formed resolution by helping her.

With these thoughts, he went up the hill to church on the following

Sunday, and on his way home called at the little shop. It was closed, of
course; but when he had knocked three or four times the old woman
opened the door, and to his horror she was drunk. He asked for the
children, and she mumbled out that they had gone to the Forest, and in
reply to further questions she would only mutter "to the Forest, to the
Forest," with an idiotic laugh. Ralph walked on, passed the gate of Lady
Mabel's Rest, and went along the Forest Road. He would go a little way,
he thought, and perhaps might meet the children.

CHAPTER V.
RALPH'S DINNER PARTY.

IT was a lovely day, and the road through the remains of the great forest
had never looked more beautiful. Some hawthorn blossoms still lingered
in the hedges, and under the trees the ground was blue with wild
hyacinths. Here and there a delicate tuft of stellaria, or a carpet-like
patch of the pale blue speedwell, varied the colouring, and wild roses of
wonderful size and beauty, some of quite a deep crimson, waved in the
soft warm breeze. Over all this, the green light coming through the trees
shed its own peculiar beauty.

Ralph was not insensible to the loveliness of the scene, though he could
not have talked about it. He walked on and on, looking up every glade
that opened upon him; but not seeing the children, was just about to turn
back when a merry shout of laughter met his ear. The ground rose
suddenly on the left side of the road, and it was from that side the sound
came. Ralph easily crossed the low wall, climbed the steep bank, and
looked round.

A little way back from the road a tree had been felled, or had fallen, and
it was now nearly buried in ferns and bluebells. On the trunk of this tree,
face to face, with their feet tucked up under them, sat the two children; a
small basket lay between them, and each of them had a large piece of
bread in one hand. Ollie had a bunch of watercress in the other, and the
girl a cup without any handle. She was in the act of making a beautiful
bow to Ollie, and Ralph heard the words,—

"So I conclude by wishing you many happy returns of the day, Mr. Oliver
Garland; and I drink your health, sir, once more."

Ollie laughed—such gleeful music as his laugh was!

"Thank you, Mam'selle Garland; you are very polite. That was a
beautiful speech, Ruthie. I can't make speeches—not in English at least,
and you will not let me talk French."

"No; for you must learn to speak English always. It vexes people to talk
to them so that they don't understand."

"Mrs. Cricklade was vexed, certainly," replied Ollie. "Ruthie, if you had
plenty of money, what present would you give me to-day?"

"A pair of shoes," was the prompt reply.

 MRS. SHORT WAS SUNNING HERSELF AT HER OPEN WINDOW.

"No, no, you stupid Ruthie," the boy cried, with another laugh. "If you
had plenty of money, you would have bought me new shoes when that
great hole came," peeping at his foot as he spoke. "Something for
pleasure, Ruthie."

"Should you like a book—with coloured pictures, of course?"

"Yes; but I would rather have a knife with two blades in it."

"Very well," said Ruth, "I would give you a knife with two blades in it; and
you, Ollie, would cut yourself badly before night; so it is as well for your
sake that I have not plenty of money."
How long Ralph would have stood watching them—he had never
noticed children much before, not even his own son—I do not know; but
at this moment Ollie caught sight of him.

"Ruthie, here is a man," said he.

"Oh! It is the gentleman who sent me the money," cried Ruth, springing
up, and running to Ralph's side with glowing cheeks and brilliant eyes.

"I never saw you again, sir, to thank you. It was very kind of you; I felt so
rich!"

"Not rich enough," said Ralph, with a grave smile, "to buy a knife with
two blades."

"No," she answered, smiling; "and this is poor Ollie's birthday. He is

seven years old to-day, and he begged me to come out here instead of
going to church. I don't think," she added, in a low tone, "that Ollie cares
much about going to church yet. So we put our dinner in a basket, and
we found watercress; and it has been so pleasant."

"I came this way to look for you," said Ralph. "I went to your lodgings,
and saw Mrs. Cricklade," he added, looking at Ruth.

"Yes," she said, answering the look frankly. "Oh, but it is a pity! She is
always so on Sunday. And yet she is such a kind woman, sir."

"I want to talk to you," Ralph said, slowly. He was pondering a grave
question. The children's dinner had consisted, he perceived, of bread
and watercress. Now he had at home a certain meat-pie, which was his
usual Sunday dinner, because he could buy it on Saturday, ready baked,
and just warm it up in his little oven on Sunday. Generally, he left
enough for his Monday's dinner too, and he never had meat on any
other day. Still, he felt inclined to bring the children home, and to give
them a good dinner and a cup of tea.

"I will!" thought he. "The poor little creatures." Then he said aloud, "Will
you come home with me, both of you? Come and dine with me."

"Thank you, sir, but we have had our dinner," said Ruth.
"Ruthie, I could eat another dinner quite well," said Ollie from his perch
on the tree.

"Then come along," said Ralph.

Ruth looked embarrassed for a moment, but he added, "Do come, it is

not very far," and I suppose his kind intentions were plainer from his
manner than from his words for she smiled, ran back to the tree and
packed up the remains of the feast (the cress and the cup, for the bread
was all gone), took a huge bunch of flowers from behind a bush, and
professed herself ready to set out.

"Where do you live, sir?" inquired Ollie, perching his hat on the top of
such a mass of black curls that the hat seemed quite unnecessary.
"Ruthie, give me the basket, it is not too heavy for me now, you know."

"I live in Lady Mabel's Rest," said Mr. Trulock.

"Sir," said Ruth, "is there any one there named Garland?"

"No, child. Not one."

"So the man at the gate said when I asked him; but he seemed so cross
that I almost thought he might have said it to get rid of us."

"Mrs. Cricklade told me that you expected to find some relatives in

Fairford."

"Yes; one at all events—our grandfather. But I can find no one of the
name at all. There don't seem to be any Garlands in Fairford."

"What has been done to discover them?" asked Ralph.

"Mrs. Cricklade got the clerk to look in some books that are kept in the
church, and they said if any Garlands had been married, or baptized, or
buried in Fairford, it would be written in those books."

"And a very stupid book that must be," interrupted Ollie, gravely.

"And Mrs. Cricklade spoke to Mr. Needham, the lawyer, and to one or
two old people, and to the police; and she says when the rector comes
home she will speak to him too."

"Well, we'll ask leave to look over the list of the people who have lived in
Lady Mabel's Rest for the last twenty years; and then when we have
had our dinner, we will have a talk and see what more may be done."

By this time they had reached the open road, and in a few minutes more
they arrived at the gate of the Rest. Ollie asked rather nervously if the
man at the gate would surely let them out again; but Ruth was delighted
with the orderly look, the gardens and neat houses.

Mrs. Short was sunning herself at her open window, having just eaten
her dinner, and very like a large tortoiseshell cat she looked, as she sat
blinking in her easy chair, half asleep. But she was wide awake in a
moment when she saw Ralph and his two companions; in fact, having
perceived that Ralph did not return home as usual after church, she had
stationed herself in the window to watch for him, and to discover, if
possible, why he had so far departed from his usual custom.

"Bless us all! Two young beggars, as I'm a living woman! And he

carrying a posy as big as a broom! Why, neighbour! Mr. Trulock,—I say,
don't be in such a hurry; where ever did you pick up them two little
beggars?"

"We are not beggars," cried Ollie, indignantly. "We didn't ask for
anything."

"These are friends of mine who are going to dine with me," said Ralph,
while Ruth quieted Ollie.

"Friends!" squeaked Mrs. Short. "I didn't know you had any friends here
—not such young ones as that, at least. Who are they? What's their
name?"

Ralph had by this time got the key into the lock of his door, and opening
it for the children to pass in, he said:

"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Short, but I'm in haste, and a little hard of
hearing, as you know;" and in he went, shutting the door behind him.
"Nasty, crusty creetur' he ever was and ever will be! Says he's in haste,
no—but likes to keep a body wondering. But I'll know who he's got with
him before I'm very much older."

She rolled herself off her arm-chair, and waddled to the hall door; down
her own garden and up that belonging to Ralph in less time than one
could reasonably have expected her to take. Her knock was heard by
the trio in Ralph's kitchen. Ralph went to the window—then strode to the
door.

"Oh, Mr. Trulock, it's not often you have company," began Mrs. Short, in
her oiliest voice, "and so I says to myself, 'So short of china and sich as
he is, very like he hasn't a plate a piece for 'em,' so I came to offer a
loan (I know you'll be careful) of anything you may require. Now ain't I a
good-natured neighbour?"

"Thank you, but I have all I want," said Ralph. "Good morning, ma'am,"
and again the door closed.

Mrs. Short retired, fuming.

When Ralph returned to his kitchen, Ruth and Ollie had taken off their
hats and were standing before the little oven, from which there came
forth a most appetising smell. Ralph began to look about for plates, etc.,
but before he could bring them to the table, Ruth came up to him and
said with a smile:

"May I set the table, sir?"

"Do, child. I am tired, and shall be glad to sit down."

He watched the child from his corner. Ollie, after a moment's hesitation,
came and climbed upon his knee. Poor Ralph felt a strange thrill at his
heart. Poor Fred! Poor lost Fred! How often, when he was a handsome
little fellow with fair curls, had he climbed up just as Ollie did, and laid
his head where Ollie laid his now! If the boy had had fair hair, Ralph
would have broken down.

Ruth looked about presently and said,—

"Where do you keep your table-cloths, sir?"

"I have none, Ruth."

"And a very good plan too," said Ollie; "then if one spills things it does
not so much matter;" and Ollie nodded his head gravely, like one who
has made up his mind.

Ruth said nothing, though her prejudices were decidedly in favour of

table-cloths; but she looked at the table, which was stained and soiled.
She got a cloth and some water in a quiet, business-like way, washed
the table, dried it, laid the knives and forks in order, and then carefully
heated the plates with hot water. Ralph felt a curious pleasure in
watching her, she moved so quietly and was so handy-like Annie. Then
she said, "May I take the dinner out of the oven, sir?"

"You'll burn yourself, I'm afraid," said Ralph.

The girl laughed—a little comfortable chuckle of amusement—at such a

foolish notion. She opened the oven and peeped in, and in half a second
the pie was safe on the table.

"I knew it was a pie!" said Ollie, triumphantly.

Ralph brought out bread, and filled a jug with water; they all sat down,
and very soon the pie-dish only remained to witness that there had been
a pie!

"Now, Ruth," said Ralph Trulock, when dinner was quite over, "I want to
have a little talk with you. I want you to tell me all about yourself and
your father, for perhaps I may be able to help you to find out your
people; but to do that I must know all about you. We must lose no time;
for when winter comes what are you to do?"

"Winter's such a long, long way off," said Ollie. "What is the good of
thinking of it yet? Don't fret, Ruthie!" and he stroked her cheek with his
little brown hand.

"No, Ollie, I won't fret; but Mr. Trulock will help us, perhaps, to find our
grandfather. May Ollie go and play in the garden, sir? he'll like that
better than sitting quiet."

Ralph assented, and the boy went off quite happy. He had seen a lot of
daisies in the ill-kept grass, and was soon at work making a daisy chain.

"If we talk about father, Ollie would cry," Ruth said. "He is so little, that if
I don't talk, he forgets; and so I pretend to forget too. But I cannot help
thinking very often how sorry father would be that we should be so poor,
and that Ollie should not go to school any more. I have talked to Mrs.
Cricklade, but though she is kind, she does not help me—she does not
always understand. But I am sure, sir, that you will know what to do; and
I am very, very grateful to you," she added, earnestly. She had such a
pretty voice, low and gentle; Ralph felt more drawn to her every
moment.

"Your father brought you to Southampton, Mrs. Cricklade told me," he

said. "But, Ruth, do you tell me the whole story—all you know about
yourself."

"We came from Canada first. I think I was born there, and I know my
mother died there, though I don't remember it. I only remember father,
even when I was quite young,—younger than Ollie is now. Father did
everything for me; we were very poor, I think."

"That was in Canada?" asked Ralph.

"Yes, in Montreal. Father was in an office, but he was very badly paid,
because he was a bad accountant. Then he got a letter. I remember that
day well, because he was so pleased. He told me that when he was
coming to Canada, the ship was wrecked, and many of the passengers
lost. He could swim well, and when he had got my mother on shore, he
went back and saved others—among them a young Frenchman, who
must have been drowned but for him, because he couldn't swim at all.
This young gentleman was very grateful, and he promised that when he
became his father's partner, he would do something for father if he
wanted help. So he wrote for him to go to Bordeaux."

"And you went? Was Ollie born then?"

"Oh no!" Ruth said, opening her eyes wide. "Why, this was years and
years ago! Father was caretaker of the great stores; we lived in rooms in
the stores. And he married Ollie's mother, and I loved her very much.
But she only lived a little while, she died when Ollie was a baby. She told
me she gave Ollie to me, and that I must take care of him."

"Had she any relatives in Bordeaux?"

"She was an orphan; I don't think she had any relatives at all."

"Then you were father's little housekeeper?" said Ralph.

"Yes, but we had a servant. Ah, we were very happy; only father never
was merry, you know. He said—"

"Well, child, go on."

"But you didn't know him, so you may think he had done something
wrong. Nov, father couldn't have done anything really wrong. But he
used to tell me that he deserved all his sorrows, and that the reason we
were so poor was that he was saving money to pay some one; and
'then,' he said, 'I may be forgiven.'"

"Did he ever mention the name of his creditor?"

"No, never, sir. Well, one day father came home looking quite unhappy
and excited. He said to me, 'Pack up all your clothes, and Ollie's and
mine, in the big American trunk; for we must go to England, and perhaps
we may never come back here again.' I asked why; but he said I would
not understand, but that he had heard something which made him want
to go to his father. I remember he said, 'I will wait no longer; surely he
will forgive me now.' And he wrote cards to put on the trunk, and we
came to Southampton in a ship belonging to the firm."

"And the address he wrote was to Southampton?"

"No, no, to Fairford, —shire."

"And at Southampton, he was taken ill, Mrs. Cricklade told me."

"Yes; but the doctor said he must have been ill a long time. He seemed
to me just the same until in the night (the ship had sailed for Bordeaux
again, and he had been on board getting some things we had forgotten)
I found him standing beside my bed. 'Get up, Ruthie,' he said, 'but don't
wake the boy;' and he stooped and kissed Ollie. 'I don't feel well,' he
said, and went back to his room. I got up quickly and ran to him. He was
lying on the bed, his face was grey-looking and not as usual. I rang the
bell, and they sent for a doctor and gave him brandy. It was all of no
use. He was in such pain—pain in his heart, he said, that he could
hardly breathe, and very soon we found that he could not speak. He
tried so hard, and tried to write too."

"I have the paper still, but there are no plain words on it. He said,
'Fairford'; and I said; 'I am to go there with Ollie,' and he seemed
content. Then he said, 'My father!' and I said I would go to him. But he
began about something else; he said, 'You lock,' and I thought he meant
lock the box, because he had a small box with some money in it; so I
locked it, but I'm afraid that was not what he wanted done, for though
the doctor was begging him to be quiet, he sat up suddenly and tried
again to speak—and then—then he was dead."

Quiet tears ran down her cheeks, and the old man, all unused as he was
to such offices, took her little hand in his and dried her eyes with his
handkerchief.

"I must not cry," Ruth sobbed out, "or it will fret Ollie. They gave me all
the money that was left after paying every one, and a servant from the
hotel came part of the way with us. But I could not find my grandfather;
and what I shall do I don't know."

"The first thing to do, Ruth, is to write to the firm in Bordeaux. They may
be able to explain, perhaps, or there may be letters for your father lying
there at this moment."

"I don't know; Monsieur Oliver is away, and old Monsieur Mordan never
liked father, though he had saved his only son. He would not give him a
holiday. Father had to give up his place. Another man came the day
before we left."
"Still, no doubt he will tell us if he knows anything that can help us. And
we will put an advertisement in the newspaper, to find your grandfather.
We can write that now."

He got paper and pencil, and began to write:

"'The children of—' What was your father's Christian name, Ruth?"

"Frederick, sir."

"'The children of Frederick Garland, late of Bordeaux, who died

suddenly at Southampton on the —. What day of the month, Ruth?"

"The thirty-first."

"The thirty-first of March last, are at Fairford, —shire, and are anxious to
communicate with their grandfather. Do you know his Christian name?"

"No, sir, I never heard it."

"'Mr. Garland,' then, 'whom they expected to find in Fairford. Apply to Mr.
Ralph Trulock, Lady Mabel's Rest, Fairford.' There, I'll pay for this, Ruth,
so you need not think about it."

"Pay for it! Do you pay for things being put in the paper? I never knew
that. Thank you, sir. And will you write for me to Monsieur Mordan?"

"I will; give me his address now."

"'Oliver Mordan, Esq.,' you must not say Monsieur, mind, for he is an
Englishman by birth, and hates to be mistaken for a Frenchman. I have
heard father say that he fancied one reason of Monsieur Mordan's
dislike to him was that when he first came to Bordeaux, he thought
Monsieur was a Frenchman. Monsieur Oliver did not mind—his mother
was a Frenchwoman."

Mr. Trulock wrote the address, which Ruth had to spell for him, and then
he said,—

"Now we will have tea."

"Won't you let me get it ready, while you sit quiet and rest? And may I
wash the dinner things?"

Ralph had no objection, for it must be confessed that these constant

washings and arrangings were a great burden to him. It was very
pleasant to sit there and watch the neat-handed little maid as she
polished and rubbed, and set everything straight and tidy.

"Now I will call Ollie, for if we don't mind, we shall be late for evening
church," said Ruth. She ran to the door, and came back looking a little
alarmed.

"Oh, Mr. Trulock, Ollie is not there. Nor is he anywhere inside the wall,
for I looked well all about."

Ralph came to the door, looked out, meditated, and men remarked,—

"Don't be frightened, Ruth; I suspect I know where he is. I ought to have

remembered she was sure to pounce upon him."

He walked off, with anxious Ruth beside him, and knocked at Mrs.
Short's door. On the steps lay a broken daisy chain.

CHAPTER VI.
HOW THE CHRISTMAS ROSES BEGAN TO TAKE ROOT.

OLLIE GARLAND had been very happy making his daisy chain sitting
on the ragged grass plot which formed the so-called garden in front of
Ralph's house. He was too innocent, and so was Ruth, to be aware of
the danger he incurred by playing in the streets with the little urchins of
his own age, whom he met there; it was not exactly the school one
would have chosen for a child hitherto kept rather too much apart. But
he had taken no harm as yet. As water runs off the feathers of a water-
bird, so evil failed to penetrate the soft armour of the boy's innocence.
Still, he was happier in the Forest with Ruth, or even here, alone among
the daisies. Presently his chain was so long that he determined to lay it
along the gravel path, in order that its full magnificence might be seen
by Ruth as she came out. But while thus occupied, he heard a voice
calling:

"Boy! Little boy! You there—come here, I want to speak to you."

Ollie looked up; there was the fat old woman who had called him and his
sister beggars; and it was to him she spoke, he perceived.

"Come here," she cried again, beckoning with her hand. "Come here,
child. Bless the boy! I shan't eat you; I only want to speak to you."

Ollie took up his daisy chain and scrambled over the low stone wall
which divided the gardens. Rather slowly and reluctantly, he went up the
white steps and stood before Mrs. Short, whom he regarded with
considerable disfavour, expressed in his large dark eyes.

"Here's a piece of luck!" murmured Mrs. Short. "Now I shall find out
everything, in spite of old Crusty. Come in, child; don't bring that
trumpery in to spoil my carpet, though."

She snatched the daisy chain from the child's unwilling hand, breaking
it, of course, for daisy chains are not made to bear rough handling;
throwing it down on the steps, she bore her captive off triumphantly,
pushing him along before her. She took him to her parlour, and lifting
him suddenly in her short, stout arms, plumped him down rather roughly
on one of the least ornamental of her chairs.

Now, Ollie was a very quick child, and sensitive too, as quick children
generally are; her muttered words about finding out everything had by
no means escaped him, and had enlightened him as to the reason of his
capture, of which he disapproved in every way, entirely disliking Mrs.
Short's manners. So he quickly determined that whatever questions this
dumpy dame asked him, he would answer in French, which came as
natural to him as English, if not more so; but which he surmised would
be quite the reverse of natural to Mrs. Short: at least, Mrs. Cricklade had
failed to understand it.

"Well, child," said Mrs. Short, seating herself snugly in her padded chair,
panting a little after her exertions, "Tell me now, what is your name?"

"Oliver Garland," replied Ollie, making the name sound very unlike an
English one.

"Laws, now! Olivia Golong—what a name! And a boy to be Olivia, too!

Bless us! You're a furrineer, then, I do suppose?"

Ollie rolled his eyes, but said nothing.

"And where do you come from, Olivia?" inquired Mrs. Short.

Ollie assured her in French, that he came from the moon.

Mrs. Short desired him to speak English, "Which I know you can speak
it," said she.

"I can," replied Ollie.

"Then tell me where you come from," cried the tantalized lady.

Ollie relapsed into French, and this time stated that he came from the
Red Sea.

"Look here," said Mrs. Short, impressively. "You tell me what I want to
know, and I'll give you a piece of cake. See if I don't now. I'll show it to
you."

She repaired to a corner cupboard, and produced a rich cake, off which,
with a deep sigh, she cut a very thin slice, and laid it on the table before
the child.

"Now, Olivia," said she, "tell me."

"I am not hungry, thank you, madame," said Ollie.

"But this is cake!" screamed Mrs. Short. "Lovely rich pound cake, made
with my own 'ands. It's delicious—that's what it is."

"Then eat it up, madame," answered Ollie, mildly.

Mrs. Short could have danced with rage, only that her figure was not
suited to such violent exercise.

"You unmannerly cub!" said she. "Answer my questions in good English,

or I shall box your ears soundly."

"I shall not speak any more English at all," said Ollie, gravely. "But if you
touch me, I shall roar, and Ruth will hear me."

And to this determination, he adhered. Mrs. Short tried bribes and

persuasions in vain, and she was afraid to strike him. Ollie sat quietly on
his perch, pouring forth replies to everything she said, but all in what she
called his nasty furrin' tongue; and not one word of common sense could
she get out of him, as she afterwards remarked. At last the knock at the
door, of which I have already spoken, concluded this vexatious
interview.

"That's Ruthie!" cried Ollie, dropping off his chair and making for the
door; but, remembering himself, he turned and made a polite bow to
Mrs. Short, saying:

"Mille pardons, madame—adieu!" And then Mrs. Short, watching in

dumb dismay from her window, saw the party return to Ralph's house.

"Did Mrs. Short ask you many questions?" asked Ralph.

"A great many; she never stopped, sir!"

"And did you answer? But of course you couldn't help it. What a plague,"
thought he, "the old woman will be, if she has got the whole story from
the boy."

"Yes, I answered her," replied Ollie with a grave smile. "Only—I spoke in
French; and she did not like it, sir."
Ralph actually laughed, for the first time for many years, so that the
sound almost startled him.

They went to church together, and I cannot say that Ollie's behaviour
there was edifying, though he was quiet enough; for he fell fast asleep,
and lay with his head in Ruth's lap, looking like a beautiful picture. Mrs.
Short would hardly have recognised her saucy tormentor in this lovely
sleeping cherub. Ralph's heart grew softer with every glance; he could
not fix his mind on the sermon at all; but I think the two children were the
text to an unspoken sermon, preached to Ralph alone.

Ruth and Ollie went home after church, thanking him so heartily for their
pleasant day, "and all the trouble you are going to take for us," Ruth
added, that poor crusty old Ralph felt wonderfully happy.

Next day, after a good deal of thought, he wrote his letter to Mr. Mordan,
and then left home, but not, as usual, to wander aimlessly about the
country. He went up the hill, and betook himself to the curate's house.
Somewhat to his surprise, he got away without being pounced upon by
Mrs. Short; but in truth, that good lady felt a little shy of him, not knowing
what he might say about Ollie's enforced visit the day before.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Cloudesley were at home, and Ralph was at once
taken to their pretty little sitting-room. May sprang up gladly,—

"Have you come to see me at last, Mr. Trulock, to make up for your
being always out when I go to see you?" she said; and as she spoke
she found a comfortable chair for him.

"You are very kind, madam," he said, in his formal way, "and I am very
glad to see you look so well. But I only ventured to call on a little matter
of business—or not business exactly, but to ask Mr. Cloudesley
something."

"What is it, Trulock?" said Mr. Cloudesley, pushing aside his writing-
desk. "Anything that I can do for you?"

"Not for me, sir, but for a little boy—his name is Garland, and I want to
know if he can go to the Greatrex school for a time. I know it is intended
for the children of Fairford people only, and, as far as I can make out,
this child does not belong to Fairford; but it is a pity that he should be
running idle about the streets."

"Garland! I don't know the name," said Mr. Cloudesley.

"No, sir; it is not a Fairford name. These children—for the girl is no more
than a child herself, Heaven help her!—came over from France with
their father, who said he was coming to Fairford to see his father. The
poor young man died at Southampton, and from the girl's story I should
conclude that he had given up his situation, and undertaken the journey,
having reason to believe that his life was near an end. He did not tell the
child this,—it is only my own idea. With his last breath, he urged her to
come on here to her grandfather, and she obeyed, of course; but no one
of the name was ever known here."

"Have they been here long?"

"Since the early part of April, sir. They lodge at Mrs. Cricklade's; she
keeps a baker's shop half-way down the hill."

"Ah! That accounts for my not hearing of them. Mrs. Cricklade contrives
to keep out of my way, or to be wonderfully busy when I call."

"I met the girl in Price's shop, sir: she works for them, and what she
earns is nearly all they have to depend on. I have undertaken to write to
Bordeaux, and to advertise for the grandfather, but meantime it seems a
pity that little Oliver should be running about the streets."

"Nor is Mrs. Cricklade's the best place for them," remarked May.

"No; but until we get an answer from Bordeaux, I thought they might as
well stay there, as the old woman is very kind to them."

"Well, perhaps you are right," replied May, and was going on to say that
she would call and see the children, when to her surprise her husband
gave her a look which she knew meant "don't." And if this surprised her,
how much more was she amazed to hear Gilbert making some difficulty
about admitting the boy to the Greatrex school.
"I fear he hardly belongs to the class for which the school is intended,"
he remarked. "Most likely, when you have found the relatives, they will
be indignant that he should have been sent to a school of this kind.
Perhaps we may as well wait a bit, at least."

"Well, sir, I hardly like it for him. He is a fine little fellow, and very
innocent. His sister cannot spare time to see after him."

"Still, considering that the grandfather may turn up any day, I hardly like
to take the responsibility."

"I will take it upon myself, sir. I have been advising the girl, and I will
advise her to send him."

"Oh, very well, then. There is a penny a week to pay, I suppose she can
manage that? And threepence a week extra secures to the children a
meal in the middle of the day—a good dinner, too, for it is partly
provided by Lady Mabel's bequest. That's fourpence a week; you will tell
the girl, and the child can begin to-morrow. I will see Mr. Manders about
it in the evening."

"Fourpence a week," said Ralph with a sigh. "I will remember, sir."

Then he said good-bye, and departed.

"Gilbert, why did you stop me just now? And why did you not admit this
poor child free? You can, can you not?"

"I can; but don't you see how interested old Trulock is in them? Is it not
the very thing we could have wished for the poor old fellow—something
to draw him out of his shell? And would you interfere with him? You'll
find that this fourpence a week will be paid by Ralph himself, and that by
degrees he'll give more care and thought to these children than if we
took them up. Then he would feel that they were all right; but if we leave
them to him, he won't neglect them. Why, he looked quite softened when
he spoke of them."

"I should never have thought of all that!" cried May admiringly. "It is not
for nothing that you come from the North, sir. You are a long-headed
personage. Poor old Ralph! I do like him, Gilbert."
Ralph went to see Ruth, and found her hard at work, and Ollie sitting
beside her, looking, with his soft bright eyes and restless movements,
not unlike a newly-caught bird in a cage. Ruth explained his presence by
telling her friend that some of the boys had had a fight, and had hurt one
another, and Ollie had run home quite horrified. This smoothed the way
for the mention of the school, at the idea of which, particularly when the
"good dinner" was mentioned, Ruth's sweet brown eyes glistened with
joy. Ollie was glad, too, for he liked learning, though he was nervous at
the notion of going among strangers alone.

"But you must go alone, for I could not spare time to go with you, Ollie.
And besides, I don't know them any more than you do," said Ruth.

"I will come for you and go with you the first day, Ollie," said Ralph, not
without a feeling of surprise at himself.

"Mr. Trulock, I do think you are the kindest person in the world!" cried
Ruth earnestly.

"You won't find many to agree with you there," replied Ralph drily.

"That fat woman called you Old Crusty," remarked Ollie.

"You should not have said that Ollie," Ruth said reprovingly. "She did not
mean Mr. Trulock to hear it. Well, sir, I hope our grandfather may turn
out to be just like you," she added, turning to Ralph.

Mr. and Mrs. Cloudesley were at breakfast the next morning, when past
the window went Ralph Trulock, and by his side, holding by his hand,
and chattering gaily, with dark eyes raised fearlessly to the stern old
face, was the loveliest boy, May declared, that she had ever seen.

"See how well the spell works," said Gilbert.

"I knew Trulock had a kind heart," she replied, "if I could only get at it.
He speaks of his wife so tenderly."

"These children are finding their way to it, I suspect," answered Mr.
Cloudesley. "Now, May, let them quite alone. Trulock will be the better
for being left to manage everything for himself."