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

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Foreword
When the contributors to this volume completed their chapters, they

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Batchelor
3 Put Your Body into It: Exploring Imagination

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

Rajat Nayyar
5 Impossible Ethnography: Tracking Colonial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sufferings of Barnabas Downs, Jun
Who was among the number of those who escaped
death on board the privateer brig Arnold, James
Magee, commander, which was cast away near
Plymouth-Harbour, in a most terrible snow-storm,
December 26, 1778, when more than sixty persons
were frozen to death. Containing also a particular
account of said shipwreck
Author: Barnabas Downs
Release date: September 29, 2023 [eBook #71758]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: E. Russell, 1786
Credits: Steve Mattern, David Wilson and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BRIEF AND

REMARKABLE NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND EXTREME
SUFFERINGS OF BARNABAS DOWNS, JUN ***
A brief and remarkable
N A R R AT I V E
o f t h e
L I F E
And extreme Sufferings of
B A R N A B A S D O W NS,
Jun.
Who was among the Number of thoſe who eſcaped Death
on board the Privateer Brig Arnold, James Magee,
Commander, which was caſt away near Plymouth-
Harbour, in a moſt terrible Snow-Storm,
December 26, 1778, when more than Sixty Perſons
were frozen to Death.——Containing alſo
A particular Account of ſaid Shipwreck.
Printed by E. Russell, for the Author, 1786
Printing-Office Liberty-square, Sept. 22, 1786.
In the Preſs, and in a few Days will be publiſhed and
ready for Sale, by E. Russell, at his Office, near Liberty
Pole, by the Thouſand, Hundred, Groce or leſſer Quantity,
at the moſt reaſonable Rate:—Alſo may be had of
Mr. Benjamin Guild, at the Boſton Book-Store, near the
State-Houſe in Cornhill; Col. Ebenezer Battelle,
Bookſeller, at the London Book-Store, in Marlboro’-Street;
Mr. William Green, Bookſeller, at Shakeſpear’s-Head, in
Newbury-Street; Capt. William Green, at his Grocery
and Weſt-India Store near the Bridge, in Boſton;
Mr. Lemuel Cox, and Mr. Trumbull, Innholder, near the
Bridge, and Mr. Edward Hayes, in Charleſton;
Mr. Edward Killins, at his Store, near the Market, in
Salem; Mr. Bulkly Emerson, at the Poſt-Office, in
Newbury-Port; Mr. Alford Butler, Bookſeller, in
Portſmouth, New-Hampſhire, and by many other Printers,
Bookſellers, Shopkeepers and Travelling-Traders in Town
and Country.
B I C K E R S T A F F’s
genuine and
correct
B O S T O N A L M A N A C K,
For the Year of our
Redemption, 1787.
Which will contain a great Variety of uſeful and
entertaining Matter, in Prose and Verse.
This Work will be likewiſe ornamented with a large
Number of engraved Plates, ſome of which repreſent the
twelve Signs of the Zodiack in Miniature, and the ſeveral
Employments and Diverſions of the Gentlemen Farmers,
throughout the different Seaſons of the Year:—Alſo a
curious Repreſentation of a County Convention,
debating on State-Affairs; at the Head of the Table is a
Figure of H O N E S T U S, that renowned Champion and
bold Atteſtor of the Liberty of the Subject, and ſworn
Enemy to Lawyers, who is converſing with one of the
Order; over his Head is a Label with theſe Words “No
Courts, no L A W Y E R S:” Another Plate repreſents a
very curious and droll Scene of a large Group of the
Black Order, or the Sons of Littleton and Coke,
mounted on Jack-Aſſes, Peacocks, &c. returning from a
rich Feaſt at Concord Court, &c.
P R E FA CE.
To the R E A D E R, into whoſe
Hands this N a r r a t i v e
may fall; eſpecially my
Seafaring B r e t h r e n.
F R I E N D S,
HEN any remarkable

circumſtances take place
in a man’s life, he feels
commonly a diſpoſition to
communicate them to the world: If
they have been deliverances from
great and ſignal dangers, he will
make this communication from a
principle of gratitude to the Being
who hath protected and preſerved
him: He will wiſh to engage others
to be thankful on his behalf; and a
knowledge of the kindneſs of
Heaven to him may lead others to
truſt in GOD, when they are
brought into like diſtreſs and
danger. By theſe motives the
Subject of the following pages
hopes he is influenced in
publiſhing them to the world; which
is all the apology that may be
expected from the P u b l i c k’s
diſtreſſed Friend,
B A R N. D O W N E S, Jun.
Barnstable,
September 10,
1786.
☞ The Author gratefully

acknowledges himſelf indebted
to a Reverend
G e n t l e m a n in Boſton for
his kindneſs in correcting the
following ſheets.
A
N A R R A T I V E, &c.
W A S born in Barnſtable, in New-
England, October 2, 1757, of
credible Parents, whom I ſerved as
an obedient Son, I hope, until the
commencement of the late war called me
from my home, and led me to exchange the
occupation of a Huſbandman, to which I was
bred for the more dangerous employment of
a Soldier. In this capacity I served my
Country 3 campaigns, and know not that my
behaviour was censured by my officers.
After having returned for a time to the

Farming-Buſineſs, I concluded to try my
fortune at ſea: I entered accordingly on board
the ſchooner Bunker-Hill, Captain Iſaac Cobb,
Commander, on a privateering voyage: But
we had not been out more than 6 days
before we were taken by the brig Hope, one
Brown, Commander, and carried into Halifax.
We were committed to jail and kept very
ſhort: Then I was taken with the ſmall-pox,
thro’ which GOD ſafely carried me when
deſtitute of the neceſſaries of life, and under
great preſſure of mind. But after my being
recovered ſo far as to be returned to the jail
from the hoſpital, in conſequence of my
having nothing but a ſmall allowance of ſalt
proviſions, which were next to poiſon for a
ſick perſon, I was taken with a violent fever,
which returned me again to the hoſpital, and
brought me to the gates of the grave. No
perſon who hath not experienced it can
imagine how gloomy and diſtreſſing it is to be
under ſuch circumſtances: To be far diſtant
from our deareſt Friends; to be among
perſons who are not only without any
concern for us, or intereſt in our fate, but who
are our profeſſed enemies, and not governed
even by the common principles of humanity,
is a caſe truly melancholy. In this ſituation I
was attacked with a bleeding of the noſe, (to
which I had before been ſubject) which
brought me to the very borders of eternity!
After this I was, by the ſmiles of heaven

recovered and reſtored, by a cartel, with 400
of my Countrymen to our own homes. How
welcome they were to us, and how pleaſant it
was to me to ſee the faces of my Friends
again, any one may imagine more eaſily than
I can deſcribe!
But tho’ I had been ſo unſucceſſful in my
firſt attempt at ſea, I could not reſiſt the
inclination I had to try once more what
Providence would do for me: I left my native
place, went to Boſton, and entered on board
the brig Arnold, James Magee, Commander.
I well remember I felt an unusual dejection
when I entered on this undertaking; and tho’
I pretend not to ſay that this foreboded the
miſfortunes I was to meet with in this fatal
veſſel, yet I have often reflected upon it ſince
with a degree of admiration.
While the brig lay in the harbour, I
attempted with ſome other hands to go on
board another veſſel in a ſmall boat, but the
wind ſuddenly riſing we were in danger of
being drowned; the boat run on Governor’s-
Iſland, and we were obliged to ſtay there
24 hours before we could get off. Providence
preſerved my life in this danger, in order that
I might live thro’ greater, and teſtify to his
loving kindneſs and mercy.
On December 24, 1778, Capt. Magee
ſailed from Boſton: We had been at ſea but a
few hours, when a moſt terrible gale of wind
aroſe, ſo that the water was almoſt knee deep
on the leeward ſide of the quarter-deck. We
continued in the Bay that day and the night
following, but on the next day we got into
Plymouth. The wind was abated, but the cold
was ſevere and intenſe beyond deſcription.
We came to anchor a little below Beach-
Point, in the Harbour of Plymouth.
On Saturday, December 26, about

6 o’clock in the morning, from the violent
motion of the ſea, the brig ſtruck the bottom
as tho’ it would drive her keel in. As there
was not depth of water enough to work the
veſſel in the place where we lay, and we ſaw
a heavy ſtorm coming on, our Commander
thought it beſt to cut our cables and let her
drive, which was immediately done. The
ſtorm increaſed very faſt, ſo that we were
obliged to cut away the main-maſt, and we
drifted upon an hard flat a little to the
weſtward of Beach-Point.
This was early on Saturday morning, and
we now laboured hard in throwing over our
wood and getting our guns off the decks into
the hold, but the veſſel began to leak very
faſt, and with every motion of the ſea ſhe
ſtruck the bottom as tho’ ſhe would ſplit in
pieces. We kept 2 pumps going, but could
not gain upon the water. The ſtorm now
increaſed to a moſt prodigious degree: It
ſnowed ſo thick that we could ſee but a very
little way from the brig, and the cold was
extreme; we continued hard at work all day
without eating or drinking any thing ſcarcely,
having but little appetite with the proſpect of
death continually before our eyes.
Until now we had hopes of eſcape, but
juſt before night we looked into the hold and
ſaw the caſks floating about; this drove us to
deſpair, and we forſook the pumps without a
ray of hope but from the immediate
interpoſition of divine Providence. Many of
the people now began to pray, and I went
into the cabbin and ſat upon one of the gun-
carriages. I had not been there long before I
ſaw cheſts floating about, and perceived that
the tide was flowing on us very faſt; by
direction of the Capt. all left the cabbin and
came upon the quarter-deck.
It is not poſſible to deſcribe my ſenſations
at this period; death appeared inevitable,
and we waited every moment for its
approach! Even now, when I recollect my
feelings it is difficult to ſteady my pen! And
indeed I had ground enough for my
apprehenſions, for we had not been long
upon the quarter-deck before the water upon
the main-deck was even with it. Our fore-
maſt was ſtill ſtanding, which cauſed the veſſel
to roll very much, but when we had cut that
away ſhe lay ſtiller. The brig now lay ſunk; the
tide was flowing faſt and the ſea broke very
heavily over us. We were all upon the
quarter-deck, and the water came in upon us
ancle deep.
There was a ſail in the netting upon the
windward-quarter, which we contrived to laſh
over us, but there were ſo many under it that
we ſhould have been ſtifled for want of
breath, if we had not cut places to let in the
air. The tide was then about at its height but
the ſtorm did not abate. There was nothing to
be heard around but ſcreeches, groans and
deep lamentations for themſelves and their
families, and earneſt cries to G O D for
mercy and relief!
There was ſuch a croud upon the quarter
deck we could not ſtand up without treading
upon one another. Being in a ſtruggle I was
thrown down and trampled upon as if the
breath would be crouded out of my body:
However I ſoon recovered my feet and
trampled upon others in my turn; for the
immediate regard which every man had to
his own life prevented him from attending to
the diſtreſſes of his neighbours!
Struggling in this manner and trying to
clear ourſelves from thoſe who fell down had
pulled off moſt of our ſhoes, and the wet and
cold ſoon froze our feet. Nature could ſuſtain
it no longer and the people began to die all
around me. Capt. John Ruſſell of Barnſtable
was the firſt of thoſe with whom I was
acquainted that died, but many others ſoon
followed him. Fatigue and diſtreſs, added to
the extreme cold and deſpair of relief, put a
period to the lives of great numbers. Thoſe
who were able to ſtand were obliged to
huddle up cloſe together, and breathe in
each other’s faces to preſerve them from
freezing to death, while their comrades were
dying around them all night. In the morning a
moſt awful ſight preſented itſelf to us; 60 of
our Comrades lay dead acroſs each other,
and but 2 of my Townſmen were among the
living!
On Lord’s-Day, Dec. 27, the ſtorm abated
and the ſun appeared clear, but the ſevere
cold ſtill continued. We ſaw Plymouth and a
number of people coming along the ſhore for
our relief: We could diſcern them puſh off two
boats and make an hard trial to come to us,
but the harbour was ſo full of ice they could
not reach us: We ſaw them return and it gave
us an inexpreſſible ſhock. The elevation
which their appearance gave us tended to
ſink us the lower. Our ſituation was very
gloomy; we had little to ſupport nature except
rum; no ſhoes on our feet, and very much
frozen; the Heavens was our only covering!
I retained my ſenſes until about 2 o’clock
on Lord’s-Day, but was then deprived of
them and lay on the quarter-deck until the
next day, when a boat got to us in order to
carry the living aſhore, which amounted only
to 32. When they were looking around to
collect the ſurvivors, they at firſt ſuppoſed me
to be dead, but ſeeing one of my eye-lids
move they took me up and laying me in the
boat carried me aſhore.
I was carried to Mr. Bartlet’s tavern,
whoſe kindneſs to me I would thus publickly
acknowledge, and hope I ſhall always
remember with gratitude. My cloaths were
firſt cut from off me and I was put into cold
water in order to take out the froſt: I was then
placed in bed and having my teeth forced
open had ſome cordials poured down my
throat, but I have no remembrance of any of
theſe tranſactions, for I lay perfectly ſenſeleſs
until 2 o’clock on Monday, when my ſenſes
came to me at once. My eyes were not open,
but I heard the voices of perſons talking
around me, and the firſt idea which ſtruck me
was, that I was ſtill on board the brig, but that
a boat come to our relief. I ſoon however
opened my eyes and was informed of what
had happened and where I then was.
I recovered gradually, but was obliged
to paſs thro’ the painful operation of having
ſome of my limbs ſeperated from my body:
But after all theſe diſtreſſes I am ſtill among
the living to praiſe G O D! Let my ſpared life
be devoted to his ſervice, and may I ever be
mindful of his benefits!

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Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com

When the contributors to this volume completed their chapters, they

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

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

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

1 Introduction: In Search of Lost Futures 1

2 Possibilities and Impossibilities in Acción 25

3 Put Your Body into It: Exploring Imagination

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

5 Impossible Ethnography: Tracking Colonial

Part II Deep Interdisciplinarity

6 Future-Making in Times of Urban Sustainability:

7 Knowing and Imagining with Sustainable Makers 151

8 Anticipating Crisis as Affective Future-Making

9 Simulating and Trusting in Automated Futures:

Part III Autoethnography

10 Intimating the Possible Collapse of the Future:

11 Absence, Magic, and Impossible Futures 255

12 Projections and Possibilities: An Installation About

13 Exhibition Development as Restorative

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

Chong-Anna Canfora is Executive Director at Michigan Community

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

ethnography, and Indigenous research methodologies. Her new mono-

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

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

Fig. 2.1 Students construct a public memorial to the 43

Fig. 7.1 Open-Source Circular Economy Days Helsinki 2016

Introduction: In Search of Lost Futures

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston and Mark Auslander

© The Author(s) 2021 1

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

movements, spearhead artistic initiatives, and develop revolutionary tech-

Anthropological Forays into the Future

Anthropologists have also documented how people anticipate the

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The Three Approaches

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Imagining and Intervening in the Future

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

In recent years, multimodality—approaches and practices that employ

• and Ethnographic Terminalia, a collective of international artists and

Title: A brief and remarkable narrative of the life and extreme

Author: Barnabas Downs

Release date: September 29, 2023 [eBook #71758]

Original publication: Boston: E. Russell, 1786

Credits: Steve Mattern, David Wilson and the Online Distributed

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BRIEF AND

HEN any remarkable

☞ The Author gratefully

After having returned for a time to the

After this I was, by the ſmiles of heaven