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“Future senses,” as a method, analytic frame, or ideological position, call upon us to become a part of communities as anthropologists. Through the process of striving to become accepted into and learn the “rules” of communities, we develop a perspective on where the future is headed as it emerges from within communities. There is a difference between explaining a historical shift in order to say, “This is where the future is headed, and this is how you should position yourself to meet it,” and actively ingratiating oneself within communities to say, “This is the future they are building, and my perspective is built on being a part of their everyday life and seeing how they live.” Our argument is not about accuracy of guessing the future but rather about having a different relationship to our subjects, and thereby gaining a different perspective on future visions and how they emerge.
CONCLUSION
Our reflection on “future senses” in general, and suggestion to integrate “future senses” in our practices of research, design, and strategy in particular, has been an adventure into possibility, and new ways of thinking and doing. As should be clear, we are invested in embracing more deeply an experiential, bottom-up perspective when using ethnography in order to provide new insights into the relational nature of future-making. To us, this is meaningful work that calls us to question the idea of the “over there” subject as the object of analysis—something that knowledge can be extracted from and inserted “here.” Rather, we locate the possibility of agency—to perceive, attend to, and anticipate the future—within the “empirical particulars of the group being observed” (Fine 2003, 44).
In grounding anticipation in lived experience, moreover, we offer a framework for approaching the way the future develops in different social and cultural contexts, and show how integral the future is to the present. Such an approach has the potential to reveal realities often overlooked in broader future visions, including the inequalities which such visions, strategies, and plans tend to reproduce. Lived experience, we might add, differs across time and space, across cultures and countries. Capturing these disparities, and exploring how they come about, is the first step in creating diverse kinds of potential instead of simply “following trends.” As Ákos Östör noted some decades ago, “There are many worlds, human beings are the world makers, and the future is still open ended” (Östör 1993, 88).
Jana Jevtic (PhD, CEU, Anthropology) is a Strategist at Gemic. Prior to joining Gemic, she worked as an Assistant Professor at Sarajevo School of Science and Technology. She has been a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley, conducting research on Islam and consumer boycotts.
Rebekah Park (PhD, UCLA, Anthropology) is a Director of Strategy at Gemic. Previously, she worked as a Senior Manager at ReD Associates and taught at Marlboro College. She has been the Principal Investigator for studies funded by the Fulbright, Jacob K. Javits, Andrew W. Mellon, and Pacific Rim foundations.
NOTES
1. While these fieldworks were conducted individually, we opt to use an inclusive first person plural pronoun—“our,” “us,” and “we”—for clarity and consistency.
2. For the sake of brevity, Bosnia and Herzegovina is referred to as “Bosnia” in the paper.
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