ABSTRACT
In industrial societies,1 in this end-of-millennium decade, imaging the future is serious business. The versions of it which were fashionable for a century are no longer so: as David Lowenthal would have it (Chapter 1), the old images are simply not alive anymore. There is a resurgence of interest in the scientific modelling of time;2 science fiction and futuristic fantasy have lost their minority cult status and become the object of literary and social criticism;3 cinematic visions of the future dominate popular entertainment;4
and public policy is more often debated by weighting the appeal of one ‘scenario’ against the other than by reference to precedent.5 And because ferment around a particular concept in this culture creates demand for cross-cultural perspectives on it, the moment is now right for a review of comparative insights into the future
The arena is not new to anthropologists, of course, but we are equivocal about claiming it. On the one hand we take pride in having expert knowledge, relative to others, of social form and of the likely outcome of social process; on the other, we are nervous of anything that smacks of prediction. And while the social anthropologist as practitioner is inevitably expected to predict the future in some degree-whether to visualise, to plan, or to help control it-and many examples of individuals’ success in application and advocacy now stand to our collective credit, yet there are niches in the discipline which persist in denying the validity of its nonacademic role exactly because of the ‘guessing’ entailed by it.6
