ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the readers to Bremerhaven and the context in which the author's informants reconfigure their expectations. It reviews some recent contributions to the literatures on maintenance, repair, and the crisis of liberalism. With their help, the chapter extrapolates some characteristics of the context of our discipline’s contemporary stances to the future. It returns to Bremerhaven and its post-industrial revitalization programmes. The chapter discusses the conceptual implications of sustainability and related topics, such as maintenance and repair. It does so in conversation with some recent social science literature on these topics, also to sketch the context of anthropology’s own current epistemic and political crisis. Like the author's informants from Bremerhaven, the author and many of his anthropological colleagues still and continuously try to readjust our expectations of the future.
