ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the purchase of this Bergsonian approach for an ethnographic study on the imagination. A central contention has been that, as free-floating after-effects of futures that have been but were never to be, the images and desires associated with the two infrastructural projects acquired their own lives in Maputo and Ulaanbaatar. Adopting Kant's vocabulary, one might have described these as 'pictures', if it were not for the fact that these halo-like temporalities are fundamentally divested of human sensory input. Anthropological studies of the imagination have argued that social imaginaries aid people to make sense of changing social, political and economic circumstances by straddling the divide between an uncertain present and an unknown future. A good illustration of this approach can be found in Vincent Crapanzano's book Imaginative Horizons, where he makes the argument that imaginative possibilities are conditioned also by what lies beyond the immediately given and resists total articulation, a 'hinterland' that human beings might never reach.
