The “Future” of Anthropology

In Samuel Gerald Collins’s “Sail on! Sail on!: Anthropology, Science Fiction, and the Enticing Future,” he discusses how anthropologists have neglected attempts to study the possibilities of the future of humankind. I am particularly interested in Johannes Fabian’s metaphor: “Fabian argues in Time and the Other, the “[s]ystematic study of ‘primitive’ tribes began first in the hope of utilizing them as a kind of time-machine, a peep into our own historic past, as providing closer evidence about the early links in the great Series” that led to modern Western civilization” (180). As Collins discusses, this essay’s purpose is to address “anthropology’s persistent amnesia about its future work” (181).

With this metaphorical “time machine,” anthropologists are only using two of the time machine’s three choices: (1) backward time travel and (2) no time travel (the study of present day). For a long time, anthropologists have studied less-developed countries in order to take a glimpse at our past. However, anthropology has yet to take advantage of the third option: future time travel. Collins says, “By examining technologies of future work in anthropology, I hope to evoke the possibility of an emergent discourse no longer mired in the tempocentrisms of the past” (182). It is very important that Collins acknowledges the connection between anthropology and science fiction because by incorporating science fiction into anthropological studies, anthropologists like Ursula K. Le Guin are able to attempt to hypothesize about the future. Collins continues, “But while this is an essay largely critical of a certain strain of anthropological thought, I nevertheless believe that there is, in the intertexts of anthropology and science fiction, a good deal of potential” (182). There is in fact a lot of potential in this arena because the reason we study the past is to not repeat our mistakes. Therefore, anticipating the future will help project what will happen so we as humans can be prepared.