To Predict the Future or to Guide It

     Samuel Collin's article "Sail on! Sail on!: Anthropology, Science Fiction, and the Enticing Future" discusses the emerging trend in anthropology to attempt to predict future cultures and to add a sort of science fiction aspect to the anthropological field.  In this article, Collins addresses Margaret Mead's, and others', critiques of anthropology being "temprocentric."  These anthropologists believed that the field concerned itself with only "the past, the ethnographic past and the actual present," disregarding what anthropology could tell us about the future.  Collins also discusses the emerging relationship between anthropology and science fiction, remarking that science fiction writers need an understanding of anthropology (along with physics) and that it may be the case that anthropologists who are bad science fiction writers fall short as anthropologists in some way.

     Despite being a science fiction fan myself, I believe that anthropology must refrain from becoming a literary field and one that dabbles in predictions as much as science fiction.  Anthropologists are scientists concerned with understanding the human condition.  This condition includes human cultures, how our societies are structured, how these cultures exist today, how they have evolved, and how we humans ourselves have evolved.  Needless to say, anthropology covers a wide field of topics, though an anthologist’s understanding comes from data.  It is from this understanding that anthropologists find themselves in a position to affect the future and to better humanity's understanding of itself.  However, anthropology should avoid becoming a discipline of predicting the future.  It must avoid this as such attempts are doomed to fail.  There is no way that anthropologists can try to do predict the future without sacrificing their scientific standing.  If this standing is lost, anthropology shall loose its ability to improve society.  Instead of predicting the society’s future, anthropology must seek to guide society towards a better tomorrow by grounding our understanding of ourselves in the facts of the past and present.