Ethnographic Theory Back Through the Future-Focused Looking Glass: Comparative Metaphysics, Epistemological Historiography, and Caring for Concepts

Abstract (English)

How have different practitioners approached ethnographic theory? And how might we imagine what the future direction of such theorisations could consist of? Do the abstractions involved in theory, and the empirical commitment which shapes ethnography, align? Responses to these questions may, at first glance, appear to be apparent to practitioners: Theory is often conceived of as the analysis of ethnographic descriptions whose comparison with other materials produces, often through extrapolation, generalised and/or abstract explanations. Yet, once conceptualisations of ethnographic theory are given the same level of analytical scrutiny as the descriptive materials pertaining to our participants’ worlds, responses to the aforementioned questions may be more difficult to articulate.

The future, as an analytical domain for anthropologists and as an empirical phenomenon for research participants, appears to be undergoing unprecedented transformations through the rise of technologies such as AI and advanced robotics, biohacking and nutrigenomics, and digital methodologies and multi-modal forms of practice and representation. Although the future has become a research area in its own right, it would be analytically untenable to approach this temporal domain without attention to the antecedent conditions that shaped its emergence. This panel explores not only what ethnographic theory is and how it is assembled, but also how future directions in these domains relate more broadly to anthropological practice. It invites presentations that focus on current technologies, and longer-established research areas such as indigenous and nomadic peoples, ethnic minorities and other groups affected by power asymmetries, through the lens of ethnographic theory. In this sense, although the panel’s main focus is on the yet to come, it also welcomes engagements with the ways that previous ethnographic theorisations have shaped both contemporary anthropology(s) and future-focused approaches that extend the very notions of contemporaneity, the future, and theory.
Because of its emphasis on the future of ethnographic theory, the panel is particularly interested in papers that engage with and, perhaps, destabilise the fields of epistemology and historiography, concept/heuristic formation and deployment, comparative metaphysics and other philosophical/analytical modes of description and representation, including, but not limited to counterfactuality and speculation, inference and (im)plausibility, and indigenous semiotics and psychotropic sense-making. One starting point might be to draw upon non-Western modes of abstraction, theorisation, and speculation. Another fruitful avenue for exploration may be to approach ethnographic theory from the perspective of multi-modal methods that inspire and facilitate different ways of approaching theoretics and futuricity. These may include comparative sense-scapes and aesthetics, indigenous and nomadic (multi)perspectivism, and ethnographies of quantitative and technological imaginaries, (inter)generational trans-temporalities, and the theoretical-oriented poetics of concept-making and deployment.