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When accounting for changes in the post-socialist era, anthropologists were forced to carefully distinguish between what had remained the same, what had actually changed and what was emerging anew and on its own terms. As a sub-discipline, the anthropology of post-socialism has thereby contributed prominently to theories of time, change and temporal agency. It has also shown that the post-socialist present is, if at all, as determined by its socialist past as it is by its insecure futures. Based on a few ethnographic examples from a former socialist model city in East Germany, and my own experiences as both a post-socialist anthropologist and an anthropologist of post-socialism, I scrutinize the temporal logic of the sub-discipline’s defining concept. I do so by testing its applicability to three objects of anthropological inquiry, and by pondering upon its implications for a more sustained study of the future. The temporal multiplicity that this concept affords, I claim, is crucial for the discipline overall, but demands further scrutiny. Rather than abandoning it, as I and others have previously argued, it is time to rewrite the time of post-socialism with regards to the future.

In order to be able to contextualize and understand social worlds, anthropologists pay close attention. We observe how individuals and communities relate to each other and to their ideas. We study the intimate and subjective, as well as the large-scale cosmologies by which people make themselves and the world. Our participatory methods and reflective analysis document the complex, intricate, patterned, and also random aspects of people’s reasoning and actions. These activities, on anthropology’s part, supposedly offer not only critical descriptions of the present (on its historical trajectories), but possible intimations of a society’s future. Anthropological analysis, in other words, not only describes but also anticipates. This position paper focuses on the notions of anticipation, predictability, and possibility in anthropology. It asks what methodological and theoretical assumptions are built into our ways of making predictions about our field sites. It invites the reader to consider the effects certain anticipatory practices have for the people and phenomena we study as well as for the discipline. Centrally, the paper proposes different ways of attending to visions that anticipate the future. By reflecting on my ethnographic and analytical journeys in Serbia, I attempt to explain why I currently make so much of questions of predictability and possibility in both the field and the discipline. My desire is to open up a discussion on the value of cultivating attention to what seems to emerge on the side of predictable., Da bi mogli kontekstualizirati i razumjeti društvene svjetove, antropolozi pomno promatraju. Promatramo kako se pojedinci i zajednice odnose jedni prema drugima i prema svojim idejama. Proučavamo intimno i subjektivno, kao i kozmologije velikih razmjera pomoću kojih ljudi ostvaruju sebe i svijet. Naše participativne metode i reflektivne analize dokumentiraju kompleksne, zamršene, uobličene, ali i nasumične aspekte ljudskog razmišljanja i djelovanja. U antropologiji takve aktivnosti nude ne samo kritičke opise sadašnjosti (na njihovim povijesnim putanjama) već i moguće nagovještaje budućnosti nekog društva. Drugim riječima, antropološka analiza ne samo da opisuje nego i predviđa. Ovaj rad razmatra ideje predviđanja, procjenjivanja i mogućnosti u antropologiji. Propituje koje su metodološke i teorijske pretpostavke ugrađene u antropološke načine predviđanja, odnosno opisa i posljedične analize naših terena. Istražuje kakve učinke imaju prakse anticipacije, kako na ljude i fenomene koje proučavamo tako i na disciplinu. U središtu rada su prijedlozi različitih načina pristupanja vizijama koje predviđaju budućnost. Reflektirajući o svojim etnografskim i analitičkim putovanjima po Srbiji, nastojim pojasniti zašto sam trenutačno posvećena pitanjima predvidljivosti i mogućnosti i na terenu i u disciplini. Želja mi je potaknuti raspravu o vrijednosti pažnje usmjerene na ono što predvidljivošću ne možemo obuhvatiti.

The Goetheviertel is the poorest district of Germany’s poorest city, the postindustrial harbour city of Bremerhaven. However, for many local inhabitants it is also the city’s most beautiful district with its 19th century architecture and central location, and any visitor of Bremerhaven would agree: this district is ripe for gentrification. Gentrification has been anticipated for the district at least since the 1980s when the city declared the Goetheviertel to be an investment area. Investors from all over the world bought property in the district, but, as many inhabitants underline today, they never really invested into the maintenance of their houses. The results are postindustrial ruins of a special kind: ruins of pre-gentrification. These ruins are former apartment houses whose ongoing decay materialises not just the general postindustrial decline of Bremerhaven, but results from the continued failure of the realization of gentrification. They are ruins of failed anticipation. As many of the people living in the district, these houses might still await a better future, but, statically speaking, time has run out for them. Their deterioration has deemed them scrap (‘Schrott’-) houses that are legally uninhabitable. They epitomize the standstill in urban renovation that dominates both district and city. However, this absence also produces spaces for those that are usually excluded from a gentrified future. The scrap houses’ material qualities therefore maintain the current district inhabitants’ local futures by delaying the gentrification everybody continues to foresee. This article maps their temporal agency in order to scrutinize social sciences approaches to the production of time. Whilst discussing recent contributions to the anthropological literature on time and infrastructure, I present these houses with their specific material properties as active partners in the co-production of time in this particular district, and its potential futures.

This is an episodic sensorial biography (Desjarlais 2003) of a city made of concrete. It recounts how urban modernist infrastructures, shaped by their main construction material, created a new historical-sensorial experience. It tracks an infrastructural intimacy, whose cracks, tremors and concussions mark epochal changes in what – for want of a more precise term – others have coined “infrastructural times:” the similarly intricate relations between specific infrastructures and the times in which they exist (Barry 2015; Anand et al. 2018; Appel 2018; Joniak-Lüthi 2019). The maritime metaphors deployed below are not intended to naturalize these dramatic changes. Rather, they introduce a different temporal context to this infrastructure’s precarious materiality in order to disturb our own sense of time.

Different times evoke different relations to the future. Recent additions look discouragingly conservative: sustaining, maintaining, and enduring describe practices that look like they are aimed at preventing change rather than provoking it. However, once we change our own expectations, we can see them as radically progressive alternatives for future-making in the postindustrial era. But what kind of futures do these practices help us and our informants to envision? And are these futures necessarily “otherwise”—and otherwise with regard to what: the state of the present or dystopian expectations of worse futures? Based on the material from a prototype postindustrial German city, I explore my informants’ seemingly disappointing attempts at maintaining urban sustainability and expand our analytic toolkit by fully contextualizing their own searches for lost futures.

Like the rest of this volume, this paper emerges out of the 2016 annual meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth (ASA). The conference took place just ten days after the UK referendum on EU membership, and most of its delegates were still in shock: the UK had voted for ‘Brexit’, a British exit from the EU. Everyone was talking about the result: at the drinks reception, during the breaks, whilst roaming the corridors. Laura Bear delivered a fiery Firth Lecture (published as Bear 2017), in which she demanded that anthropologists take a more critical political-economic stance. Many presenters prefixed their talks with more or less detailed allusions to Brexit’s potentially dire consequences. The 2016 meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), I presume, must have featured similar allusions. As a result of the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit, delegates at both conferences had witnessed highly politicised moments in time. Arguably, both of these events were major turning points in recent political history. They had caught the profession “off-guard” (Bessire and Bond 2017) and, in the eyes of many colleagues, cemented a crisis of liberalism (see e.g. Boyer 2016; Dzenovska and Kurtovic 2018). At the ASA meeting, there was a tangible sense of urgency, despair, and hopelessness: a feeling that we had lost our grip on the world we claim to represent.

Anthropologists and other commentators struggle to make sense of pre-COVID-19 political developments in the postindustrial Global North. Various narratives were created to explain these dramatic events and changes, deploying an armory of social science analysis. We could approach one of these worrying developments, Brexit, as a postindustrial phenomenon. To make this case, I will compare my ethnographic material from postindustrial German cities with my experience in North East England as a non-UK, EU citizen. Brexit is not just a delayed response to economic decline and insecurity, epitomized in the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent times of austerity. Rather, Brexit indicates that the former industrialized countries of the Global North have not yet redefined their political and economic organization. Further, they have not developed an idea of what life after the postindustrial crisis can look like. I show that anthropology can contribute to precisely this kind of future-thinking.

At the height of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe, right‐wing critics challenged refugees’ rights to asylum. One of the ways they did this was by predicting chaotic, doom‐laden futures. In reality, nobody – neither the communities hosting the refugees, nor the refugees themselves – knew what the post‐crisis future would bring. Anthropologists are in a position to consider that future ethnographically. This article discusses the emerging future expectations of one Afghan family in the German post‐industrial city of Bremerhaven. It attends to the local production of representations of the future during the aftermath of the crisis. The author uses this material to literally look ahead with ethnography and to thereby intervene in the broader context of the politics of expectations. He argues that the earlier we anthropologists can provide detailed accounts of how the future is starting to take shape in our fieldsites, the more efficiently we can stop further fearmongering and the deprivation of human rights. These ‘ethnographic prospects’ may allow us to ask different questions and offer different imaginations of the future.

This paper investigates the impact of recent politico-economic changes on contemporary experiences of time from the perspective of the future. By discussing endurance, permanence, and sustainability in Germany's fastest-shrinking city, I present a set of future-orientated practices which are post-industrial, but unexpectedly so: namely, hopeful and not subject to the widely attested phenomenon of ‘enforced presentism’. I subsequently position the temporal logics of endurance and sustainability against current academic responses to accelerated change, captured in the misleading uses of the Deleuzian concepts of emergence and becoming. My informants' epistemic investments in the future allow for a different understanding of what I describe as post-industrial temporal agency and the conflictive politics that shape these otherwise unexpected temporal relations.

With the help of ethnographic material from Germany’s fastest shrinking city, I critically engage in this paper with the term ‘temporality’. By bringing together recent insights from the anthropology of time and the future, the literature on post-socialism, and contemporary philosophical debates on the problem of presentism, I pursue a thorough re-conceptualization of time as a matter of knowledge practices. I thereby question the idea of temporality as an inherent quality of anthropology’s objects of inquiry. Beyond temporality, I urge for abandoning such temporal attributions altogether whilst scrutinizing the temporal underpinnings of our own theories and analytics, as manifested in the term post-socialism. I claim that if anthropologists, and other social scientists, want to avoid determinists’ fallacies they should acknowledge that there is, indeed, no need for temporality in their analyses.

Hoyerswerda, Germany's fastest-shrinking city, faces problems with the future that seem initially unrelated to the past and yet excite manifold conflicting accounts of it. The multiple and conflicting temporal references employed by Hoyerswerdians indicate that the temporal regime of postsocialism is accompanied, if not overcome, by the temporal framework of shrinkage. By reintroducing the analytical domain of the future, I show that local temporal knowledge practices are not historically predetermined by a homogenous postsocialist culture or by particular generational experiences. Rather, they exhibit what I call temporal complexity and temporal flexibility-creative uses of a variety of coexisting temporal references. My ethnographic material illustrates how such expressions of different forms of temporal reasoning structure social relations within and between different generations. Corresponding social groups are not simply divided by age, but are united through shared and heavily disputed negotiations of the post-Cold War era's contemporary crisis.

This theoretical introduction develops a conceptual argument stemming from the concept of ‘time-tricking’. Whilst most theories of time in anthropology develop a coherent definition of the nature of time – for instance, as ‘cyclical’ or ‘linear’ – I draw attention to a seemingly common metaphysical distinction in our temporal ontologies, that between the past and the future. This distinction allows me to do two things: first, I present two different versions of time-tricking, one focusing on references to time and particularly to the past, the other conceptualizing effects on the future; and then, second, I present the future as the main object of temporal agency. By developing the notion of ‘future-tricking’, I point to a specific kind of temporal agency which is based on metaphysical commitments heavily embedded in the present in politics, interests and possibilities.

Recently, new political but also conceptual hopes have been invested in the study of anarchy as a non-prescriptive, native category, proposing a dialogue between actually existing anarchism and the discipline of anthropology. My article contributes to this anthropology of anarchists with an analysis of a specific form of temporal reasoning exhibited in the social, ethical and lifestyle practices of an anarchist group in the East German city of Hoyerswerda. By developing the term ‘creative presentism’, I present these contemporary anarchist practices as an arena of knowledge production in which the postmodern, neoliberal evacuation of the near future – so convincingly detected by Jane Guyer – is significantly challenged by an urge for a different relationship to the future. Anarchist practices thus ethnographically add to the growing anthropology of the future and additionally offer new grounds for a self-reflexive investigation of the role hope and the future play in our own knowledge practices.

Wie kann man 25 Jahre nach der Wiedervereinigung als interessierter Beobachter die Gegenwart Ostdeutschlands denken? Mithilfe der sozialanthropologischen Literatur zum Osten Deutschlands wird in diesem Beitrag versucht, eine theoretisch fundierte Perspektive zu entwickeln, die diese Gegenwart weder uber den Bezug zur DDR-Vergangenheit noch uber eine Fokussierung auf die Zukunftsprobleme Ostdeutschlands erforscht. Als empirisches Material dienen dabei drei verschiedene Jugendprojekte aus Hoyerswerda, der ehemaligen 2. Sozialistischen Modellstadt der DDR und 2009 Deutschlands am schnellsten schrumpfender Stadt. Mithilfe der Analyse dieses ethnografischen Materials werden sowohl die offentlich-medialen Diskurse zum Osten als auch die Wissensproduktion der Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften zu diesem Thema hinterfragt. Es wird aufgezeigt, dass jedweder Bezug zur Vergangenheit und Zukunft als in spezifische gegenwartige Interessen, Konflikte und soziale Beziehungen eingebundene Praktiken verstanden werden sollten. Diese Neuverortung der Ostdeutschen in der Gegenwart soll ihr Verhaltnis zu den anderen Zeitdimensionen entproblematisieren und somit eine neue, kreative Gegenwartigkeit im Denken uber den Osten fur Ost- und Westdeutsche sowie Wissenschaftler, Journalisten und andere Wissensproduzenten ermoglichen.