The End (and After) in Ethnographic Worlds.

Anthropology can be broadly characterised as an optimistic discipline. Exploring the ways in which different groups confront particular ends and end-time scenarios, whether through rituals and ceremonies, myths and legends, or through local manners of coping with the aftermath of political and ecological ends, anthropologists have been particularly inventive and productive in thinking through ends and endings. Examining different narratives of ends and endings, they also shed light on the future, which, as Vidal and Dias explain, 'is imagined less as a continuation of the present than as a time in which the present ... will no longer be' ([54]: 5). Encounters with Millenarian movements, particularly in Papua New Guinea and Melanesia (Roscoe [46]; Robbins [42]; Stephen [49]) but also elsewhere (Stewart & Harding [50]; Pessar [37]), have led anthropologists to consider the ways in which doomsday scenarios shape everyday lives. [Extracted from the article]