Introduction: Envisioning Anthropological Futures (and Provincializing their Origins)

This introduction pays tribute to the 150th anniversary of the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (ZfE, comp. Vol. 144) and situates the special section in the discussion on anthropological futures. It attends to the diverse challenges and opportunities stemming from the foundations of the discipline's theoretical and epistemological orientations, and discusses the ethicalities and potentialities of anthropological practice - today and in the years to come. We take the anthropology of the future as our conceptual starting point in order to show how visions of anthropological futures - and future anthropologies - emerge from entangled individual and collective imaginations, as well as previous experiences and histories, and arise from shared or contested worldviews and professional infrastructures. With regard to future pathways for the discipline of anthropology in German-speaking academia, we explore the ZfE's particular origins and position within the formation of the academic subject Ethnologie / Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie, and situate these histories in relation to the wider landscape of national and international anthropological scholarship and publishing. Against the backdrop of this historical overview, we contextualize the contributions of this special section - and their authors' theoretical, epistemological, and ethical agendas - both in regard to their ethnographic field sites in Spain, Germany, Indonesia, and Uganda, and in relation to the challenges and prospects they identify for doing anthropology today and in the future.