Futures Fixed and Foreclosed

In considering the ways anthropological approaches to the future can help make sense of current debates around energy transition, it is important to understand that “the future” is not a singular temporal placeholder, a category that allows us to talk meaningfully about moments, or events, or epochs, or sequences of days, months, and years that might—or might not—be awaiting us. Even so, if the central paradox of the High Anthropocene is that we are fated to imagine alternative (energy) futures that are at the same time impossible, then the task of anthropology should be to help understand the consequences of this paradox for social life, its nuances, its forms of violence, and its “uncanny” affordances.