Anthropological Optimism: Engaging the Power of What Could Go Right 1032386444, 9781032386447

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Foreword
Introduction: Why Optimism?
What Is Optimism and Why Does It Matter?
The Anthropology of the Good
Time and the Future
Engagement, Advocacy, and Activism
Design Anthropology
Anthropological Engagements with Optimism
References
Chapter 1: A World Made Safe for (Future) Difference: Anthropology and Utopian Possibility
Burning It Down
Little Creatures
Between Coming and Becoming
Difference at a Distance
Relativism Reborn
Extinguishing Hope
Conclusion: Anthropology and Its Surplus
References
Chapter 2: Vertiginous Optimism: Optimistic Orientations in a Field of Chronic Crisis
Optimistic Orientations in a Field of Chronic Crisis
Ethnographic Vertigo and the Right Kind of Optimism
The Vertiginous in Social Theory
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 3: “Moving on and Moving Up”: Productive Angles of Exploring Optimism
Perspective Is Everything: On How We Choose to See the World
Forcing Ourselves to See the World Differently
Theoretical Implications: Why Thinking about Optimism Is Important
Methodological Implications: How This Changes What We Do
Optimism as Fuel for Advocacy
References
Chapter 4: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: Planting Optimism in a Disrupted Ecology
Introduction
Methodology
Surviving the Fallout with Suisen (Narcissus)
Himawari (Sunflower) and Attunement to a Disrupted Ecology
Experimenting with Kosumosu (Cosmos)
Resuming a Normal Life with Kikyō (Turkish Bellflower)
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Chapter 5: Indigenous Optimism in the Colonialcene
Optimism and Indigenous Anthropology
Indigenous Land Education and Community-Based Conservation in the Cherokee Nation
Building a Strong Relationship to the Land
Teach by Showing; Learn by Doing
Communal and Spiritual Values
Having a Good Time
Setting Nets and Planting Seeds: Nmé Restoration, Slow Movement, and Facing Climate Change
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 6: Putting the Pieces in Place: Optimistic Futuring in Transition Culture
Optimistic Research: Transition as Self-Medication
Embracing (and Creating) Change
Optimistic Futuring in the Here and Now
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 7: Optimism at Scale: Exploring Everyday Activism in Atlanta’s Alternative Food Networks
Introduction
Everyday Activism: Practical Actions and Iterative Self-Making
Making Myself: Working as an Embedded Practitioner in Atlanta Food Systems
Scales of Everyday Activism in Atlanta Food Systems’ COVID-19 Responses
Community-Level Self-Making: Expanding Organizational Collaboration
Iterative Self-Making within Organizations: Adjusting Missions and Goals
Individual Iterative Self-Making: Optimistic Reorientations
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
Notes
References
Chapter 8: Fusing Outrage and Hope into Acts of Resistance, Volunteerism, and Allyships
Emotional Fusions
Positioning Hope and Optimism in Research
Grief-Courage Prompts Social Justice Activism
Exhaustion-Elation Realized in Wildlife Volunteerism
Worry-Enthusiasm Shared in Intergenerational Dialogues and Allyships
Conclusion: The Promise of Transformative Actions
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Chapter 9: Optimistic Anthropology in the Work of Systems Changemakers
Context and Background
The Problem with Problem-Solving
The Possibility of Systems Change
The Work of Systems Changemakers
Who Needs to Be Involved in the Work of System Transformation?
How Do We Cultivate Interdependency among the People, Communities, and Institutions Who Make Up a System?
How Did the System Come to Be This Way?
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Chapter 10: China 2060: Envisioning a Human-Centered Approach to Energy Transition
Introduction
China’s Energy Past and Present
The View from 2060: Envisioning China’s Energy Future
Anthropological Contributions: Linking the Empirical and the Ethical
Conclusion: On Fate and Optimism
Note
References
Chapter 11: Doing Anthropology Forward: Emerging Technologies and Possible Futures
Prologue
Introduction
Beyond the Bind of Techno-Optimism and Techno-Dystopianism
Technologies for Hope in the Construction Industry
Emerging Technologies for Ethical Optimism
Acknowledgments
References
Afterword: Optimism as Capacity
References
Index

Citation preview

ANTHROPOLOGICAL OPTIMISM

This book theorizes the roles of optimism in anthropological thinking, research, writing, and practice. It sets out to explore optimism’s origins and implications, its conceptual and practical value, and its capacity to contribute to contemporary anthropological aims. In an era of extensive ecological disruption and social distress, this volume contemplates how an optimistic anthropology can energize the discipline while also contributing to bettering the lives, communities, and environments of those we study. It brings together scholars diverse in background, career stage, and theoretical approach in a collective attempt to comprehend the myriad intersections of anthropology and optimism. The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have recently underscored the larger, longer-term catastrophes of climate change, ecosystemic collapse, social injustice, and antipathy toward scientific knowledge and those who produce it. In this context, exceedingly few anthropologists feel comfortable observing and documenting passively while their research communities face unrelenting waves of (un)natural disasters. We need to act. But we also need to hope. Discontent with the state of the world and cultural anthropology’s turn to increasingly positive, future-oriented, and engaged work have converged to unleash a courageously optimistic anthropology. This book is a timely springboard for this impactful and emergent approach. Anna J. Willow is Professor of Anthropology at The Ohio State University, USA.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL OPTIMISM Engaging the Power of What Could Go Right

Edited by Anna J. Willow

Designed cover image: sutthiphorn phanchart, Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Anna J. Willow The right of Anna Willow to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Willow, Anna J., editor. Title: Anthropological optimism : engaging the power of what could go right / edited by Anna J. Willow. Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022046075 (print) | LCCN 2022046076 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032386430 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781032386447 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781003346036 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Applied anthropology. | Optimism. Classification: LCC GN397.5 .A652 2023 (print) | LCC GN397.5 (ebook) | DDC 301--dc23/eng/20221024 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046075 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046076 ISBN: 978-1-032-38643-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-38644-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34603-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/b23231 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

For my mom, because we can always find hope.

CONTENTS

List of Contributors Foreword

ix xiii

Joel Robbins

Introduction: Why Optimism?

1

Anna J. Willow

1 A World Made Safe for (Future) Difference: Anthropology and Utopian Possibility

29

Samuel Gerald Collins

2 Vertiginous Optimism: Optimistic Orientations in a Field of Chronic Crisis

46

Daniel M. Knight

3 “Moving on and Moving Up”: Productive Angles of Exploring Optimism

62

Kelly A. Yotebieng

4 Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Planting Optimism in a Disrupted Ecology

71

Mankei Tam

5 Indigenous Optimism in the Colonialcene Natasha Myhal and Clint Carroll

88

viii  Contents

6 Putting the Pieces in Place: Optimistic Futuring in Transition Culture 104 Anna J. Willow

7 Optimism at Scale: Exploring Everyday Activism in Atlanta’s Alternative Food Networks

117

Hilary B. King

8 Fusing Outrage and Hope into Acts of Resistance, Volunteerism, and Allyships

131

Patricia Widener and Gail Choate

9 Optimistic Anthropology in the Work of Systems Changemakers 147 Alison Gold

10 China 2060: Envisioning a Human-Centered Approach to Energy Transition

164

Bryan Tilt

11 Doing Anthropology Forward: Emerging Technologies and Possible Futures

177

Sarah Pink

Afterword: Optimism as Capacity

192

Rebecca Bryant

Index

197

CONTRIBUTORS

Rebecca Bryant is a Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University who studies forced migration, borders, and unrecognized states. Through those subjects, she investigates the state and sovereignty, with a special focus on temporality, historicities, and the future. Much of Bryant’s ethnographic work focuses on ethnic conflict and displacement, border practices, post-conflict reconciliation, and contested sovereignty on both sides of the Cyprus Green Line and in Turkey. She studied Philosophy (BA) and Cultural Anthropology (MA, PhD) at the University of Chicago and has held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics, George Mason University, and the American University in Cairo. Clint Carroll is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his doctorate from the University of California Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona in Anthropology and American Indian Studies. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, he works at the intersections of Indigenous studies, anthropology, and political ecology. His first book, Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), explores how tribal natural resource managers navigate the material and structural conditions of settler colonialism, and how recent efforts in cultural revitalization inform such practices through traditional Cherokee governance and local environmental knowledge. He is an active member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. He also serves on the editorial boards for Cultural Anthropology and Environment and Society.

x  Contributors

Gail Choate is a PhD candidate in the Culture, Society, and Politics track of Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Her research examines the interaction of social movements and political behavior. Specifically, she analyzes the role of social movements in the election of women to high public office and how women in office mediate their position with the social movements that contributed to their success. Prior to candidacy, Choate was an adjunct professor teaching American Government and Comparative Politics. In that role, she wove community activism into the classroom as part of her commitment to empower students as changemakers. Samuel Gerald Collins is a Professor of Anthropology at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he researches and teaches on urban studies, social media, design anthropology, and information technologies in the United States and in South Korea. Among other books and articles, he is the author of All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future (Berghahn, 2021) and co-author (with Matthew Durington) of Networked Anthropology (Routledge, 2015). Alison Gold is passionate about sharing her unique combination of skills and experiences as an anthropologist, systems changemaker, culture-builder, strategist, and facilitator with organizations and collaborations seeking to create a positive and equitable world. After 15 years working in nonprofits, philanthropy, and government, she founded Optimistic Anthropology LLC in 2017 to help organizations and multi-sector partnerships understand how complex social, economic, and environmental problems came to be and develop the cultures, processes, and strategies to move systems that produce these outcomes to healthier states. She calls Washington, DC, and Sarajevo home. Learn more about her work and connect with Alison at www.OptimisticAnthro.com. Hilary B. King is Associate Director of the Master’s in Development Practice at Emory University, a professional degree grounded in the anthropology of development. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Emory University. She uses ethnographic research methods to explore business practices, knowledge flows, definitions of sustainability, and emerging political and social networks in the realm of sustainable agriculture. Her current research focuses on the anthropology of organizations and bureaucracy, interrogating the impact of non-profit professionalization on direct market agriculture in the United States. Her work has been supported by the US Department of Agriculture, Fulbright, and the Watson Foundation. Daniel M. Knight is a Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He is the author of four books on crisis, temporality, and

Contributors  xi

future-making, most recently including Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen (Berghahn, 2021) and The Anthropology of the Future (Cambridge, 2019, with Rebecca Bryant). He has edited numerous collections, including Emptiness (2020) and Alternatives to Austerity (2017). Daniel is ­co-editor of History & Anthropology journal and convenor of the Association of Social Anthropogists’ Anthropology of Time network. Natasha Myhal is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She received her master’s degree in Indigenous Studies from the University of Kansas, and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota–Morris in Environmental Studies and American Indian Studies. She is a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Her current research seeks to understand barriers to practicing traditional lifeways, where the fields of anthropology and Indigenous studies point to three objects of concern: legal relationships, political ecologies of health, and gender practices. As such, Myhal’s doctoral work seeks to contribute to global biodiversity efforts to renew and restore the ecosystems and cultural systems upon which Indigenous people rely. Sarah Pink is Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University and co-leads the People Programme in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. She is a design anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, specializing in futures, emerging technologies, and innovative methodologies. Her recent books include Emerging Technologies/Life at the Edge of the Future (Routledge, 2022), Design Ethnography (Routledge, 2022) and Everyday Automation (Routledge, 2022). Joel Robbins is Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is author of the books Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (University of California Press, 2004), and Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life (Oxford University Press, 2020). His work focuses on issues of values, ethics, religion, and anthropological theory. Mankei Tam is currently Research Grants Council Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research concerns citizens’ self-empowering practices in critical assessments of radiation risks and their collaborations to explore new forms of agriculture after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. His research interests include political ecology, science and technology studies, multispecies ethnography, and studies in social movements. Since 2005, Mankei has engaged in environmental activism in Asia through Greenpeace and Earthwatch. He was the Director of Amnesty International Hong Kong from 2019 to 2020.

xii  Contributors

Bryan Tilt is a Professor of Anthropology at Oregon State University. He is an environmental anthropologist who specializes in natural resources and energy development in contemporary China. Tilt also engages in interdisciplinary projects related to natural resource issues in the United States, including sustainable agriculture, water resources, fisheries, energy production, and coastal development. Among many other works, he is the author of Dams and Development in China: The Moral Economy of Water and Power (Columbia University Press, 2015). Patricia Widener is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Florida Atlantic University and the author of Toxic and Intoxicating Oil (Rutgers, 2021) and Oil Injustice (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011). Her research examines the conflicts and collaborations of climate and environmental groups, oil corporations, and communities impacted by oil disasters and oil extraction and transportation projects in Ecuador, New Zealand, and the United States. She studies these dynamics through the lenses of environmental justice, political economy, and visual analysis. Currently, she is researching how social justice advocates publicly framed their grievances and demands following the 2016 presidential election. She teaches courses on the environment, poverty, and disaster. Anna J. Willow is a Professor of Anthropology at the Ohio State University. An environmental anthropologist who studies how individuals and communities experience and respond to externally imposed resource extractive development, she is the author of Strong Hearts, Native Lands: The Cultural and Political Landscape of Anishinaabe Anti-Clearcutting Activism (SUNY Press, 2012) and Understanding ExtrACTIVISM: Culture and Power in Natural Resource Disputes (Routledge, 2018). Willow received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison as well as a MS in natural resources and environment from the University of Michigan. Kelly A. Yotebieng is a practicing medical anthropologist interested in the intersections of global health, marginality, hope, and risk. She has received recognition and support for her work from the Fulbright Institute of International Education, US Institute of Peace, and National Science Foundation, among others. Prior to completing her PhD at the Ohio State University in Anthropology, she received a Master of Public Health from Tulane University in collaboration with the United States Peace Corps in Cameroon. Dr. Yotebieng teaches courses on social and emotional determinants of health with Hunter College’s Department of Human Biology and is a Program Director focusing on ending neglected conditions that drive global health disparities with the END Fund.

FOREWORD

This is a brave and important book. Anthropology is once again working hard to find a new footing for itself, asking more insistently than it has in at least three decades why it matters and if it should even continue to exist in any way that would be recognizable from the point of view of its past. When I told my maternal grandmother in the mid-1980s that I wanted to be an anthropologist, she replied by asking me, “What is that?” I told her that anthropologists went to stay with people in other places—this was back when the otherwise was still thought to be tightly correlated with an elsewhere—to try to learn about what they cared about and how they lived. “Why,” she quickly replied with another question, “is that any of your business?” Back then I had the kind of answers the potentials and contradictions of which Samuel Gerald Collins so ably surveys in his chapter: A mix of well-rehearsed lines about documenting the range of options open to human beings and a youthful zeal to jump onboard a train carrying what E. B. Tylor had from virtually its first run promised was, in relation to its own home environment, a “reformer’s science” that would use what it learned about other people’s lives to unsettle taken-for-granted ways of thought and life among the members of its audience at home. The question rarely asked at that time, at least in my own youthful experience, was what was in it for the people the anthropologist learned from that made it worthwhile for those people to treat that learning as the anthropologist’s business. There was some sense that anthropology might increase understanding and tolerance in the metropole in ways that could benefit the people anthropologists studied, but such claims were not well worked out, did not directly challenge the world-systemic status quo (the going salvation of the discipline back then was experimenting with new high-modernist and postmodernist forms of writing),

xiv  Foreword

and did not foresee the soon to be rapidly tightening grip of the global politicaleconomic system on almost all the elsewheres anthropologists were at that time in the habit of making their business. By now, for many in the discipline, these kinds of rationales for making other people’s lives anthropologists’ business have started to seem at the very least threadbare and more often unacceptable, even if not straightforward, cases of bad faith. So, the discipline finds itself asking again, and with some urgency: What does anthropology have to offer now? The answer to this question that this book puts on the table is that what anthropology might have to offer is…optimism. This is not the kind of answer one would predict. For one thing, optimism is not really having a moment these days. To my eye, at least, it rarely goes out in public without Lauren Berlant’s (2011) “cruel” riding adjectival shotgun to protect it from coming off as a Pollyannaish failure to reckon with the actual state of the world. Terry Eagleton, for his part, is so pitched against optimism that he wants to purify even the notion of hope of any optimistic elements. He finds optimism a fatalistic “quirk of temperament” that “spreads a monochrome glaze over the whole world.” (2015, 2). It breeds a kind of confident, passive waiting for the inevitable improvement of things that Eagleton finds pernicious. Even Christianity, Eagleton tells us, is built around “hope…but no callow optimism” (2015, 3). The same is true of what he takes to be genuine Marxism. Whatever hope is, Eagleton thus concludes, “it is certainly not a question of optimism” (2015, 12). Without a doubt, anthropologists these days are quick to conjure with hope as a focus of study if not a personal stance, but if they are holding on to any optimism while they do so, they rarely tip their hands. So, optimism is a genuine candidate to count as a truly new reason to do anthropology, and its novelty, when combined with its appearing now, so seemingly out of season, is what makes this book’s promotion of it both brave and important. In her elegant and unusually substantial introduction, Anna Willow makes a number of moves to prepare optimism for its close-up in the volume as a whole. One of these is offering a novel definition of optimism that limbers the concept up so it can shake off the look of passivity that so bothers Eagleton and become a bit more assertive. Thus, Willow tells us, for the purposes of this book, optimism is defined as a “belief in the human capacity to create positive change.” Among other advantages, this definition has the benefit of such beliefs being something anthropologists can study effectively with their field methods, since identifying beliefs and how they shape action has long been a core part of the discipline. This is, as they used to say, an operational definition—we really can explore how people think about and try to carry out positive change. Willow then goes on to acknowledge that as a topic for anthropology, optimism is going to have to reckon frankly with the very difficult, often catastrophic conditions in which many people live today. This new kind of anthropology cannot be a complete turning away from the world’s darkness (to adopt Ortner’s [2016]) term). Rather, optimistic anthropology will illuminate that darkness from a direction that is

Foreword  xv

different from, though in Willow’s reckoning not a substitute for, the much more well-developed traditions of critical anthropology. In common with many versions of the latter, optimistic anthropology also holds that objective research is not enough to make anthropology matter; it must also be involved in “promoting justice, wellbeing, and sustainability.” Finally, Willow situates optimistic anthropology in relation to four other recent areas of disciplinary interest: The anthropology of the good, the future, design, and activist engagement. As Willow mentions in her Introduction, of the members of that set, I am most aligned with the anthropology of the good, and my brief remaining remarks will consider the relation of the anthropology of optimism to that strand of thinking (Robbins 2013). Inasmuch as in my own formulation the anthropology of the good is in important respects about focusing anthropological attention on the ways people define the good and seek to realize it in the course of their social lives, it clearly shares much with an optimistic anthropology that “amplifies and celebrates the diverse ways in which people around the world use the power of positive vision to build their own best lives” (Willow, Introduction). But there is another aspect of my argument about the anthropology of the good that is sometimes left to the side in people’s readings of my original 2013 article (though it is taken up quite thoughtfully by Daniel Knight in Chapter 2 of this volume). This is the emphasis on the way that focusing on the differences between models of the good that are prevalent in varying social worlds might allow anthropology to recover some of the critical force of its original interest in the range of variation in human ways of life. I hoped, that is, that an anthropology of the good could alert its audience to the existence of goods that are indeed worth pursuing but that are not highlighted, or sometimes even formulated, in their own traditions (see Robbins 2019). This is an important part of that article’s argument because, pace Sherry Ortner’s claims in her 2016 piece on dark anthropology, I do not think that studying people’s efforts at resistance will be enough to present our audience with viable alternative models of the good (Robbins n.d.). Instead, following the critical theorist Maeve Cooke, I suspect that “without some, more or less determinate, guiding idea of the good society, critical social thinking would be inconceivable” (2006, 197). This means, as musicologist Simon Frith puts it, we need to explore “how people come to believe, imaginatively, in something more than resistance” (1998, 20). Focusing on optimism is a promising approach to doing what Frith recommends—to finding our way, that is, toward people’s varied versions of the good. Yet there is a potential complication that this aspiration to use ethnographic research to find alternative models of the good inevitably confronts, though I did not reckon with it in my original formulation of my version of this position. This complication comes up when one asks how ethnographers ought to approach the study of people who are committed to versions of the good that many anthropologists are inclined to think of as bad. The analogous question for optimistic anthropology would be: What are anthropologists to do when they are not optimistic about some of the things the people they study are optimistic about?

xvi  Foreword

Joseph Webster (2020) limns the issue of goods about which many anthropologists are not optimistic in his book on the militantly anti-Catholic Orange Order of Scotland. The sectarianism of the Orange Order makes them stand as a clear example of a group whose most vocal definition of the good is hard for many anthropologists to embrace, but there are also less obvious cases of troublesome goods coming to light in the anthropological literature that are perhaps more challenging for anthropology by virtue of not being as cut-and-dried as the Orange Order one first appears (at least before reading Webster’s account of it, which does not treat it as being so simple). Consider for example the recent upsurge in work arguing that in many parts of the world people highly value hierarchical patron-client relations, defining a good world not as one where everyone is equal, but as one where everyone has relations both with those above themselves in some or other hierarchy and with those below (Ferguson 2013; Haynes and Hickel 2016; Peacock 2016; Keeler 2017; Piliavsky 2021). Could this vision of a valuable way of ordering society be a productive alternative to some taken-for-granted anthropological definitions of the good, so many of which focus on equality between individuals (Tidey 2022, 20)? To test this point against one work in this growing tradition, would optimistic anthropologists be able to share with Zimbabwean prosperity gospel followers their optimism about the potential of their religion to allow people to formulate and move upward within valued hierarchies in spiritual terms at a time when the collapse of the Copperbelt economy has made it difficult to do so in material ones? (Haynes 2017). Related issues come up in this volume in Knight’s ethnography of the individual, vertiginous success stories that he discovers amidst broad austerity-based social suffering in Greece—and in the pushback he reports greeting him when he recounts his discoveries in somewhat optimistic tones to other anthropologists. Such clashes between versions of the good that elicit optimism from anthropologists and those that do so from some of the people that anthropologists study raise tricky questions of judgment, questions that used to be muted by a broad if not deep disciplinary acceptance of relativism but that are more rarely treated this way now (Langlitz 2020). Having spent some time the last few years comparing anthropology and Christian theology as disciplines, I have been struck by one thing: theologians are carefully trained in how to make judgments about the various expressions of Christianity (academic and otherwise) that they study. They have well-thought-out routines of testing such expressions against scripture, against various hermeneutic approaches to scripture, and against tradition in formulating and arguing for their judgments. Anthropologists, by contrast, receive little or no training in judgment (and indeed, given relativism’s place in the canon of anthropological thought, they are generally carefully taught how at first to withhold judgment, at least until they can understand any given belief or practice in its cultural context) (Robbins 2020). What this means for anthropology, I worry, is that as a discipline we tend to educate scholars who anchor

Foreword  xvii

their strongest judgments concerning which among other people’s goods really are good in their own local definitions of the good (which, even when they are oppositional in their own social contexts, are still homegrown). The risk is that we will make the same rather thinly considered judgments in determining which among other people’s optimistic projects are worthy of our optimism. Approaching the task of judgment this way effectively short-circuits the most specifically anthropological part of the discipline’s critical potential: its ability to open its audience up to new formulations of such phenomena as “justice, wellbeing, and sustainability” that bear consideration. I hope the slightly cautionary tone of this final paragraph does not suggest any lack of optimism in my own response to the exciting and thought-provoking project this very original book inaugurates. Even as it offers details on some cases that do indeed foster optimism about the human ability to create change for the better, it raises profound questions about why anthropology matters now. It is a great resource to think with in our current moment and surely beyond, and it lays the groundwork for a new generative stream of anthropological thought and work that can stand side-by-side with those of the anthropology of good, the future, design, and activist engagement in whose company it situates its initial formulation. One does not have to be an optimist to see that it has a bright future. Joel Robbins

References Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cooke, Maeve. 2006. Re-Presenting the Good Society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Eagleton, Terry. 2015. Hope without Optimism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ferguson, James. 2013. “Declarations of Dependence: Labour, Personhood, and Welfare in Southern Africa.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2): 223–242. Frith, Simon. 1998. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haynes, Naomi. 2017. Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Oakland: University of California Press. Haynes, Naomi, and Jason Hickel. 2016. “Introduction: Hierarchy, Value, and the Value of Hierarchy.” Social Analysis 60 (4): 1–20. Keeler, Ward. 2017. The Traffic in Hierarchy: Masculinity and Its Others in Buddhist Burma. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Langlitz, Nicolas. 2020. “Devil’s Advocate: Sketch of an Amoral Anthropology.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (3): 989–1004. Ortner, Sherry B. 2016. “Dark Anthropology and its Others: Theory Since the Eighties.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47–73. Peacock, Vita. 2016. “Academic Precarity as Hierarchical Dependence in the Max Planck Society.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 95–119. Piliavsky, Anastasia. 2021. Nobody’s People: Hierarchy as Hope in a Society of Thieves. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 447–462. Robbins, Joel. 2019. “Why is it Useful to Compare Cultural Definitions of the Good?” Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 2: 219–223. Robbins, Joel. 2020. Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Robbins, Joel. n.d. “On the Prospects for a Comparative Study of the Good: Beyond the Dark in Anthropological Relativism.” Unpublished paper. Tidey, Sylvia. 2022. Ethics or the Right Thing? Corruption and Care in the Age of Good Governance. Chicago: Hau Books.

INTRODUCTION Why Optimism? Anna J. Willow

These days, optimism is in short supply. The racial and regional disparities and the extreme income inequality on display in the twenty-first century are underlain by the same extractivist thinking responsible for the ecocidal overshoot that now undermines the Earth’s ability to support life as we once knew it. The stable climate our predecessors took for granted is changing rapidly, bringing rising sea levels and extreme weather events (IPCC 2018), and we anticipate an unprecedented number of plant and animal extinctions within our lifetimes (IPBES 2019; Ceballos et al. 2020). These predicaments are both attributable to and detrimental to humans, with impoverished and otherwise marginalized communities both disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of climate change and ecological decline and disproportionately innocent in their causation. As I write these words, war rages in Ukraine, triggering a humanitarian crisis, destabilizing global security, and threatening the world’s already precarious food supply (Katser-Buchkovska 2022). There is good reason for despair. Headlines proclaiming that the societal collapse predicted in the well-known Limits to Growth report is running “right on schedule” do little to inspire confidence in what the future will bring (Ahmed 2021). Five decades ago, Donella Meadows and her team published the results of computer simulations (known as World3) for a dozen possible scenarios based on a diverse array of assumptions about resource use, technology, and societal values. The report concluded that the relentless pursuit of economic growth would lead to steep declines in productive capacity and human population in the twenty-first century (Meadows et al. 2013 [1972]). These findings have been revisited several times, most recently by Gaya Herrington, who discovered a strong fit between two of the modeled scenarios and contemporary reality: Both the “Business as Usual 2” (BAU2; i.e., business DOI: 10.4324/b23231-1

2  Anna J. Willow

as usual, but using double the amount of resources as in the original model) and “Comprehensive Technology” (CT, which assumes technological developments to reduce pollution, improve efficiency, and increase yields) scenarios appear consistent with current conditions (Herrington 2021). Notably, while the BAU2 scenario does lead to the kind of steep decline that portends a societal “collapse,” the CT scenario offers a much softer landing, even as economic and population growth come to an end. Far from a declaration of doomsday, Herrington sees her findings as a call for change. Following the CT path demands that we avoid ecological tipping points while embracing beneficial technological and social ones. And even a “Stabilized World” (SW) scenario, in which a widespread shift in values heralds sustainable choices and policies, is not out of reach. “It’s not yet too late for humankind to purposefully change course to significantly alter the trajectory of future data points,” Herrington writes, “a transformation of societal priorities which, together with technological innovations specifically aimed at furthering these new priorities, can bring humanity back on the path of the SW scenario” (2021, 623). As this brief example illustrates, optimism exists, yet it is often eclipsed by fear. Purveyors of dystopian drama have, to date, managed to yell above those who proclaim: “We can do this, because we must.” Quieter still are the voices that declare the end of industrial society something to celebrate. But increasingly, leading public intellectuals argue that attention to positive possibilities is necessary to counter the notion that socioecological catastrophe is inevitable (e.g., Monbiot 2017; Goodall and Abrams 2021). It now appears that making attractive alternatives visible and accessible may be the best way to convince people to trade destructive practices for more sustainable and just options (ISSC/ UNESCO 2013). Not only is this trend evident in public, activist, and policy circles, but it also reflects a broad shift in the humanities and social sciences away from critique for its own sake toward projects with more immediate applications and more positive implications (Anker and Felski 2017). This volume enters into and furthers this conversation by considering what anthropological optimism might mean for the discipline and the world at large. In this context, we ask: Where does optimism come from? What assorted forms does it take? What is its conceptual and practical value? And how might embracing optimism contribute to anthropological aims? Anthropological Optimism: Engaging the Power of What Could Go Right catalyzes a vibrant conversation about the role of optimism in anthropological thinking, research, writing, and practice. The recent COVID-19 pandemic underscored the intertwined and longer-term catastrophes of climate change, ecosystemic collapse, social injustice, and antipathy toward scientific knowledge and those who produce it. Exceedingly few anthropologists now feel comfortable passively observing and documenting while their research communities face unrelenting waves of (un)natural disasters. Increasingly, scholars recognize (and utilize) their positions of relative privilege, while at the same time realizing that today’s

Introduction  3

monumental challenges will leave no one untouched and demand a comprehensive, collaborative response. We need to act. But we also need to hope. As humanity’s collective sense of risk and unpredictability has intensified, anthropological attention to various forms of optimistic future-making has increased (Kleist and Jansen 2016). In an era of extensive ecological disruption and social distress, this volume contemplates how anthropological optimism can energize the discipline while also enriching the lives, communities, and environments we study. Eschewing outmoded illusions of objectivity and moving beyond reflexive cultural critique, the authors featured in this volume acknowledge their ­ability— and ponder their ethical duty—to contribute to relevant policy debates and work toward more fulfilling futures (see Speed 2006; Bryant and Knight 2019). Anthropology has long specialized in making alternatives visible and convincing our various audiences that other worlds are within our reach. Taking inspiration from ethnographic practice, this volume demonstrates anthropology’s capacity to illuminate an affirmative tapestry of global opportunities and imagine selfdetermined desirable futures as a first step toward achieving them (Collins 2007). Capturing a range of optimism-infused scenarios for the future, the authors featured here draw on diverse perspectives and voices as they put forward conceptual and concrete recommendations for collaboratively enriching the world we share.

What Is Optimism and Why Does It Matter? In day-to-day discussions, the term optimism typically denotes confidence in favorable outcomes, either for a specific occurrence or for the future in general. More broadly, it implies a positive attitude and the perception that one’s metaphorical glass is half full (as opposed to half empty). Psychology, the field that has spent the most definitive energy on the topic, identifies optimism as a personal trait reflecting “the extent to which people hold generalized favorable expectancies for their future” (Carver et al. 2010, 879). Psychologists have demonstrated that whether individuals expect positive or negative things to happen is a significant determinant of outcomes in mental and physical health, relationships, resilience, and many other dimensions of wellbeing, with optimists faring far better than pessimists. In the world of philosophy, optimism is associated with the work of seventeenth-century German thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who argued that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds (Craig 2005). Fittingly, the English word optimism is derived from the Latin optimus, meaning “best” (OED Online 2021b). Given this (heavily Western) intellectual history, it behooves us to take stock of how optimism’s implicit association with linear temporalities and goals of progress over time accord with the global repertoire of cross-culturally ­relevant—and culturally relative—positive expectations. The former, we contend, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient component of optimism. Given that

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notions like “favorable” and “best” are determined by beholders with very different proclivities, constant questioning of optimism’s structures of value (optimism for what?) and power (who decides what is good?) is a vital pursuit (see Knight, this volume). In this light, optimism is revealed as plural, multiple, and mutable. An anthropological approach compels our optimisms (and the resultant responses to the challenges we face) to be guided by the people we work with at local levels, as opposed to more conventional methods that permit powerful outsiders to formulate assumptions (and make decisions) on behalf of entire communities. While relatively few anthropologists have written about optimism per se, the closely overlapping topic of hope has garnered considerable attention in recent years. Indeed, Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight’s conception of hope as “a way of pressing into the future that attempts to pull certain potentialities into actuality” (2019, 134) is closely aligned with this volume’s interpretation of optimism, most significantly in the shared recognition that people possess the agentive capacity to create new possibilities and shift desired likelihoods from possible to probable through deliberate action (anthropological treatments of hope—along with other elements of “the good”—are examined in more detail below). As “desire combined with expectation” (OED Online 2021a), hope demands optimism. It requires believing that things could go right. Optimism, however, should not be taken to imply passive faith or complacency. Our optimism is infused with uncertainty. Just because things could go right does not mean they necessarily will. The conditional and subjunctive nature of the word could is significant here; optimism denotes a state of becoming, a process, a direction. It signifies a relationship to a future that is tractable but still unknown (see Tilt, this volume). It is up to people—reflexive, creative human actors—to design and implement the diverse futures they desire, whether they do so alone or in conjunction with others (a category that may sometimes include anthropologists and analogous partners). In this way, our version of optimism runs parallel to the notion of active hope popularized by resilience scholars Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone; it is about identifying desired outcomes “and then playing an active role in bringing them about” (2012, 37). While recognizing that both the futures people strive for and the means through which they seek them are diverse, we define optimism for the purposes of this volume as belief in the human capacity to create positive change. This volume considers how a distinctively anthropological emphasis on optimism can further understandings of the rich range of human experience while simultaneously promoting justice, wellbeing, and sustainability. Anthropological optimism centers positive human capacity, but it is not naïve. It refuses to obscure injustice and despair. Grounded in ethnographic observation and analysis and tempered by a bifocal view of humanity’s dark/bad and bright/good sides, anthropological optimism is distinguished by its nuanced consideration of the tensions that punctuate and complicate this continuum. Far from positioning

Introduction  5

optimism as an antithesis or antidote to dark anthropology (Ortner 2016), we intend it as a complementary form of ethical engagement. We also recognize that attention to optimism is not without potential pitfalls. Our positivity—like that of our research participants—should not be interpreted as a dismissal of the profound and pervasive suffering present in the world today, nor should it be permitted to obscure the power imbalances that permeate contemporary relationships (including those between researchers and those they study). Optimism, we concede, can be cruelly ironic; in some cases, the very things that people desire become obstacles to their flourishing and longterm success (Berlant 2011). Anthropological optimism does not justify cultural movements that twist optimistic rhetoric to promote socially and/or ecologically destructive causes (e.g., white supremacy, greenwashing), although it may be well positioned to better comprehend their subjectivities. Optimism does not sugarcoat historical and contemporary traumas flowing from colonialism, racism, and environmental decline; it instead amplifies and celebrates the diverse ways in which people around the world use the power of positive vision to build their own best lives. Generally speaking, ours is not an optimistic time. In stark contrast to the future of prosperity and progress imagined in the 1950s, popular sentiment increasingly foresees global ecological and civilizational collapse (e.g., Oreskes and Conway 2014; Scranton 2015). Faced with this grim reality, many individuals struggle to find a constructive way forward. A quick glance at our own friends, family members, and neighbors may serve to illustrate the polarity of reactions to the onslaught of bad news; as some pacify themselves with hedonistic excess, others plunge into paralyzing despair. Especially concerning is the number of young people suffering severe anxiety as a result of the climate/ecological crisis (Panu 2020). In a 2019 survey of American teens, 57% said they were scared about climate change and 52% reported feeling angry about it (Plautz 2020). In the same year, a survey in the UK revealed that nearly one in five young people does not feel that life is worth living—double the rate recorded a decade earlier (Booth 2019). In the intervening years, the pace of change and the prevalence of despair—exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic—has only increased. A more recent survey of youth in ten countries between the ages of sixteen and 25 found that of 45% of respondents were so worried about climate change that it affected their daily life and ability to function (Hickman et al. 2021). We stand with those—young and old alike—searching for ways to move courageously forward in the face of pervasive cynicism and sociopolitical inertia. Optimism, in this context, is a mode of resistance. This volume is founded upon three simple premises. First, we affirm the ethical responsibility of scholars to use their knowledge, skills, and resources in ways that contribute to the resolution of critical contemporary challenges. Cognizant of the conjoined catastrophes of climate change, ecological degradation, and social injustice, most researchers no longer

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feel comfortable calmly conducting “objective” social science while we bear witness to immense suffering and the biosphere we share continues to deteriorate. Increasingly, engagement in public debates and campaigns have become accepted—and in some cases expected—aspects of academic life (Checker et al. 2014; Willow and Yotebieng 2020). Second, we believe that one significant way for anthropologists (and those with overlapping proclivities) to engender positive change is to present compelling alternatives to the destructive and dissatisfying ways of life now widely normalized within industrial societies. With firsthand experience of diverse realities and relationships, anthropologists are uniquely situated to amplify a vibrant array of visions for humanity—along the way dispelling notions that dominant narratives, assumptions, and arrangements are the only or best option (Egan 2013). As Margaret Mead declared toward the end of her career, one of anthropology’s greatest contributions to the world is its ability to keep people’s imaginations open (2005, 275). Discovering that other worlds are both possible and within reach inspires individuals to imagine how things could be different, which makes them much more likely to invest their time, energy, and determination in the realization of desirable futures (Hopkins 2019). When publicly engaged scholars observe, analyze, and communicate about diverse (sub)cultures, they illuminate a hopeful assortment of possible futures, thereby transforming not only how the world is understood but also the world itself (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010). Third, accepting the inherent dynamism of all cultural beliefs and practices means having faith that people can change—and catalyze change. From our individual values (which are molded by the cultures we learn to inhabit) to our shared economic and political systems (which are extrapolations of repeated daily decisions), the circumstances we confront today are not inevitable. Humans have the ability to imagine and anticipate multiple futures. Contrary to the neoliberal doctrine of “no alternative,” our attentive agency enables us to make conscious decisions in order to evade negative fates and encourage more desirable ones. Even as many prognosticators envision dark days ahead, Paul Raskin and his colleagues see it otherwise. “Humanity has the power to foresee, to choose and to act,” they affirm, and even if we are skeptical, “a future of enriched lives, human solidarity and a healthy planet is possible” (Raskin et al. 2002, ix, emphasis added). Recognizing humans as reflexive elements of a system that is simultaneously social and ecological demands that we view ourselves not simply as antagonists driving global environmental destruction, but also as “protagonists who can influence the future” in positive ways (O’Brien 2013, 77). This change of mind has important consequences: Thinking of ourselves as “creative agents of deliberate change” opens doors to myriad possibilities for positive, proactive response (ISSC/UNESCO 2013, 7). We can—and we must—enact sweeping societal transformations. A journey of this magnitude cannot commence without optimism.

Introduction  7

In recent decades, anthropological approaches emphasizing the good, the future, engagement, and design have cleared a path for this volume’s ventures into the intersection of anthropology and optimism. It is to these precedents that we now turn.

The Anthropology of the Good For those of us who came of academic age in the 1990s and early 2000s, focusing on adversity was par for the course. Graduate students were encouraged to prove their worth through incisive critique. Those of us who hoped to get academic jobs selected research topics and field sites riddled with systemic inequities and their tangible consequences, which we then proceeded to illuminate through nuanced ethnographies and discerning analyses. Joel Robbins synopsized this trend in an influential 2013 article tracing the replacement of pre-1980s anthropology’s “savage” Other with a disciplinary centering of suffering subjects—people “living in pain, in poverty, or under conditions of violence or oppression” (2013, 448). The phrase dark anthropology (coined by Sherry Ortner in her theoretical overview of anthropology since the 1980s) likewise captures the field’s collective focus on “the harsh and brutal dimensions of human experience, and the structural and historical conditions that produce them” (2016, 49). Reacting to conditions created by neoliberal globalization, Ortner says, anthropologists came to see the world “almost entirely in terms of power, exploitation, and chronic pervasive inequality” (2016, 50). Gradually, however, this dark curtain has begun to lift. While careful never to downplay the difficult circumstances confronting large portions of the world’s population, both Robbins and Ortner observe that anthropology has recently expanded its focus to include a vibrant array of optimistic themes. Robbins goes so far as to call for a “new focus on how people living in different societies strive to create the good in their lives” (2013, 457). He shares further reflections on this topic in this volume’s Foreword. The anthropology of the good is now a robust genre, notes Ortner, one that is well complemented by the field’s advancing emphasis on resistance and alternatives (2016) and that requires no compromise of theoretical complexity (Laidlaw 2016). Increasingly, contemporary anthropologists appreciate the analytical and practical value of investigating cultural processes that support functioning communities and landscapes (Osterhoudt 2021). Wellbeing, happiness, hope, and aspiration figure prominently among the interconnected themes taken up by anthropologists of the good. In The Good Life, for example, Edward F. Fischer argues that wellbeing involves far more than just material conditions: Physical health and safety, family and social relationships, aspiration and opportunity, dignity and fairness, and commitment to a larger purpose also play important roles. Seeking to understand “the good life” as people themselves conceive of it, Fischer suggests embracing the “constructive

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possibilities of a positive anthropology” capable of offering genuine solutions to complement the discipline’s characteristically critical stance. “In addition to documenting structural inequalities,” he states, such an anthropology “would look at cultural norms and social structures that seem to work well and from which lessons could be extrapolated” (Fischer 2014, 215). The even more subjective notion of happiness has also attracted anthropological attention. Beginning with the premise that how diverse groups of people comprehend, assess, and pursue happiness reveals much about how they wish to live, what they see as worthwhile, and what they believe matters most, Harry Walker and Iza Kavedžija call for ethnographic investigations into “how happiness figures as an idea, mood, or motive in people’s day-to-day lives” (2015, 5). While long dismissed by anthropologists as an elitist concern that detracted from the discipline’s critical social justice focus, it now appears that examining happiness can help us understand “what gives lives a sense of purpose or direction, or how people search for the best way to live—even in dire or hostile circumstances” (Walker and Kavedžija 2015, 17). Construed (as it often is) as something to strive for, happiness is closely connected to motivation and the feeling that “one is headed in the right direction” (Walker and Kavedžija 2015, 15). In this sense, happiness evokes two additional foci within the anthropology of the good—hope and aspiration. While the existence of hope has long been implicitly recognized in socialscientific explorations of revolution, revitalization, and utopian movements, it was only following Vincent Crapanzano’s reflective essay on hope’s conceptual parameters and possible ethnographic uses that it entered the scene as an explicit topic of anthropological inquiry. Crapanzano posits hope as a passive counterpart to desire; whereas one acts on desire, “hope depends on some other agency—a god, fate, chance, an other—for its fulfillment” (2003, 6). Seeking to more fully “bring hope into view as a method or means as well as an end of anthropological analysis,” Hirokazu Miyazaki uses in-depth ethnographic research to guide his considerations of hope as a social resource in Fiji and Japan (2005, 289). Hope, for him, is a “reorientation of knowledge” that enables individuals to envision better futures and shift their present actions accordingly (2006, 149). A similarly grounded approach to hope appears in Jarrett Zigon’s work, which draws on the experiences of Moscow residents to argue that hope is both passive and active and that it is capable of evoking continuity and stability as well as movement toward an ideal future goal. As Zigon suggests, hope slips constantly between serving as “the background attitude that allows one to keep going” and the drive to resolve problems through “conscious and intentional action” (2009, 258). Writing from the very different ethnographic context of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Morten Pedersen extends these conceptions of hope to account for the seemingly irrational optimism exhibited by his economically precarious informants. For them, he argues, hope is “a distinct form of work” (2012, 3), a practice that “enables people to calibrate their dispersed internal

Introduction  9

capacities (souls, life forces, and luck) with their equally dispersed outer capacities (loans, credits, and collateral)” (2012, 6). More recently, a special issue on the topic of “hope over time” appeared in the journal History and Anthropology. In their introduction, guest editors Nauja Kleist and Stef Jansen extol the proliferation of anthropological research and writing on the diverse range of things people hope for, the ways in which they hope, and how they strive to make the possible real. Much of the current scholarship on hope, Kleist and Jansen observe, takes it as something desirable to seek out and affirm—even when surrounded by hardship and despair. As such, scholarship on hope is “often written against disillusion and malaise; against fatalistic convictions that there are no alternatives to the current order; against pessimistic diagnoses of the present political moment as preventing any meaningful emancipatory intervention” (Kleist and Jansen 2016, 378). Hope counters the despair of dark anthropology by celebrating the possibility of positive action. Aspiration (our final “anthropology of the good” theme) is often accepted as synonymous with hope, although its connotations are more active: If hope means believing that something can happen, aspiration lends energy to that belief. Edward Fischer, introduced above, views aspiration as a core element of wellbeing that crosses cultural contexts. For him, aspiration is “a hope for the future informed by ideas about the good life [that] gives direction to agency— the power to act and the sense of having control over one’s own destiny” (Fischer 2014, 207). Probably the best-known treatment of aspiration comes from Arjun Appadurai’s 2013 book, The Future as Cultural Fact. Here, Appadurai focuses on the capacity to aspire, arguing that although yearnings for the good life exist everywhere, the ability to work toward their realization is unevenly distributed within and between societies. Appadurai sees aspiration as “a navigational capacity” that begets opportunities for future exploration and a pragmatic appreciation of how aspirations are realized (2013, 188). Significantly, he also distinguishes between “ethics of possibility” that “expand the field of the imagination” and lead to a more equitable capacity to aspire and “ethics of probability” that continually remind us that the odds are stacked against us (Appadurai 2013, 295). Favoring the former, Appadurai argues, “can offer a more inclusive platform for improving the planetary quality of life and can accommodate a plurality of visions of the good life” (2013, 299–300). While a full review is neither possible nor necessary here, this brief overview offers a taste of recent anthropological work emphasizing the positive aspects of human life and the prospect of favorable outcomes. It is essential, however, to highlight one additional inspiration for anthropology’s turn to the good— Indigenous scholars’ appeals to trade apocalyptic gloom for a more generative outlook. This topic is considered in more depth in Chapter 5, in which Natasha Myhal and Clint Carroll explore the origins and implications of a distinctively Indigenous optimism. For the broad purposes of this introduction, it is important to understand how Indigenous scholarship has served to encourage a more

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optimistic anthropological stance. In 2009, Aleut scholar Eve Tuck advised Indigenous peoples to suspend the long tradition of “damage-centered research” (2009, 409) that depicted their communities as riddled with pathology and loss. Communities, she declared, need to stop thinking of themselves as broken. Research should instead aim to “capture desire” and underscore the rich realities of Indigenous lives (2009, 216). Tuck’s point resonated far beyond her original audience. Anthropologists who conduct research among (and largely sympathize with the goals of) Indigenous and other marginalized communities saw themselves reflected in her critique. Many have since committed to more positive and collaborative agendas. Indigenous scholars have also pointed out that dystopian futures—now at the center of mainstream climate change discourse—have been an unrelenting element of their peoples’ actual experience. As Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi) argues, “the hardships many nonindigenous people dread most of the climate crisis are ones that Indigenous peoples have endured already due to different forms of colonialism: ecosystem collapse, species loss, economic crash, drastic relocation, and cultural disintegration” (2018, 226). If the Indigenous apocalypse has already occurred, it is imperative that we attend to the generative hope cultivated in its aftermath. Such hope, according to William Lempert, is “hope with grit, hope that neither avoids the history of colonial dispossession nor has been rendered misanthropic by it” (2018, 204). From this perspective, the collapse of the extractive/colonialist/capitalist system is not the end of the world: It is a brilliant new beginning. Demonstrated in settings ranging from contemporary cultural revitalization campaigns to Indigenous science fiction, post-apocalyptic hope opens doors to optimistic (re)imaginings of circumstance reversal and creative alternatives that use new understandings of the past to build a better future (Dillon 2012). In this way, Indigenous scholarship—like the anthropologies of the good described above—inspires us to research, write, and act against despair.

Time and the Future An upswelling of recent attention to the future has also set the stage for anthropological work that investigates and/or incorporates optimism. The emerging anthropology of the future genre illuminates how people in diverse cultural settings conceive of the future as well as what they perceive as possible or desirable. Along the way, this work has generated new interest in processes of cultural change and its concomitant contestations. For most of its history, anthropology was a past-looking discipline (Wallman 1992). Even as generations of anthropologists considered the cultural vagaries of time and persuasively portrayed present moments as amalgamations of memory, perception, and anticipation (Gell 1992), the discipline’s enduring emphasis on human origins, traditions, cultural reproduction, and social memory led to a widespread “anthropological neglect of the future” (Munn 1992, 115). Sporadic

Introduction  11

engagements with time and temporality did little to prevent the discipline from “shortchanging the future” (Bryant and Knight 2019, 7). Exacerbated by the modernist presumption that diverse non-Western ways of life—the mainstay of classic anthropological work—would soon be replaced and therefore had no future worth considering, it was possible for many decades to describe anthropology and the future as ships passing in the night (Razak and Cole 1995, 277; Collins 2007, 76). This is no longer the case. The current focus on the future was foreshadowed by Margaret Mead, who, in her later years, reflected repeatedly on both the forms the future might take and our ability to influence it. In a 1977 lecture entitled “Our Open-Ended Future,” Mead argued that “our future is neither pre-determined nor predictable: it is, rather, something that lies within our hands, to be shaped and molded by the choices we make in present time” (2005, 329). Furthermore, Mead recognized that how hard we are willing to work for the future depends largely upon our image of what that future will be like. If we take the pessimistic view that human nature is getting progressively worse and our future will be grim, it is tempting to just give up, refuse to bring more children into the world, and to live out our lives consuming all the gasoline we can. If, on the other hand, we feel that it is possible to master our present-day problems, we can summon up the dedication and political will necessary to create a better world. (Mead 2005, 331) Visions of the future, in short, have a profound impact on here-and-now choices, which in turn give rise to the realities that ultimately ensue. While typically less enthusiastic about their ability to direct change, subsequent scholars of the future abided by the same foundational premise that the future “is still being made” (Bell 1996, 28). In the 1980s, Robert B. Textor pioneered an approach he called Ethnographic Futures Research, which employed anthropological methods to anticipate cultural change. Future scenarios that interviewees considered optimistic, pessimistic, and most probable were elicited and analyzed with the ultimate goal of developing sound policies and effective programs (Textor 1985). By the early 1990s, anthropologists investigating cross-cultural conceptions of time had made a compelling case for investigating culturally specific understandings of the future and their consequences (Munn 1992; Wallman 1992). Rejecting notions of the future as categorically empty (as had often been assumed), anthropologists came to appreciate that “our lives are constructed around knowledges of the future that are as full (and flawed) as our knowledges of the past” (Rosenberg and Harding 2005, 4). In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the trickle of anthropological attention to futurity became a steady flow. Invigorated by the perception of

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global unpredictability and collective anxiety—heightened by climate change, financial insecurity, and political instability—many anthropologists turned to future-making as a research focus (Kleist and Jansen 2016). Significantly, Arjun Appadurai called on anthropologists “to place futurity, rather than pastness, at the heart of our thinking about culture” (2013, 194). “By bringing the future back in,” he argued, “we are surely in a better position to understand how people actually navigate their social spaces” (Appadurai 2013, 195). Ethnography has since proven a powerful tool for comprehending how ordinary people design their own futures and how diverse future-making projects are organized and experienced. Anthropologists working on a wide range of topics and geographical regions have embraced the future as a guiding frame, as demonstrated by the appearance of several edited collections. For example, contributions to Environmental Futures (Barnes 2016) explore diversely situated deliberations on future environments in settings ranging from scientific modeling of Antarctic ice sheets to anticipated resource extraction in Ecuador, Bangladesh, and São Tomé and Príncipe. Contributions to Anthropologies and Futures (Salazar et al. 2017) explore an even broader array of topics; from quests to make the future bureaucratically manageable through urban planning; to contested imaginings of future landscapes that infuse conservation debates; to more experimental ethnographic interventions that use immersive artifacts, dramatic storytelling, film, and fiction to propel research participants into the unknown. The future has also become a frequent focus of ethnographies and articles, which are too numerous to cover in any comprehensive manner. A recent Anthrosource query for the term “future” as a keyword or title component returned over 250 hits since 2015 (these hits include numerous short-format articles in Anthropology News that reflect current thinking and trends within the discipline). Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight’s Anthropology of the Future (2019) is one notable example of essential reading in this genre; it is not coincidental that both authors are among this volume’s contributors. Within this rapidly expanding body of work, two interrelated points stand out as particularly pertinent to anthropological optimism. First is the relativistic realization that individuals and groups hold very different opinions as to what constitutes an ideal, acceptable, or abhorrent future. Indeed, one person’s dream may be another’s nightmare. As futures are made (and remade) in the eyes of their beholders, not only are contrasting worldviews revealed, but the future also becomes a profoundly contested domain. When groups with contrasting ideas of what constitutes a positive future claim the same physical or symbolic terrain, attempts to convert one’s own future vision into reality are inevitably also efforts to impede others’ visions (see Tam, this volume). Second is the insight that future images inspire present actions. These actions, in turn, determine how the future unfolds. This explains why future-making practices (even those that at first glance seem benign) are often rife with political struggle. Capable of expressing and shaping how people perceive a desirable future, future-oriented practices

Introduction  13

and movements “become powerful tools for creating (new) orders, empowering or excluding actors, and even for preserving or transforming fundamental values” (Knappe et al. 2019, 891). Anthropologies of the future shed light on the future-creation process by documenting how people envision the future and then considering how these visions reflect their cultural beliefs and influence their current behavior. Political ecology, in particular, sheds light on contestations that arise when groups with mutually contradictory visions of the future compete to control the same landbase and/or resources. For example, Clinton Westman’s critical examination of social impact assessments in the tar sands region of northern Alberta, Canada, outlines how the industry captures the future by presenting information in ways that satisfy technical and isolationist rubrics. In this case, it is not simply about differently constructed visions of the future—articulated by Indigenous residents on the one hand and industry consultants on the other—but also raises the profoundly political question of “who has the power to tell the story of the future and then to enact it” (Westman 2013, 112). In the tar sands and far beyond, divergently optimistic futures and the conflicts they generate have far-reaching results. While anthropological considerations of the future are not necessarily or inherently optimistic in nature, much recent work has taken this tack and, as such, frequently overlaps with the “anthropologies of the good” described above. People everywhere think about the future; anthropology is uniquely situated to comprehend both the intricacies and the implications of diverse future visions. The future is no less important—and no less consequential—for our own cultures and subcultures. It is this reflexive version of futurity that led Margaret Mead to insist that her listeners imagine a better future—and that underlies this volume’s contention that anthropology can be a positive force for change. Anthropology proves that other worlds are possible. Echoing Mead, anthropological futurist Samuel Gerald Collins sees raising the possibility of radical alterity as one of anthropology’s most essential contemporary roles. “We need—more than ever—to revisit the idea that anthropology might provide material and critique for cultural futures,” Collins observes, “for the imagination of different lifeways less premised on exploitation and ecological degradation” (2007, 8). Formerly found in tales of coeval cultural Others, such alternatives also exist in our own visions of futures worth striving for. When we draw attention to the possibility of other futures, Collins suggests, we create “an anthropology that can change the world” (2007, 115). Collins further examines the influence of Mead and other early anthropologists as they inform hope for anthropology and anthropological optimism in Chapter 1 of this volume. Recent shifts in anthropology’s temporal gaze can be traced to changes in the questions the discipline asks about the human condition as well as to changing beliefs about the feasibility—and ethics—of using social science to influence the future. While one could ostensibly study how people think about the future in a detached scientific manner, the majority of scholars who place the future

14  Anna J. Willow

at the center of their analyses do so because they are committed not only to understanding how people imagine what lies ahead but also because they hope to craft a more satisfying and sustainable world. Whether premeditated or by happenstance, the creation of academic knowledge alters the future—sometimes in unpredictable ways. Given this, Sarah Pink and Juan Francisco Salazar argue adamantly that the time has come to face head-on our role in future-creation processes and accept that we have a “moral obligation…to implicate ourselves in futures” (2017, 15). It is to these obligations that we now turn.

Engagement, Advocacy, and Activism If anthropologists’ temporal sensibility has shifted in recent years, so too has our sense of scholarly responsibility. Instead of conceiving of ourselves as experts who generate objective knowledge and theory, increasing numbers of contemporary social scientists are undertaking research that aspires, first and foremost, to create better circumstances for the people we study. The ongoing quest to determine how we might best direct our distinctive skill-sets to the resolution of multi-scaler socioecological problems has yielded a wide variety of valuable work. We commence and continue this work energized by our own optimism— the conviction that our efforts can make a positive difference—and by our collaborators’ diverse visions of better days ahead. The foundational goal of anthropology—understanding how others live and find meaning in their lives—makes it an intrinsically empathetic discipline. Often working within marginalized communities and reliant upon “methodology that emphasizes personal attachment,” anthropology lends itself to involvement in issues of interest to the individuals and groups we study (Checker et al. 2014, 408). While societal engagement has long been an integral part of anthropology, it has not always been openly embraced. Over one hundred years ago, Franz Boas deployed the anthropological principle of cultural relativism to denounce anti-Semitism and racism. His most famous student, Margaret Mead, was a vocal early feminist with a resolute belief in the power of citizen action (Low and Merry 2010). In the McCarthy era of the 1950s and for years after, however, anthropologists who worked for racial, gender, and economic equality were political targets. In the years that followed, many censored themselves to avoid controversy, which had lasting impacts on the field’s development (Price 2004; Mullings 2015). In the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, anthropologists reentered the public fray, speaking out against the Vietnam Conflict and organizing teach-in protests. The counterculture movement’s anti-war, civil rights, and feminist politics were accompanied by a widespread embrace of activism, which invigorated anthropological thinking. Worried that anthropology would wane into irrelevance if it remained confined to the academy, Dell Hymes convened a volume entitled Reinventing Anthropology in 1972, in which he and his colleagues argued for an

Introduction  15

anthropology dedicated to “confronting the powerful and seeking to transform the structures of power” (1972, 52). At the same time, Sol Tax was promoting an “action anthropology” that recognized solving social problems, advancing knowledge, and generating theory as inseparable projects (1975). Instead of aiming for dispassionate analysis, academics began to reconsider their goals. It became imaginable that publicly engaging with political issues could become “integral to American academic practice in the future” (Checker and Fishman 2004, 8). Inspired by the observation of inequities and the desire to assuage them, the decades that followed saw a steady increase in engaged anthropological research and writing. While a comprehensive inventory of this work would fill an entire volume, a few select examples will suffice. In the realm of medical anthropology, Nancy Scheper-Hughes broke new ground in Death without Weeping, in which she elucidates mothers’ nonchalant response to infant mortality in a Brazilian shantytown. As she examined intersections of desperate economic conditions, maternal care, and religious coping mechanisms, Scheper-Hughes proved to herself that it is possible to be both a researcher and a deeply dedicated companheira. She ultimately contends that anthropology, if it is to be useful, must “begin to think about cultural institutions and practices in moral or ethical terms” (1992, 21). Diverging from the ethnographic mainstream, Scheper-Hughes is candid about the influence she exerts on her informants/teachers. Anthropology, she argues, is “both active and committed. [It] exists as both a field of knowledge (a disciplinary field) and a field of action (a force field). Anthropological writing can be a site of resistance” (1992, 25). More recently, prominent work in medical/human rights anthropology has heeded this bold call, as demonstrated by Paul Farmer’s analysis of the structural violence that underlies economic despair, human rights violations, and disease (2004) and by Seth Holmes’s incisive work on the rights and health of migrant laborers in the western United States (2013). Environmental anthropology, too, has contributed to the development and popularity of engaged anthropology. For example, in her study of environmental injustice afflicting a Black community in Georgia, Melissa Checker sought not merely to shed light on how residents comprehend and react to connections between pollution and race, but also to contribute to the community that welcomed her (2005). In her quest to simultaneously understand, amplify, and support those who face the effects of environmental degradation firsthand, Checker is far from alone. Stuart Kirsch’s work among Papua New Guineans, whose landscapes and livelihoods have been destroyed by toxic mine waste (2014, 2018), and Susan Crate’s work with Sakha pastoralists confronting the realities of climate change in northeastern Siberia (2008, 2022) are but two of the more recent engaged environmental ethnographies that take this approach. For all its benefits, engaged work is not without challenges. Even as respected anthropologists call their colleagues to action, an opposing disciplinary contingent

16  Anna J. Willow

has long insisted that anthropology remain an objective scientific field of study (e.g., Hastrup and Elsass 1990; D’andrade 1995). This skepticism has abated over time but still persists in some academic departments. Reflective of ongoing debates regarding the relationship and relative merits of “scientific” versus “applied” work, a perceived tension between sound scholarship and engagement has created related impediments. While some anthropologists position academic critique and activist anthropology as separate projects, characterized by different strategies and commitments (Hale 2006), others argue that academic contributions and engagement can “be productively practiced together, as part of one undertaking” (Speed 2006, 71). Increasingly, engaged scholars have embraced the latter perspective, proceeding under the assumption that it is possible—even essential—for their research to concurrently contribute to both their academic discipline and the world at large (in this volume, this theme is especially prominent in chapters by Yotebieng, Willow, King, and Widener and Choate). Other challenges are pragmatic in nature. The substantial time commitment demanded by engaged work is often at odds with the pressure to publish early, often, and in highly ranked peer-reviewed journals (Kirsch 2018). Similarly, the struggle to obtain grant funding for engaged research results in barriers to success in the academic system as currently designed. As a consequence, some anthropologists who wish to conduct engaged work compromise their ambitions for more standard academic fare, while others burn out under the strain (Checker 2014). For the increasing number of anthropologists who embrace it, engaged research takes myriad forms. Indeed, there are many ways to “do” anthropology and “be” an anthropologist (see Gold, this volume). In addition to scholarly writing, some anthropologists publish nonacademic essays and editorials in support of their chosen cause. Others participate in global justice alliances, act as expert witnesses (Kirsch 2002), or find ways to generate crucial material aid for the communities they study (Schuller 2014). Still others become what Jeffrey Juris and Alex Khasnabish call “militant ethnographers,” which implies immediate involvement in organizing political and/or direct action (2013, 26; see also Graeber 2009; Maeckelbergh 2009). These roles are by no means mutually exclusive. Not only may engaged anthropologists serve concurrently as facilitators, networkers, critics, mediators, media producers, campaigners, witnesses, advocates, advisers, and partners, but these roles also shift in accordance with particular projects and career stages (Johnston 2010; Low and Merry 2010). Through it all, anthropologists often find themselves serving as “strategically placed allies with access to cultural and material skills, tools, and resources,” thus fulfilling a desperate need in many marginalized communities (Juris and Khasnabish 2013, 25). In challenging times, moreover, the simple potency of moral support, friendship, and respect across difference should not be underestimated. Considering the connection between anthropology and engagement leads us to ponder what our roles can and should be, both as anthropologists and as citizens of the world. What contributions might we make? And how? It reminds

Introduction  17

us that what we choose to illuminate, how we tell our stories, and the messages we convey all matter a great deal (see Yotebieng, this volume). Accepting our responsibility as responsible anthropological citizens means doing “problemfocused participatory research” that entails “working with [not just in] communities to understand and address issues of mutual concern” (Johnston 2010, S235). In our troubled times, presenting material that is meaningful and constructive qualifies as an essential service. Emphasizing and encouraging expressions of optimism—peoples’ hopes for the future and the creative actions they inspire—is an opportunity to make the positive difference we seek.

Design Anthropology One additional inspiration warrants attention. Design anthropology is a synergy between two formerly separate fields of study with distinct practices and goals. While design traditionally involved the purposeful creation of images, items, and structures, anthropology pursued a rich understanding of diverse cultural beliefs and practices. The former created, while the latter comprehended. For anthropologists, the forward-facing energy of design illuminates the realm of the possible and shifts the focus from societal reproduction to societal transformation (Smith and Otto 2015). For designers, the addition of anthropology directs attention to cultural specificity and underscores the necessity of accounting for diverse beliefs, practices, and values. Given its explicit objective of altering the future (and its implicit objective of improving it) via the addition of artifacts and/ or the conscious shaping of systems, viewing the cultural world through the lens of design generates new possibilities for anthropological optimism. While design is typically associated with the manufacture of material objects, design anthropology casts a much wider creative net. According to Ton Otto and Rachel Charlotte Smith, “by designing objects, technologies, and systems, we are in fact designing cultures of the future” (2013, 13). It is not only trained modernist practitioners but all people, argues Arturo Escobar, who engage in design and have the capacity to design their lives—even if not always under conditions of their own choosing. As we seek to create richer and more sustainable relationships, we necessarily find ourselves redesigning not merely “structures, technologies, and institutions but our very ways of thinking and being” (Escobar 2018, 118). When we create new tools, narratives, and thought processes, we are concurrently creating new perspectives and new realities. Despite its recent emergence as an independent subgenre, design anthropology has strong ties to both the anthropology of the future and engaged anthropology. Refusing to artificially separate scholarship from processes of future creation, design anthropologists believe that design and anthropology can work together to become “significant agents of social, material and ecological change for the better” (Anusas and Harkness 2016, 55). Like the engaged anthropology introduced in the previous section, design anthropology owes its existence to

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changing scholarly expectations and roles. No longer are we mere “observers, analysts, and interpreters of social structure and culture,” affirms design anthropologist Christine Miller; researchers now operate as “participants and agents in the processes of social and cultural transformation” (2018, 57). By corresponding and collaborating with community members, design anthropologists position themselves as partners in change. They facilitate collective thinking about possible worlds in order to become “co-creators of desirable futures” (Otto and Smith 2013, 13). Beyond borrowing from the standard methodological repertoires of both fields, design anthropologists have developed hybrid methods that enable them to draw out and articulate what people see as possible and to “facilitate and guide dynamic transformative action” at the same time (Miller 2018, 60). Techniques such as directed role play, elicitation of experience and opportunity maps, and visioning/backcasting interviews bring the imaginary then-and-there into a tangible here-and-now. In a study of waste production/reduction practices in Denmark, for instance, Joachim Halse and his colleagues developed miniature doll scenarios and full-scale enactments that allowed research participants to perform imagined worlds in real time, thus revealing how grand narratives of environmental sustainability, recycling, and participatory decision-making could play out at a concrete level. Such ethnographies of the possible “render the imaginative directly available” for observation and inquiry; imagined worlds are converted into observable present phenomena that are amenable to social scientific study (Halse 2013, 190). Other design anthropologists have directed more conventional participantobservation to the task of elucidating divergent design temporalities and their implications. For example, Mike Anusas and Rachel Harkness conducted comparative research contrasting the “close-present” that configures work in conventional commercial design studios with the “far-reaching-present” observed in alternative Earthship communities. They discovered that different design processes are associated with contrasting senses of the present and perceptions of temporal flow. Furthermore, these divergent presents “are indicative and generative of different socio-material ecological relationships with/in the world” (Anusas and Harkness 2016, 67). With this finding in mind, the authors posit an eminently hopeful, socially aware, and ecologically oriented design anthropology that places long-term transformational thinking at its center. Design anthropology is an inherently optimistic undertaking. Still in its early years and diverse in its specific forms, it entails not only envisioning alternative futures but also intentionally crafting the world we wish to see. It accepts anthropology’s potential as a catalyst for positive change and develops tools for collecting information and informing appropriate action, a process Sarah Pink refers to as “doing anthropology forward” (this volume). In engaging with change as something that is both plausible and desirable, design anthropology differentiates itself from other forms of future-oriented research that regard people’s hopes

Introduction  19

and fears as interesting (or even influential) but still hypothetical, thus remaining temporally ensconced in the ethnographic present. Because thinking of the future as different from the present also raises questions concerning what should change and who should change it (Mazé 2016), political contestations are likely to become a major focus of design anthropology in the years ahead. The world today is beset by a complex multitude of challenges. Moving toward their resolution requires profound transformations in how we relate to the world and to one another. We need, according to Arturo Escobar, a completely new civilizational model and must reconfigure “an entire way of life and a whole style of world making” (2018, x). Escobar uses the term disoñar (which he borrows from his Afro-Columbian interlocuters) to denote the process of dreaming with the intention of creating (2018, 216). We dream (soñar)…and then we design (diseñar). The tools and methods of design can be used to generate the compelling future visions we so desperately need and also to “inform and inspire projects in the present” (Irwin 2015, 233). We design not simply new artifacts, but also new relationships and values. The open embrace of design as the creation of future cultures offers exciting options for an effectively engaged and powerfully optimistic anthropology.

Anthropological Engagements with Optimism Anthropology is not separate from the world in which it operates. As Sherry Ortner reminds us, “academic work, at least in the social sciences, cannot be detached from the conditions of the real world in which it takes place” (2016, 47). Even as anthropology seeks to illuminate the global diversity of circumstances and experiences, practitioners are themselves caught in a swift current of world events. Anthropology studies those who are situated in the culture of their time and place, but we are no less situated. Conscious of our shifting playing field and reflexive about the roles we play both within and outside of the academy, we continuously (re)evaluate if, when, where, and how we might contribute. As such, the changing zeitgeist of the world beyond anthropology has an indelible influence on our work. Much of the impetus for anthropological work on optimistic topics is a reaction to widely circulated images of natural, health, financial, and political disasters, which have “added to a widespread sense of crisis and unpredictability, to a sense of not knowing where the world is or could be going” (Kleist and Jansen 2016, 375). Anthropological training is not needed to recognize that times are tough and likely to get tougher. We are but a minute fraction of those who seek to be part of the solution. We resist despair by directing our skills to the creation of the more fulfilling lives our research participants—and we ourselves—seek. As anthropologists, concerned citizens, and fallible human beings, we (along with so many others) find hope where we can, even when we must search in dark places (Solnit 2004, 2010).

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This volume arose out of the circumstances of 2020–2021—a time when catastrophic climate change and ecological decline seemed inevitable, the COVID19 pandemic felt never-ending, and injustice appeared ubiquitous despite decades of amelioratory efforts. Discontent with the state of the world and cultural anthropology’s turn to increasingly positive, future-oriented, and engaged work have converged to unleash a courageously optimistic anthropology. Anthropological Optimism: Engaging the Power of What Could Go Right was conceived in advance of the 2021 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (held in Baltimore, Maryland, and virtually in November of that year) as a way to (1) bring scholars with diverse research interests together for a collective, comprehensive, and current consideration of the roles optimism plays in contemporary anthropology and (2) produce an accessible text that brings this imperative perspective to a broad audience of students and scholars. A roundtable session on the theme was accepted with invited status from the Society for Cultural Anthropology, indicating the topic’s increasing prominence. While several of the chapters that follow have origins in the November 2021 discussion, additional contributions were sought to further expand the included perspectives. The Society for Applied Anthropology’s 2022 meeting (held in Salt Lake City, Utah, and virtually in March of that year) offered further opportunities for conversation and collaboration. Contributors to this volume bring trends in the discipline and the world at large to bear on questions of optimism’s conceptual and practical value to the field of anthropology. Not only do contributors come from a diverse range of personal backgrounds, theoretical perspectives, professional positions, and career stages, but chapters are also informed by research conducted in a wide variety of ethnographic settings (including Australia, Cameroon, China, Greece, Japan, Mozambique, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities across North America). While not divided into arbitrary parts or sections, this volume’s flow of chapters gradually proceeds from disciplinarily situated theoretical considerations of optimism, to ethnographically grounded empirical pieces that reveal how optimism is being engaged in contemporary anthropological research, to demonstrations of how optimistic anthropological perspectives can contribute to the resolution of real-world problems. Each in their own way, authors reflect on the juxtaposition (and occasional tension) between optimism and pessimism in their own work; as it relates to anthropology’s unique potential; as it is reflected in the discipline’s past, present, and future; and as it plays out in global events. The volume opens with a consideration of optimism’s associations with the field of anthropology and its characteristic ethnographic endeavor. Samuel Gerald Collins offers a fresh take on the history of anthropology and the lessons it contains for conveying anthropological optimism into the present moment. In Chapter 1, entitled “A World Made Safe for (Future) Difference: Anthropology and Utopian Possibility,” Collins revisits the work of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead (along with other key texts and ideas), ultimately arguing that in spite of its

Introduction  21

problematic past, anthropology can be viewed as a profoundly hopeful enterprise with the capacity to disclose future worlds very different from the dystopian present. In Chapter 2 (“Vertiginous Optimism: Optimistic Orientations in a Field of Chronic Crisis”), Daniel M. Knight continues to probe the paradox of anthropological optimism. Informed by a rich body of social theory and by fieldwork conducted in the aftermath of the Greek financial crisis, he ponders the analytic value of anthropologists’ positive focus amid circumstances marked by chronic suffering, social degradation, and apathy. Knight interrogates the intersection where ethnographic reality and social theory grind together, proposing that vertiginous optimism may be found in the micro-utopias of everyday life, even in the most pessimistic of fields. A similar perspective guides Kelly A. Yotebieng’s contribution. In Chapter 3, entitled “‘Moving on and Moving Up’: Productive Angles of Exploring Optimism,” Yotebieng assesses her own fieldwork experiences and the realizations they catalyzed. She takes cues from citizens of war-torn communities in Mozambique and survivors of gender-based violence to suggest that focusing only on suffering reduces people with hopes, dreams, and aspirations to their troubled circumstances. Attention to optimism, she argues, orients us to the future and offers a way to address the grim realities of life while also underscoring human dignity and providing opportunities for engaged solutions. The chapters that follow confirm that optimism is indeed plural, multiple, and mutable. Mankei Tam’s chapter focuses on fostering optimism in the wake of disaster. In Chapter 4, Tam presents a nuanced ethnography of the return to Iitate, a Japanese village heavily impacted by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown of March 2011. In “Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Planting Optimism in a Disrupted Ecology,” he elucidates how flowers symbolize optimism in the midst of the region’s ecological and social devastation. Tam argues that, in this instance, villagers use flower cultivation as an optimistic mode of resistance that contrasts with outside observers’ declarations that their village remains uninhabitable. Chapter 5, by Natasha Myhal and Clint Carroll, is also contextualized by disaster, resistance, and resurgence—in this case the long-term catastrophe of North American settler colonialism and the enduring effort to overcome it. In “Indigenous Optimism in the Colonialcene,” Myhal and Carroll explore what a distinctively Indigenous optimism looks like and how it is enacted and expressed within contemporary US Indigenous communities. Informed by engaged fieldwork projects related to (1) land education and resource access in the Cherokee Nation and (2) the maintenance of reciprocal relationships with lake sturgeon (nmé) among the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, the authors view optimism through the lens of Indigenous futurity. This perspective acknowledges the tragedies of colonialism, underscoring the reality that numerous Indigenous apocalypses have already transpired. As Indigenous peoples sustain (and, in some

22  Anna J. Willow

cases, create or re-create) relationships with the land and its beings, optimism means hope—and work—for continued flourishing in relationship with land and more-than-human relatives into the distant future. Subsequent chapters feature authors who, like Myhal and Carroll, conduct research on communities of which they are part and to which they seek to contribute. As they consider optimism’s diverse forms, these chapters take an explicitly reflexive approach, examining how optimism intersects with individual anthropologists’ experiences, roles, and capacities to make a positive difference. In Chapter 6 (“Putting the Pieces in Place: Optimistic Futuring in Transition Culture”), Anna J. Willow explores optimism’s role in guiding how participants in the Transition movement for climate change resilience approach the future and the actions they take to create it. Drawing on engaged ethnographic research and experience as a native anthropologist (Bunzl 2004) in the Midwestern United States, she describes conceptual and concrete ways in which Transition participants express optimistic futuring, which is characterized by a positive, purposive, and active relationship with the future as a temporal frame. Ultimately, she posits optimism as a significant force behind the everyday activism that distinguishes Transition from other contemporary environmental social movements. Working in a similar ethnographic setting, Hilary B. King considers the question of scale in Chapter 7 (“Optimism at Scale: Exploring Everyday Activism in Atlanta’s Alternative Food Networks”), specifically asking how optimism can flow from individual to organizational levels—and potentially beyond. Drawing on long-term research and involvement with alternative food systems networks in metropolitan Atlanta (Georgia, USA), she explores how the COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed change and growth at multiple scales. She argues that iterative self-making enables people to rethink their ability to effect meaningful transformations by connecting small, community-based change to larger social ecosystemic projects, emphasizing horizontal replication, and framing social change as a practice rather than a solution. The ongoing self-making process and everyday activism undertaken by food systems participants makes it possible to maintain optimism in the face of large-scale crises. Chapter 8, “Fusing Outrage and Hope into Acts of Resistance, Volunteerism, and Allyships,” by Patricia Widener and Gail Choate, speaks to the enduring hope and optimism conveyed in three types of action. The authors present case studies drawn from their personal and professional experiences—which range from ecological restoration, protests against gun violence in the United States, and higher education alliances—to illustrate how positive efforts create spaces for hope to inspire additional work toward social well-being, ecological sustainability, and cultural and political transformation. Alison Gold comes to the topic of anthropological optimism from the perspective of a practicing anthropologist who works outside of the academy, as we learn in Chapter 9 (“Optimistic Anthropology in the Work of Systems

Introduction  23

Changemakers”). Recognizing the far-reaching relevance of anthropology, she examines how individuals and organizations (sometimes unknowingly) use perspectives and methods that are distinctively anthropological as they seek to create positive systemic change. Drawing on stories of changemakers working to improve outcomes in prisons, educational institutions, and racial justice movements, Gold’s chapter identifies how optimistic anthropology can offer a more holistic, proximate, inclusive, and informed approach to policy change. While all of the included chapters have numerous potential applications, the volume closes with chapters that follow Gold’s emphasis on the utility of anthropology for the resolution of real-world problems. In Chapter 10, “China 2060: Envisioning a Human-Centered Approach to Energy Transition,” Bryan Tilt explores the roles and meanings of optimism in China’s anticipated renewable energy transition, which he describes as a future conditional process. Looking beyond the technicalities—and sheer immensity of the transition—he cites the associated human values, experiences, and consequences to argue that anthropology’s creativity, critical capacity, theoretical engagement, and methodological rigor have much to contribute to the realization of this essential undertaking. Finally, Sarah Pink engages the question of “what could go right” through the prism of an interventional design anthropology of emerging technologies in Chapter 11 (“Doing Anthropology Forward: Emerging Technologies and Possible Futures”). Drawing on interviews with Australian construction industry experts, she demonstrates the potential of anthropological research that attends to and surfaces how and where encounters with automation and artificial intelligence can be generative, collaborative, hopeful, and ethical. Arguing for a future-focused anthropology rooted in design and futures anthropology, Pink suggests that beyond simply studying what has gone right, “doing anthropology forward” engages an essential new mode of optimism. This volume is a collective celebration of the possible and a testament to our ability—as anthropologists and as concerned world citizens—to create positive change. The conviction that present efforts can produce a better future is a potent and necessary force for action. As the chapters you are about to read attest, optimism opens practical pathways by which action can triumph over despair. Anthropology has an important role to play in this process; illuminating the countless alternatives that exist not only in distant times and places but also all around us reminds us that we, too, can live differently. Anthropological optimism reveals what we might do and where we might start.

References Ahmed, Nafeez. 2021. “MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule.” Vice.com, July 14, 2021. https://www.vice. com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-societywill-collapse-soon (accessed July 19, 2021).

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Anker, Elizabeth S., and Rita Felski, eds. 2017. Critique and Postcritique. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anusas, Mike, and Rachel Harkness. 2016. “Different Presents in the Making.” In Design Anthropological Futures, edited by Rachel Charlotte Smith, Kasper Tang Vangkilde, Ton Otto, Mette Gislev Kjaersgaard, Joachim Halse, and Thomas Binder, 55–69. London: Bloomsbury. Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso. Barnes, Jessica, ed. 2016. Environmental Futures. Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons. Bell, Wendell. 1996. “An Overview of Futures Studies.” In The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies: Foundations, edited by Richard Slaughter, 28–56. Hawthorn, Victoria: DDM Media Group. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Booth, Robert. 2019. “Anxiety on Rise Among the Young in Social Media Age.” The Guardian, February 4, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/05/ youth-unhappiness-uk-doubles-in-past-10-years (accessed August 12, 2021). Bryant, Rebecca, and Daniel M. Knight. 2019. The Anthropology of the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bunzl, Matti. 2004. “Boas, Foucault, and the “Native Anthropologist”: Notes Toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 106 (3): 435–442. Carver, Charles S., Michael F. Scheier, and Suzanne C. Segerstrom. 2010. “Optimism.” Clinical Psychology Review 30 (7): 879–889. Ceballos, Gerardo, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Peter H. Raven. 2020. “Vertebrates on the Brink as Indicators of Biological Annihilation and the Sixth Mass Extinction.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (24): 13596–13602. Checker, Melissa. 2005. Polluted Promises. New York: New York University Press. Checker, Melissa. 2014. “Anthropological Superheroes and the Consequences of Activist Ethnography.” American Anthropologist 116 (2): 416–420. Checker, Melissa, Dána-Ain Davis, and Mark Schuller. 2014. “The Conflicts of Crisis: Critical Reflections on Feminist Ethnography and Anthropological Activism.” American Anthropologist 116 (2): 408–409. Checker, Melissa, and Maggie Fishman. 2004. “Introduction.” In Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America, edited by Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman, 1–25. New York: Columbia University Press. Collins, Samuel Gerald. 2007. All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future. New York: Berghahn. Craig, Edward, ed. 2005. The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Crapanzano, Vincent. 2003. “Reflections on Hope as a Category of Social and Psychological Analysis.” Cultural Anthropology 18 (1): 3–32. Crate, Susan A. 2008. “Gone the Bull of Winter? Grappling With the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology’s Role(S) in Global Climate Change.” Current Anthropology 49 (4): 569–595. Crate, Susan A. 2022. “Sakha and Alaas: Place Attachment and Cultural Identity in a Time of Climate Change.” Anthropology and Humanism 47 (1): 20–38. D’andrade, Roy. 1995. “Moral Models in Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 36 (3): 399–408. Dillon, Grace. 2012. “Imagining Indigenous Futurisms.” In Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, edited by Grace Dillon, 1–12. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Introduction  25

Egan, Keith. 2013. “Emerging Voices: Public Anthropology and Moral Optimism.” Irish Journal of Anthropology 16 (1): 13–17. Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Farmer, Paul. 2004. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fischer, Edward F. 2014. The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Gell, Alfred. 1992. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. Oxford: Berg. Gibson-Graham J.K., and Gerda Roelvink. 2010. “An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene.” Antipode 41 (S1): 320–346. Goodall, Jane, and Douglas Abrams. 2021. The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times. New York: Celadon Books. Graeber, David. 2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Hale, Charles R. 2006. “Activist Research V. Cultural Critique: Indigenous Land Rights and the Contradictions of Politically Engaged Anthropology.” Cultural Anthropology 21 (1): 96–120. Halse, Joachim. 2013. “Ethnographies of the Possible.” In Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice, edited by Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, and Rachel Charlotte Smith, 180–196. London: Bloomsbury. Hastrup, Kirsten, and Peter Elsass. 1990. “Anthropological Advocacy: A Contradiction in Terms?” Current Anthropology 31 (3): 301–308. Herrington, Gaya. 2021. “Update to Limits to Growth: Comparing the World3 model with Empirical Data”. Journal of Industrial Ecology 25 (3): 614–626. Hickman, Caroline, Elizabeth Marks, Panu Pihkala, Susan Clayton, Eric R. Lewandowski, Elouise E. Mayall, Britt Wray, Catriona Mellor, and Lise van Susteren. 2021. “Young People’s Voices on Climate Anxiety, Government Betrayal and Moral Injury: A Global Phenomenon.” The Lancet. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_ id=3918955 (accessed July 11, 2022). Holmes, Seth M. 2013. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hopkins, Rob. 2019. From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the World We Want. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Hymes, Dell. 1972. “The Use of Anthropology: Critical, Political, Personal.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 3–79. New York: Pantheon Books. IPBES. 2019. Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Bonn, Germany: IPBES. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3553579 (accessed October 12, 2021). IPCC. 2018. Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty. https://www.ipcc.ch/ sr15/ (accessed September 6, 2019). Irwin, Terry. 2015. “Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research.” Design and Culture 7 (2): 229–246. ISSC/UNESCO. 2013. World Social Science Report 2013: Changing Global Environments. Paris: OECD Publishing and UNESCO Publishing.

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Johnston, Barbara Rose. 2010. “Social Responsibility and the Anthropological Citizen.” Current Anthropology 51 (S2): S235–S247. Juris, Jeffrey S., and Alex Khasnabish. 2013. “Ethnography and Activism within Networked Spaces of Transnational Encounter.” In Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political, edited by Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabish, 1–36. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Katser-Buchkovska, Nataliya. 2022. “The Consequences of the War in Ukraine Will be Far-reaching.” World Economic Forum, April 29, 2022. https://www.weforum.org/ agenda/2022/04/an-unfair-war-economic-social-and-security-consequences-of-therussian-invasion-into-ukraine/ (accessed May 24, 2022). Kirsch, Stuart. 2002. “Anthropology and Advocacy: A Case Study of the Campaign against the Ok Tedi Mine.” Critique of Anthropology 22 (2): 175–200. Kirsch, Stuart. 2014. Mining Capitalism: The Relationship Between Corporations and their Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kirsch, Stuart. 2018. Engaged Anthropology: Politics Beyond the Text. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kleist, Nauja, and Stef Jansen. 2016. “Introduction: Hope Over Time—Crisis, Immobility and Future-Making.” History and Anthropology 27 (4): 373–392. Knappe, Henrike, Anne-Katrin Holfelder, David Löw Beer, and Patrizia Nanz. 2019. “The Politics of Making and Unmaking (Sustainable) Futures: Introduction to the Special Feature.” Sustainability Science 14 (4): 891–898. Laidlaw, James. 2016. “Through a Glass, Darkly.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 17–24. Lempert, William. 2018. “Generative Hope in the Postapocalyptic Present.” Cultural Anthropology 33 (2): 202–212. Low, Setha M., and Sally Engle Merry. 2010. “Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas: An Introduction to Supplement 2.” Current Anthropology 51 (S2): S203–S226. Macy, Joanna, and Chris Johnstone. 2012. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy. Novato, CA: New World Library. Maeckelbergh, Marianne. 2009. The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy. London: Pluto Press. Mazé, Ramie. 2016. “Design and the Future: Temporal Politics of ‘Making a Difference’.” In Design Anthropological Futures, edited by Rachel Charlotte Smith, Kasper Tang Vangkilde, Ton Otto, Mette Gislev Kjaersgaard, Joachim Halse, and Thomas Binder, 36–54. London: Bloomsbury. Mead, Margaret. 2005. The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipate the Future. Edited and with an introduction by Robert B. Textor. New York: Berghahn. Meadows, Donella H., Jorgen Randers, and Dennis L. Meadows. 2013. The Limits to Growth (1972). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Miller, Christine. 2018. Design+Anthropology: Converging Pathways in Anthropology and Design. London: Routledge. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2005. “From Sugar Cane to ‘Swords’: Hope and the Extensibility of the Gift in Fiji.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11 (2): 277–295. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2006. “Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and its Critiques.” Cultural Anthropology 21 (2): 147–172. Monbiot, George. 2017. Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. New York: Verso Books. Mullings, Leith. 2015. “Anthropology Matters.” American Anthropologist 117 (1): 4–16.

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Munn, Nancy D. 1992. “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 93–123. O’Brien, Karen. 2013. “What’s the Problem? Putting Global Environmental Change into Perspective.” In World Social Science Report 2013: Changing Global Environments, 71–78. Paris: OECD Publishing and UNESCO Publishing. OED Online. 2021a. Hope, n.1. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/ (accessed September 01, 2021). OED Online. 2021b. Optimism, n. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/ (accessed September 01, 2021). Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. 2014. The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. New York: Columbia University Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 2016. “Dark Anthropology and its Others: Theory Since the Eighties.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47–73. Osterhoudt, Sarah. 2021. “Bright Spot Ethnography: On the Analytical Potential of Things that Work.” The Arrow 8 (1): 33–47. Otto, Ton, and Rachel Charlotte Smith. 2013. “Design Anthropology: A Distinct Style of Knowing.” In Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice, edited by Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, and Rachel Charlotte Smith, 1–29. London: Bloomsbury. Panu, Pihkala. 2020. “Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-Anxiety and Climate Anxiety.” Sustainability 12 (19): 7836. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012. “A Day in the Cadillac: The Work of Hope in Urban Mongolia.” Social Analysis 56 (2): 136–151. Pink, Sarah, and Juan Francisco Salazar. 2017. “Anthropologies and Futures: Setting the Agenda.” In Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds, edited by Juan Francisco Salazar, Sarah Pink, Andrew Irving, and Johannes Sjöberg, 3–22. London: Bloomsbury. Plautz, Jason. 2020. “The Environmental Burden of Generation Z.” Washington Post Magazine, February 3, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/02/ 03/eco-anxiety-is-overwhelming-kids-wheres-line-between-education-alarmism/ (accessed August 12, 2021). Price, David H. 2004. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Raskin, Paul, Tariq Banuri, Gilberto Gallopin, Pablo Gutman, Al Hammond, Robert Kates, and Rob Swart. 2002. Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead, Volume 1. Boston: Stockholm Environmental Institute/Tellus Institute. Razak, Victoria, and Sam Cole. 1995. “Anthropological Perspectives on the Future of Culture and Society.” Futures 27 (4): 375–384. Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (3): 447–462. Rosenberg, Daniel, and Susan Harding. 2005. “Introduction: Histories of the Future.” In Histories of the Future, edited by Susan Harding and Daniel Rosenberg, 1–18. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Salazar, Juan Francisco, Sarah Pink, Andrew Irving, and Johannes Sjöberg, eds. 2017. Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds. London: Bloomsbury. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schuller, Mark. 2014. “Being an Insider Without: Activist Anthropological Engagement in Haiti after the Earthquake.” American Anthropologist 116 (2): 409–412.

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Scranton, Roy. 2015. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers. Smith, Rachel Charlotte, and Ton Otto. 2015. “Cultures of the Future: Emergence and Intervention in Design Anthropology.” In Design Anthropological Futures, edited by Rachel Charlotte Smith, Kasper Tang Vangkilde, Ton Otto, Mette Gislev Kjaersgaard, Joachim Halse, and Thomas Binder, 19–36. London: Bloomsbury. Solnit, Rebecca. 2004. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. New York: Nation Books. Solnit, Rebecca. 2010. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. New York: Penguin. Speed, Shannon. 2006. “At the Crossroads of Human Rights and Anthropology: Toward a Critically Engaged Activist Research.” American Anthropologist 108 (1): 66–76. Tax, Sol. 1975. “Action Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 1 (4): 514–517. Textor, Robert B. 1985. “Anticipatory Anthropology and the Telemicroelectronic Revolution: A Preliminary Report From Silicon Valley.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 16 (1): 3–30. Tuck, Eve. 2009. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review 79 (3): 409–428. Walker, Harry, and Iza Kavedžija. 2015. “Values of Happiness.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (3): 1–23. Wallman, Sandra. 1992. “Introduction: Contemporary Futures.” In Contemporary Futures: Perspectives from Social Anthropology, edited by Sandra Wallman, 1–22. London: Routledge. Westman, Clinton. 2013. “Social Impact Assessment and the Anthropology of the Future in Canada’s Tar Sands.” Human Organization 72 (2): 111–120. Whyte, Kyle P. 2018. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1 (1–2): 224–242. Willow, Anna J., and Kelly A. Yotebieng. 2020. “Introduction: Doing Good Anthropology.” In Anthropology and Activism: New Contexts, New Conversations, edited by Anna J. Willow and Kelly A. Yotebieng, 1–18. London: Routledge Press. Zigon, Jarrett. 2009. “Hope Dies Last: Two Aspects of Hope in Contemporary Moscow.” Anthropological Theory 9 (3): 253–271.

1 A WORLD MADE SAFE FOR (FUTURE) DIFFERENCE Anthropology and Utopian Possibility Samuel Gerald Collins

In her 1946 book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Ruth Benedict famously contrasts policy that leads to a “world made safe for difference” to one insisting on the universality of human culture. While many have utilized this passage to underscore the urgency of anthropology in a violent and intolerant world, it also suggests the uneasy essentialism of her approach, one in which culture is ambiguously shared among denizens of the nation-state. Yet, in almost the next breath, Benedict reassures us that “encouraging cultural differences would not mean a static world.” What if Benedict is referring less to an essentialist “cultural identity” than a way of thinking of the world that is generative of cultural difference and human flourishing? And what would it mean for anthropology to work toward this world “made safe” for the production of difference? In this chapter, I propose to evoke an anthropology focused on future difference, both in terms of challenging hegemonies of power and capitalism and in terms of opening up understanding to alternative futures premised on difference. This involves repositioning anthropology’s immanent critique as the disclosure of possible worlds, on the one hand, and interrogating what exactly “difference” means in terms of the inequalities that have overdetermined our present. The chapter concludes with the possibility of anthropology as a utopian science bound up with disclosing future worlds different from the dystopian present.

Burning It Down This chapter’s point of departure is a series of devastating critiques of “mainstream” anthropology undertaken in the wake of Black Lives Matter, the election of a white supremacist president in the United States, and the baffling decision of DOI: 10.4324/b23231-2

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the American Anthropological Association to hold its annual meeting amidst climate change–induced fires in San Jose, California. To what extent, critics asked, was anthropology part of this overall structure of inequality? To what extent does anthropology exacerbate social and climate injustice (Jobson 2020)? Is anthropology irredeemably part of the structures of settler colonialism from which it originated and from which it gained its institutional legitimacy (Todd 2018)? Evocations of and demands for a transformed anthropology followed, including calls for an abolitionist anthropology, entreaties to “Cite Black Women,” and a renewed drive to decolonize the field: In general, a series of challenges to practices and hierarchies that have defined the field since the nineteenth century (Smith et al. 2021). Predictably, there was a backlash. Equally predictably, that backlash originated among white anthropologists that had most benefited from the field’s “liberal” orientations. And while that backlash seemed to be largely confined to dyspeptic remarks on the American Anthropological Association’s ill-conceived “communities” message board, there was a concomitant growth in vaguely reactionary conference papers and even some publications, with Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air contributing to a general defense of the largely Western, largely white practice of anthropology in the twentieth century (King 2019). If nothing else, this seemed to confirm the critique, and reading the phlegmatic posts of largely emeritus faculty posted on the “Communities” board was in itself sufficient argument for the wholesale dismantling of the liberal tradition, and, in particular, the ways that these hagiographies of past anthropologists make up some of the techniques and technologies “through which Anthropology imagines, reproduces, and promulgates itself as largely, still, a white, male, and colonial discipline” (Todd 2018). Yet, as I write this, I, like many people teaching introductory courses in anthropology, am readying my syllabi for a new semester and reviewing introductory textbooks. As always, I am struck by the strident optimism in those textbooks. It goes something like this: Through understanding, critique, and the application of methods and theory, anthropology will make the world a better place. Some of this optimism is, I think, misplaced and decidedly ­revanchist— built on developmental theory from the twentieth century and reproducing colonialist assumptions of an older anthropology. But this aside, it’s hard to miss the optimism of our undergraduate curricula, curricula that are, for the most part, grounded in a twentieth-century, liberal tradition that many of us no longer espouse. So, the question: Is this optimism endemic to anthropology? If it is, what is the basis for our optimism? As I have suggested elsewhere, part of this basis lies in the futural orientation of the field; anthropology is premised on a transforming world, and, courtesy of successive critiques, that future is no longer a priori colonized by the West (Collins 2021). But this doesn’t really get to the heart of the question: What makes anthropology an optimistic study, and can

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that optimism be sustained in the face of multiple, continued crises (Yotebieng, this volume)? To turn this question inward, can we have optimism for anthropology itself? Can we imagine a better anthropology? Or can one be achieved only after we let anthropology “burn” (Jobson 2020)? On the one hand, I heartily agree with critiques of anthropology’s past (and continued) investments in racism and colonialism, and I see this moment as pivotal for the establishment of a truly decolonial, anti-racist anthropology. Yet I also see the seeds of hope for anthropology in this same liberal tradition—not, of course, in the mechanics of relativism that buttressed white supremacy even in the act of critiquing it, but in the inconsistencies, interstices, and lacunae of that anthropological approach. As the touchstone of anthropology’s liberal orientation in the twentieth century, cultural relativism was deeply contradictory—fractured by its incipient racism and the unilinear evolutionary theory that lurked behind it and hamstrung by its indebtedness to Lockean individualism. Yet, the germs of a more hopeful anthropology were there all along, somewhere between the said and unsaid of anthropological method. Hope, here, lies in a recuperative possibility that draws from Ernst Bloch and the critical theory he championed. In this discussion, I look back to what some have considered foundational texts in cultural relativism and explore the ways that those texts express both optimism and hope (perhaps even despite themselves) for a deeply transformed anthropology— a hope, ultimately, that extends from their contradictions to an anthropology that hopes to exceed itself. I make the argument that anthropology can be through this lens a deeply hopeful enterprise, and that, indeed, the work of anthropology can be one of work toward better worlds—a genuine world-making (Kondo 2018). Ultimately, I strive to articulate the hope that an optimistic anthropology need not be a revanchist anthropology. To paraphrase Willow’s introduction to this volume, this is the “belief in anthropology to create positive change.” With this chapter, I hope to add to an already existing and important body of work in this area on what Richard Handler has called anthropology’s “excluded ancestors” (Handler 2000). Here, anthropologists like Faye Harrison and Ira Harrison have been re-orienting anthropology toward Du Bois and to the pathbreaking work of African American anthropologists, including Zora Neale Hurston, Allison Davis, Sr. Clair Drake, and others (Harrison 1992; Harrison and Harrison 1999). These anthropologists, marginalized in the racist milieu of early-twentieth-century anthropology, represent other, more emancipatory possibilities for the field. These works are a foundation for hope; they allow us to “imagine a future for the discipline unmoored from its classical objects or referends” (Jobson 2020, 261). Those “classic references” include ways that anthropology makes its Other—the essentializations and reifications that mask powerful inequalities even as they superficially promote understanding through cultural relativism (Fabian 1983). Yet there are potentials in that liberal tradition itself, potentials that come from these unresolved tensions.

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Little Creatures If cultural relativism emerged as a characteristic of US anthropology in the twentieth century, it did so without an Ur-text that would ground it theoretically. Instead, cultural relativism would be elaborated across a range of ethnographic work, visible more in the assumptions and asides of the ethnographer than in some demonstrative manifesto. Synthesizing decades of writing, Michael Brown has identified some central tenets: (1) “Cultural coherence,” or the complete integration of culture; (2) the “insistence that societies and cultures cannot be ranked on an evolutionary scale”; and (3) cultural criticism (Brown 2008, 365). The first two seem the most logically contiguous; the rejection of evolutionary models of cultural development premised on the comparisons of tabulated traits leads more or less to the examination of cultures in themselves (Pels 2003). But the third doesn’t follow and, as Brown explains, “proponents of classical relativism are inclined to contradict their own axioms by subjecting the institutions and social practices of Western industrial societies to criticism deemed unacceptable when assessing non-Western, pre-industrial ones” (Brown 2008, 365). Under what circumstances can the anthropologist act as “critic at home and conformist elsewhere,” as Levi-Straus put it (Levi-Strauss 1972, 384, quoted in Brown 2008, 365)? To put it bluntly, this was never really well thought out. This tension between inside and outside, coherence and contradiction, understanding and critique is never really resolved, and all of these rough edges explain why cultural relativism and cultural critique are oftentimes consigned to footnotes, concluding paragraphs, or to the occasional novelty piece (“Nacirema,” anyone?) (Miner 1956). At its worst, cultural relativism shored up the privilege of the white West, essentialized the cultural other, and effaced the imperialism that was oppressing the lives of anthropology’s others even as the anthropologists themselves were immersing themselves in “their strange and savage life” (Mead 1956, xi). Yet it is here, within the contradictions themselves, that I find the possibility of hope for anthropology. No one did more than Ruth Benedict to define the boundaries and set up the logical pratfalls of cultural relativism for twentieth-century anthropology. In her 1934 Patterns of Culture, she writes: No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probing he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. (Benedict 1934, 2) This sets the stage for how many understand cultural difference—as sweeping and even incommensurable differences that link together customs, institutions,

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and philosophies. Conceived of in this way, each culture was an island, analytically separate from each other until the anthropologist, as Malinowski wrote, shows up “while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight” (Malinowski 1961, 4). With that conceit, the anthropologist-cum-scientist might treat these “island” cultures as natural laboratories for cultural alterity, comparing one to the other in “experiments” where the “control” would inevitably be comparison to the West. With the vast network of historical contact which has spread the great civilizations over tremendous areas, primitive cultures are now the one source to which we can turn. They are a laboratory in which we may study the diversity of human institutions. (Benedict 1934, 17) But even if we accept all of this, what would these “experiments” accomplish? What would, in other words, be the point of this study of diversity? For Benedict, the ultimate goals of the anthropological enterprise seem murky. The psychological consequences of this spread of white culture have been out of all proportion to the materialistic. This world-wide cultural diffusion has protected us as man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other peoples; it has given our culture a massive universality that we have long ceased to account for historically, and which we read off rather as necessary and inevitable. (Benedict 1934, 6) Anthropology shows us that other ways are possible, and that “our” way is not an inevitability. Yet there’s a dilemma here. What, exactly, are people to do with this knowledge of “other civilizations”? Could this knowledge of cultural others be transformative? Could it help to critique American imperialism? Does it sharpen the knowledge of one’s self and society? As Marcus and Fischer put it, anthropology has all too often indulged in its own cross-cultural romanticism; critiquing contemporary society from the vantage point of a more satisfying other, without considering with much seriousness the practicalities of transferring or implementing that otherness in a very different social setting. (1986, 116) In practice, though, this was difficult, if not impossible. There is a curious contradiction introduced in Benedict’s relativism. If, as Benedict wrote in Patterns

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of Culture, people are “the little creature” of culture, where “its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities,” then there is hardly room for critique amidst this straitjacket of integration (Benedict 1934, 2). Brown has identified this as the central paradox of cultural relativism (2008, 372).

Between Coming and Becoming Margaret Mead’s 1928 Coming of Age in Samoa described patterns of pubescence that were different from those of Mead’s largely white and middle-class reading audience. As a result of their more relaxed approach to sexuality and the process of adolescence, Samoan girls, according to Mead, had an easier, less-stress-filled childhood. And, here, possibly, Mead could have stopped. Yet approximately 25 percent of Coming of Age is devoted to a discussion of adolescence in the United States, one that, by Mead’s account, seems like the antithesis of that of Samoans. Here, Mead fires the first salvo in cultural relativism—adolescence may be biologically universal, but the experience of adolescence is remarkably different across cultures. But what to do with that insight? If we now turn from the Samoan picture and take away only the main lesson which we learned there, that adolescence is not necessarily a time of stress and strain, but that cultural conditions make it so, can we draw any conclusions which might bear fruit in the training of our adolescents? (Mead 1961 [1928], 259) There’s the obvious point: That “we” should become more Samoan—that is, adopt the practices and institutions that enable this more “stress-free” approach. But Mead rejects this at the outset: At first blush the answer seems simple enough.…But, unfortunately, the conditions which vex our adolescents are the flesh and bone of our society, no more subject to straightforward manipulations upon our part than is the language which we speak. (Mead 1961, 234) Mead echoes Benedict’s integrative vision of culture, with the narrow path of meritocracy and puritanical sexuality characterized as central to US culture. Tugging at one end of this cultural web would, presumably, unravel other threads. Yet if that’s the case, then what is the point of Mead’s concluding chapters and their critical discussion of white, middle-class adolescence? This is where things take an unexpected turn. The point, according to Mead, is not to adopt Samoan cultural practice, but to grant US adolescents the freedom to choose their own paths.

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They must be taught that many ways are open to them, no one sanctioned above its alternative, and that upon them lies the burden of choice. Unhampered by prejudices, unvexed by too early conditioning to any one standard, they must come clear-eyed to the choices which lie before them. (Mead 1961, 246) It’s a curious passage, especially since this is not the way Mead introduces Samoan life, where young girls articulate “uniform and satisfying ambitions” (Mead 1961, 157). It’s worth asking how this juxtaposition works, given that recommendations for US society do not seem to follow in any direct way from the Samoan example. According to Mead, Samoans know “but one way of life” (Mead 1961, 248). How does this translate into an insistence on pluralism? And, in the larger sense, why would one cultural example imply the critique of another? Given the clear boundaries that, for Mead, differentiate “us” from “Samoa,” how is it that an ethnography of Samoan life would impact the lives of adolescents in the United States? Having rejected the appropriation of Samoan practice, Mead ultimately finds the basis for cultural critique within the ideal (if not the reality) of the plural society. Similarly, our children are faced with half a dozen standards of morality: A double sex standard for men and women, a single standard for men and women, and groups which advocate that the single standard should be freedom while others argue that the single standard should be absolute monogamy. (Mead 1961, 201) Moreover, since institutions in the United States are the result of complex and conflicting ideas, they themselves embody societal contradictions: “Because our civilisation is woven of so many diverse strands, the ideas will be found to contain numerous contradictions” (Mead 1961, 204). These contradictory messages with regards to freedom, responsibility, sexuality, and religion are, ultimately, the reason for adolescent stress. The presence of many strongly held and contradictory points of view and the enormous influence of individuals in the lives of their children and our country play into each other’s hands in producing situations fraught with emotion and pain. (Mead 1961, 213) The solution, for Mead, is the institutionalization of difference itself—different forms of family, different methods of education, different choices for people. As she concludes:

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For it must be realized by any student of civilisation that we pay heavily for our heterogeneous, rapidly changing civilisation; we pay in high proportions of crime and delinquency, we pay in conflicts of youth, we pay in an ever-increasing number of neuroses, we pay in the lack of a coherent tradition without which the development of art is sadly handicapped. In such a list of prices, we must count our gains carefully, not to be discouraged. And chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilisations have recognised only one. (Mead 1961, 247) Mead’s cultural critique, then, does not rely on the adoption of Samoan lifeways. The solution to the stress of adolescent life lies in the recognition of heterogeneity, and the resolution of contradictions through the extension of that recognition to adolescent development. In other words, the answer to the dilemma of the young women Mead addressed in Coming of Age lies within, rather than without; Samoa here acts as catalyst for a process of anagnorisis (recognition) of promise or potential in the past for the future (Zipes 1997, 4).

Difference at a Distance Benedict employs similar strategies in her “culture at a distance” study of Japanese “national character” in her report for Office of War Information, published in 1946 as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Benedict 1946). At first glance, the essay seems to follow on the path started in Patterns of Culture, where societies can be captured in a singular tableau and summed up with a single word: “Apollonian,” “Dionysian.” “Any attempt to understand the Japanese must begin with their version of what it means to ‘take one’s proper station’” (Benedict 1946, 43). This essentialism was at the heart of “national character” studies that Mead, Gorer, and other US anthropologists were producing in the 1940s and 1950s— technologies of both control and understanding in the postwar world (Lie 2001). This didn’t imply that Japan was free from complexity, and Benedict characterized the Japanese by a series of contradictions metaphorized in the sword and chrysanthemum: “Both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around” (Benedict 1946, 2–3). Yet whatever its essential characteristics, Japan would undergo change, and the US occupation was the primary vector for that change, making Benedict’s work in many ways seem a self-congratulatory ode to the Pax Americana. That said, Benedict was doubtful that Japan would become like the United States. As she prognosticated, “Japan will, of course, experiment with Western political mechanics of democracy, but the Western arrangements will not be trusted tools with which to fashion a better world, as they are in the United States” (Benedict 1946, 302–303).

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The path forward lay not with the United States at all. In fact, Benedict (and others) advocated what she describes as a “policy of good faith,” where Japanese institutions and governmental structures are left largely intact (Benedict 1946, 299). Instead, changes would be largely affected from within. “The Japanese have an ethics of alternatives. They tried to achieve their ‘proper place’ in war, and they lost. That course, now, they can discard, because their whole training has conditioned them to possible changes of direction” (Benedict 1946, 304). Here, Benedict relies on well-worn tropes of orientalism in her understanding of Japanese pasts and future, in the end essentializing not only Japan but the United States (Lie 2001). The results, as John Lie and Sonia Ryang have (independently) pointed out, serve to distance heterogeneity from both countries and to contribute to, for example, nationalist discourse (Lie 2001; Ryang 2002). So, while Benedict’s work may fall into the general tradition of orientalism—with Japan as a repository not only for cultural alterity, but also as a foil for celebrating the United States—it is a curious essentializing that projects an open future for Japan even as it attempts to contain Japan as the essentialized other. When Benedict turns her attention to racism, as she does in her Race: Science and Politics, it is with the same admixture of essentialism and alterity (Benedict 2019 [1940]). First, as Visweswaran, Anderson, and others have shown, “race” for Benedict (and for the Boasians in general) is cultural and separate from biology, but, in the alembic of cultural relativism, at the same time preserved and essentialized (Visweswaran 2010; Anderson 2014). As Anderson argues, Benedict’s work both accentuated racial distinctions in its construction of biological race under the tripartite division of Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid yet minimized the sociocultural consequences of racial distinctions in the US body politic by framing the overcoming of racism as a question of integration into an assimilative “American” culture. (Anderson 2014, 396) Race-as-culture placed race alongside other “ethnic” markers, suggesting that race (and racism) would disappear alongside white antipathy toward immigrants. Not only did this allow the biological study of race to continue unabated (with disastrous consequences in health equity, over-policing, and other forms of institutionalized racism), but essentialism placed the study of (and the critique of) racism outside of anthropology altogether (Anderson 2014; Ifekwunigwe et al. 2017). All of those contradictions are readily evident in the writings of Boasians, from Boas through Benedict to Mead’s bizarre and embarrassing Rap on Race (Baldwin and Mead 1971). However, Benedict’s Race: Science and Politics nevertheless suggests other possibilities. First, it must be said, Benedict goes down the road of other wartime anthropologists in claiming that the “real” foundations of the country lie in equality and democracy. Benedict claims, apparently without any

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historical consciousness at all, that: “Our motto is ‘No distinctions of race, creed, or color’ and we offered an ‘asylum for the oppressed’ and wrote enthusiastically about ‘the Melting pot’” (Benedict 2019 [1940], 196). Yet, Benedict complicates the picture by locating racism in the experience of settler colonialism and in socioeconomic inequalities that enabled the development of the United States— neatly contradicting her own point (Anderson 2014, 401). “After all, color was the most conspicuous difference, and it set off the opposing parties on the frontier as religion often no longer did” (Benedict 2019 [1940], 171). By placing racial animus in the mechanics of colonialism, Benedict opens up the possibility for change in challenging the colonialism that still grounds inequality in the United States. For Benedict, as Anderson has suggested, “The solution to those problems lies in the transformation of social conditions” (Anderson 2014, 403). This vision of cultural relativism would be almost completely buried in postwar anti-communism, with, as David Price has documented, the government suppression of cultural critique grounded in political economy (Price 2019). Mead’s postwar writings on race very much anticipate the bland multiculturalism of the 1970s and 1980s, replete with empty generalizations about equality and democracy in the United States. Her Rap on Race (with James Baldwin), is, for all of Mead’s cringeworthy clumsiness, the apotheosis of the cultural relativist position. Mead’s contributions are largely a caricature of white liberalism, emphasizing “melting pot” theories of assimilation grounded in a shared, Christian ethos, and a dogged tendency to reduce racism to individual prejudice—which Mead herself had been spared. And, yet, in her other work—contemporaneous with Rap on Race—Mead had already moved away from the relativist position staked by Boas and Benedict onto something else entirely. In the final pages of And Keep Your Powder Dry, Mead alludes to “techniques for freeing ourselves from the limitations imposed by our own culture” (Mead 1942, 181). On the next page, Mead expands on this idea: It is possible that this type of social science, which is not the mere lifeless aping of the mannerisms of the natural sciences but which shapes its hypothesis to its materials and includes the repercussions of a hypothesis inside its equation, can give us premises by which we can set man free; release in them energies which can be trusted to develop towards more freedom instead of towards a machine model of slavery or Utopian totalitarianism. (Mead 1942, 182) On the one hand, this new “type” of social science looked a lot like social engineering, a tendency that Mead had perhaps always had but which had become more and more evident over the course of the war and Mead’s own growing prominence as a public intellectual (Collins 2003). Yet there was something else here as well—the possibility of “freeing ourselves” from the limitations of

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anthropology, or at least the anthropology that Mead had been instrumental in establishing over the first decades of the twentieth century. That is, in the same breath Mead espoused the hubris that anthropology might build new cultures while at the same time extending the hope that anthropology might transcend all of this in an emergent future. Mead’s postwar writings were more and more concerned with evocations of an “open” future and the possibility of a “prefigurative” generation that might save the Earth from nuclear war and climate disaster. As she wrote, I believe we are on the verge of developing a new kind of culture, one that is as much a departure in style from configurative cultures, as the institutionalization of configuration in orderly—and disorderly—change was a departure from the postfigurative style. I call this new style prefigurative because in this new culture it will be the child—and not the parent and grandparent—that represents what is to come. (Mead 1970, 204) Although the Boasians certainly included culture change in their research (e.g., the work of Melville Herskovits), the idea of making a decisive break with the past was something that Mead had not explored before the 1950s. Just the opposite: “Primitive” societies were, in her formulation, static and uniform. Some of this was based on her understanding of change as both desirable and inevitable, as in her shameless defense of the US colonization of the Admiralty islands during World War II (Mead 1956). In that respect, Mead’s interest in the future could be seen as part of the same liberal ethos that would see her pushing an insipid multiculturalism on James Baldwin. But it was also a born of a desire for a radically different future that “is neither predetermined nor predictable,” one that built on what Mead understood as the counterculture (Mead 2005 [1977], 329). And that open future was not just confined to society—she also hoped for a transformed anthropology. Anticipating the “postmodern turn” by decades, Mead advocated reflexivity in the very early days of her involvement with the Josiah Macy, Jr, Conferences of Cybernetics: She would have liked best a film showing whom sat next to whom, whispers among those seated next to each other, facial expressions, and all sorts of non-verbal behavior, but having only a verbal record, she wanted to include the jokes, the asides, everything said, as to make a comprehensive document for a detailed social study of a small intellectually substantial group at work. (Heims 1991, 72) Why Mead might want such a multimodal record of the conference is another question; she was not sure what the shape of the field would be, and suggested

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experiments in “non-linear” forms of communication about emergent forms of life that have neither been named nor fully imagined (Mead 2005, 273–274). Indeed, what seems clear in Mead’s and Bateson’s famed 1976 interview with Steward Brand, where Bateson draws diagrams showing the integration of the observer of the system within the system itself, issues that seemed much more assured in the 1920s—questions of culture’s integration, pattern, change, and heterogeneity—were all on the table in the wake of cybernetics. And while “second-order” cyberneticists generally interpret Bateson’s drawing as the incorporation of the observer and the turn to reflexivity, there is a good deal more ambiguity to it (Hayles 1999; Collins 2010). Where does the reflexivity stop? And where does it go? If, on the one hand, it’s “turtles all the way down” with regards to the embeddedness of anthropologists in their ethnographic work, what is the recursive form that emerges from that work? Bateson and Mead did not necessarily have the answers in 1976; perhaps this was the prefigurative anthropology that they could not name (Brand 1976). If the observer was embedded in a nested series of contexts with the observed, was this the end of cultural relativism? Or was it the dialectical synthesis of contradictions inherent in the relativist model from the beginning?

Relativism Reborn As an anthropological strategy for cultural critique, cultural relativism suffered from glaring, and even fatal, flaws. Many of these are familiar to the instructor of anthropology, who may have been confronted by students making the rather obvious point that rationalizing others’ cultures through a consideration of context seems to demand the same consideration when critiquing powerful inequalities in the West. These were inherent in the concept itself—never mind the many, trenchant critiques over the years of cultural relativism as part of a system of general racism and colonialism (Wolfe 1999). In practice, then, anthropologists struggled to maintain analytical divisions between the cultures they defined. They found it problematic to account for change, resorting to the identification of central cultural values and institutions while distancing questions of heterogeneity or minority practices. When it came time for critique, the insistence on sharp boundaries and the denial of history made it conceptually challenging to extend institutions from one culture to another (Wolf 1982). Taken together, all of these problems undermined the very idea of critique, and cultural relativism was in this sense more of an affirmation of Western power than a challenge to hegemony. Yet anthropologists have found it hard to move on and, in the return of the repressed, have again and again revisited cultural relativism and cultural critique. Some of this might be attributed to the lure of ethnographic authority and the “power” to mete out authoritative proclamations on culture and difference. But even here there’s something else: An optimistic vision for the possibility

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of change extending from understanding. Accordingly, there have been several revivals of cultural relativism over the past 50 years. Evidently, anthropology cannot give up this past even as it tries (at least sometimes) to distance itself from the colonialism and racism that were the sine qua non conditions of cultural relativism in the early twentieth century. George Marcus and Michael Fisher’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique sought, among other things, to re-invent the Boasian legacy for a postmodern age. They note that “[t]he challenge of serious cultural criticism is to bring the insights gained on the periphery back to the center to raise havoc with our settled ways of thinking and conceptualization” (1986, 138). Yet, in many ways, their postmodern approach founders on the same rocks that bedeviled Benedict and Mead. Can a system that is ontologically premised on the preservation of an “outside” and “inside” to culture “transport” critique from one context to another? As Marcus and Fischer (1986, 159–160) ask, “How, then, to achieve a kind of criticism by juxtaposition which makes telling points, but not at the cost of decontextualiziing and stereotyping either case represented?” Ironically—and despite the title of the book—Anthropology as Cultural Critique never really arrives at an answer, with the final chapter trailing off into a review of (then) current ethnographic work. The “critique” is, ultimately, a critique of ethnographic writing rather than a cultural critique, rescuing the authority of a largely white, twentieth-century anthropology by sublimating the epistemological/ontological questions onto the text itself. Anthropology’s Du Boisian legacy (as Harrison later called it) is never considered here (Harrison 1992). Still more recently, Pandian revives the cultural relativism animus in his 2019 book, A Possible Anthropology. There, he evokes a transformative anthropology with “the aim of reinventing the whole through a shift of perspective, the idea that the world itself can change with the assumption of another point of view” (Pandian 2019, 120). For him, though, those other worlds are firmly—if tragically—embedded in the Anthropocene present, an alterity that is also the result of powerful inequalities and injustices. Yet through the work of anthropology, those voices themselves might gesture to another possibility altogether: “Like experience, then, the possible has a double life as both object and method in the discipline, both as something to which to turn and consider, and also as the stage of a transformative operation” (Pandian 2019, 119–120). His work is a tantalizing sign that cultural relativism might still generate hope, both for the world the anthropologist endeavors to articulate and for anthropology itself.

Extinguishing Hope Over the past 20 years, “hope” has emerged as an object of anthropological inquiry. From Miyazaki’s 2004 ethnography of Fijian land reform to a growing number of ethnographic works, anthropologists are more and more interested

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in the ways that people imagine better worlds for themselves and their families (Miyazaki 2004; Pedersen 2012; Kleist and Jansen 2016). As Bryant and Knight (2019, 134) define it, hope “is a form of futural momentum, a way pressing into the future that attempts to pull certain potentialities into actuality.” It is not surprising that people would turn toward a more hopeful future in the midst of present despair, and not surprising that people around the world hold some hope for their future—even amid terrible adversity (Tam, this volume). The future, as Lempert (2018) suggests, may betray the exhaustion of Western tropes of progress, but may also hold promise for people who have been historically marginalized. In this, one role of anthropologists has been to document and assist communities in their future-oriented projects (Widener and Choate, this volume). At the same time as hope burgeoned as an object of anthropological research, it seemed to dim on a discipline that seemed grounded in racialized colonialism and the exoticization of the Other. According to these critiques, moving anthropology away from its dubious past means much more than a moment of theoretical reflexivity. Instead, as Jobson wrote, we should let anthropology “burn,” allowing us to “imagine a future for the discipline unmoored from its classical objects or referends” (Jobson 2020, 261). Given the precarity of the field and the strident anti-intellectualism of an ascendent far right, it is not surprising that anthropologists might turn to a more hopeful future, but is there hope for anthropology as a field? From Bryant and Knight’s definition, hope takes a Bergsonian turn, and would mean wresting potentials for anthropology as an anti-colonial, emancipatory project from the past and actualizing them. As Grosz explains: This is what life (or consciousness) brings to the world: the remembrance of the past, the history submerged or lying behind the present, whose resources are not completely depleted for they reinvigorate the present and help generate the new, which, for Bergson, is precisely the movement of actualization of the virtual. Duration is the substance of the past in the present and the capacity of this to generate an unexpected future beyond that of imminent action. (Grosz 2004, 186) Beyond simply reviving the detritus of anthropological theory, this hope would mean looking to a fractured, contradictory field for moments that might be formed through a kind of eruption or interruption of the present that does not come simply as a gift from the future but is a reworking of the past so that the present is different from itself, is open to eruption. (Grosz 2004, 252)

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Conclusion: Anthropology and Its Surplus In their discussion of hope and the future, Bryant and Knight write that “hope emerges in the gap between the potential and the actual, between matter and its not-yet form” (Bryant and Knight 2019, 134). The “not-yet” here is a reference to the work of Ernst Bloch, whose Principles of Hope forms the philosophical lattice upon which “hope” builds a case for the future. For Bloch, “utopia” is not an impossible absolute standing outside of time and space like More’s island, but an everyday desire for better lives that is evident even in the most ideologically mystified practices and institutions. These are the “red arrows” throughout history that betray a longing for socialism, and Bloch finds them in popular music, in advertising, and in other areas of quotidian life (Kellner 1997). This “utopian surplus” is also evident in anthropology’s cultural relativism. On the one hand, cultural relativism is thoroughly ideological: Shoring up the authority of the anthropologist, “slotting” other peoples into hierarchical binarisms of cultural difference. “Cultural critique” in this context produces its opposite—a confirmation of cultural homogeneity under a thin patina of “tolerance” for difference. Inadequate and contradictory in its own time, cultural relativism cannot help but appear anachronistic in a world of dense interconnections and monstrous inequality. And yet it does not go away, and appears again and again in our textbooks and theories. One of the reasons: It is one of the most cherished wish-images of anthropology, “frozen representations or objectifications of genuine wants and aspirations that remained unfilled or thwarted” (Gilloch 2013, 105). Simply, that desire is to change the world into a better place through interacting with other people; it is the hope of cultural relativism and the optimism of anthropology. Given the ideological distortion of racism and Western hegemony, however, it can hardly accomplish that; in fact, it suggests a conceptual impossibility. Yet the seeds of something different—the “not-yet” of cultural ­relativism—are already there in the discontinuities of twentieth-century anthropology. On the one hand, cultural critique, as Benedict suggests, cannot exist outside of the amelioration of social inequality and settler colonialism. On the other, as Mead’s writings show, cultural relativism hinges not on the appropriation of cultural difference, but on the resonance that difference produces in accentuating alternatives that were already there to begin with. In other words, it is the recognition of heterogeneity and alternatives that leads to cultural critique, the opposite, in other words, of the falsely homogeneous models that drove cultural relativism. Benedict and Mead never lost their optimism for both anthropology’s role in the world and for anthropology’s future. Yet the referent of this optimism changed throughout their lives: “The world” and its “anthropology” mean very different things over the course of the twentieth century. Moreso than Benedict, whom she outlived by decades, Mead’s thoughts on anthropology changed again and again, shifting with public opinion and the political climate in ways that

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were occasionally contradictory but always uttered with the utmost confidence. These pronouncements were, of course, pure Mead, but they were also generated out of a twentieth-century anthropology optimistic about the future yet riven with fault lines. In this sense, the twists and turns of Mead’s oeuvre are a synecdoche for anthropology itself. From cultural relativism to “open culture,” and everything in between, Mead’s anthropology was often generated in the space its own contradictions. And it is the fractured landscape that continues to generate optimism for the field today, one where the critique of the liberal tradition was already immanent in the latency of twentieth-century anthropology itself.

References Anderson, Mark. 2014) “Ruth Benedict, Boasian Anthropology, and the Problem of the Colour Line.” History and Anthropology 25 (3): 395–414. Baldwin, James, and Margaret Mead. 1971. Rap on Race. New York: Corgi Books. Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Benedict, Ruth. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Benedict, Ruth. 2019 [1940]. Race: Science and Politics. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Brand, Steward. 1976. “For God’s Sake, Margaret.” Co-Evolution Quarterly 10 (21) Summer): 32–34. Brown, Michael F. 2008. “Cultural Relativism 2.0.” Current Anthropology 49 (3): 363–373. Bryant, Rebecca, and Daniel Knight. 2019. The Anthropology of the Future. New York: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Samuel Gerald. 2003. “Sail On, Sail On!” Science Fiction Studies 30: 180–198. Collins, Samuel Gerald. 2010. “An Electronic Buzzer Is Laughing.” Cybernetics and Human Knowing 17 (3): 45–64. Collins, Samuel Gerald. 2021 [2008]. All Tomorrow’s Cultures. New York: Berghahn Books. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Make Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Gilloch, Graeme. 2013. Myth and Metropolis. New York: Polity Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Handler, Richard, ed. 2000. Excluded Ancestors. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Harrison, Faye. 1992. “The DuBoisian Legacy in Anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology 12 (3): 239–268. Harrison, Ira E., and Faye V. Harrison. 1999. African-American Pioneers in Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Post-human. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Heims, Steve. 1991. The Cybernetics Group. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O., Wagner, J. K., Yu, J.-H., Harrell, T. M., Bamshad, M. J. and Royal, C. D. 2017. “A Qualitative Analysis of How Anthropologists Interpret the Race Construct.” American Anthropologist 119: 422–434. Jobson, Ryan Cecil. 2020. “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn.” American Anthropologist 122 (2): 259–271.

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Kellner, Douglas. 1997. Ernst Bloch, “Utopia and Ideology Critique”. In Daniel & T. Moylan (Eds.), Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. NewYork: Verso. King, Charles. 2019. Gods of the Upper Air. New York: Penguin Random House. Kleist, Nauja, and Stef Jansen. 2016. “Introduction: Hope Over Time—Crisis, Immobility and Future-Making.” History and Anthropology 27 (4): 373–392. Kondo, Dorinne. 2018. World-Making. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lempert, William. 2018. “Generative Hope in the Postapocalyptic Present.” Cultural Anthropology 33 (2): 202–212. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1972 [1958]. Tristes Tropiques. New York: Hutchinson and Co. Lie, John. 2001. “Ruth Benedict’s Legacy of Shame.” Asian Journal of Social Science 29 (2): 49–61. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1961 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. NY: E.P. Dutton and Co. Marcus, George, and Michael M.J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mead, Margaret. 1942. And Keep Your Powder Dry. New York: Morrow. Mead, Margaret. 1956. New Lives for Old. New York: Morrow. Mead, Margaret. 1961 [1928]. Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks. Mead, Margaret. 1970. Culture and Commitment. New York: Doubleday. Mead, Margaret. 2005. The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipate the Future. Edited and with an introduction by Robert B. Textor. New York: Berghahn. Miner, Horace. 1956. “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.” American Anthropologist 58 (3): 503–507. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2004. The Method of Hope. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pandian, Anand. 2019. A Possible Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012. “A Day in the Cadillac: The Work of Hope in Urban Mongolia.” Social Analysis 56 (2): 1–16. Pels, Peter. 2003. “Spirits of Modernity.” In Magic and Modernity, edited by Ny Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, 241–271. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Price, David. 2019. “Counter-Lineages within the History of Anthropology.” Anthropology Today 35 (1): 12–16. Ryang, Sonia. 2002. “Chrysanthemum’s Strange Life.” Asian Anthropology 1 (1): 87–116. Smith, Christen A., Erica L. Williams, Imani A. Wadud, Whitney N.L. Pirtle, and The Cite Black Women Collective. 2021. “Cite Black Women.” Feminist Anthropology 2 (1): 10–17. Todd, Zoe. 2018. “The Decolonial Turn 2.0: The Reckoning.” Anthro{dendum}, June 15, 2018. https://anthrodendum.org/2018/06/15/the-decolonial-turn-2-0-the-reckoning/ (accessed May 5, 2022). Visweswaran, Kamala. 2010. Un/common Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wolfe, Patrick. 1999. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. London: Cassell. Zipes, Jack. 1997. “Traces of Hope: The Non-synchronicity of Ernst Bloch.” In Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan (eds), Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, 1–12. New York: Verso.

2 VERTIGINOUS OPTIMISM Optimistic Orientations in a Field of Chronic Crisis Daniel M. Knight

Optimistic Orientations in a Field of Chronic Crisis I’ll be straight with you. I’m a bit of a pessimist. There it is, no beating around the bush. Quite upfront. Not in my personal life, perhaps, where I am content enough to daydream on potential futures of blissful plenty. I can’t wait for my retirement to retreat to the mountains of northern Greece, renovate my—by then—dilapidated old stone house, sip tsipouro with my equally satisfied buddies, scour the undergrowth for fresh mushrooms…fulfill my partner’s eternal dream of raising a goat. And all this on a substantial professorial pension after a lifetime of cheering my graduate students into highly influential jobs, seeing my daughter serenely start her own family (after winning Wimbledon, of course), and maybe even writing something worth reading in my chosen genre of anthropology. “That’s optimistic!” I hear you scoff, at which point I could add that I was brought up on the hyperbole of Monty Python and I just might have once written on irony and satire (2015). So, let me qualify that opening statement: I’m a bit of a pessimist in the way I represent my ethnographic field. This has its roots in the outbreak of the global financial meltdown of 2008 and its localized implications for the people of central Greece. Having set out to conduct research on how the “traditional” mode of doing socio-economics (patronage and clientelism; see Campbell 1964) was dovetailing with the capitalist market economy to provide my Greek interlocutors with the best of both worlds—“prosperity,” as my proposed thesis title would indicate—suddenly the world came crashing down: Austerity, taxes, poverty. Anticipated futures promised since accession to the European Union in the early 1980s were abruptly foreclosed; pathways to the prosperous livelihood that had been considered a birthright as part of the European project of DOI: 10.4324/b23231-3

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modernity and Western civilization were cancelled. When the incoming prime minister, George Papandreou, “discovered” the extent of the national debt and budget deficit in October 2009, people were ejected from timelines of futural momentum based on hope, boundless potentiality, and high expectations. In what seemed like a blink of an eye, narratives turned from wedding preparations, planning foreign holidays, and investing in futures of education and mobility to talk of impending times of hunger “as in the 1940s,” foreign occupation “like the Ottomans/Germans,” and looking after the nuclear family (Knight 2015). From that moment of rupture, the so-called Greek economic crisis slowly but surely became a permanent state of existence, a chronic condition that lined everyday decision-making and orientations. It led to what I have called “vertiginous life”—existence in a state of vertigo that makes one feel dizzy, nauseous, trapped, and held captive, the sense of falling through spiralling time, being detached from former pre-crisis Self, with little sense of trajectory beyond more-of-the-same (Knight 2021). We will return to this notion later. And so it was that I entered the office of one Rebecca Bryant at the London School of Economics and Political Science sometime around 2015 to discuss the early stages of our co-authored book project, The Anthropology of the Future (2019). An enthused Rebecca rattled off all the everyday orientations we might consider for such an endeavour, proposing hope, potentiality, and expectation as primary ways that people live their futures today, pulling them toward and over thresholds and horizons, actuating the future in present practice.1 Further, Rebecca postulated that each timespace, socio-political domain, or event was marked by its own teleoaffective structure, or, put simply, a bundle of affects and relations that define an era and encourage people to collectively act in certain ways and toward particular ends. With a wide smile and a lively tone, Rebecca seemed full of optimism regarding how people imagine and strive toward their futures. I recall my immediate response: “Okay…hope, potentiality, expectation. How about apathy, exhaustion, resignation?” For I was seeing the everyday futural orientations through the eyes of people caught in the clutches of perpetual crisis, in a whirlpool of repetitive desperation and entrapment that resonated with the very worst of times past. We agreed from that day in the LSE office that I was the pessimist, and each orientation might well have a flip side. The current chapter is concerned with the forms of optimism that might be present in a field where the consequences of long-term economic austerity continue their asphyxiating hold on futural orientations. As mentioned in Anna Willow’s Introduction to this volume, when discussing optimism/pessimism, the hand of the ethnographer may be led by their own political projects, ethical concerns, methods of sieving through the ethnographic data, or even disciplinary trends. An anthropology of optimism automatically calls up visions of activism, political engagement, resistance, and solidarity. As a consequence, follow-up questions should always include: “To/against what? From whose perspective? For whom?” (Knauft 2019, 9). I, for one, still feel that despite statements to the

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contrary, structures and flows of the discipline encourage anthropologists to go looking for social suffering where there might be micro-utopias of hope, or viceversa, where activist anthropology and participant advocacy is leading, perhaps even pre-determining, ethnographic knowledge. There is no better example of this than Greece during the economic crisis. While I was writing about the destruction of social institutions, return to times past, and extractive economics, some of my colleagues pursued paths of researching left-wing activism, solidarity movements, and engaging in anarchy (e.g., Dalakoglou 2011, 2012; Cabot 2016; Rakopoulos 2016). Representing people as downtrodden and floundering in the wake of neoliberal powers went against the general flow of writing on Greeks resisting, protesting, and providing a more “positive” route out of crisis than offered by neo-colonial powers. Resonating with Sherry Ortner’s (2016) critique of anthropologies of happiness in the age of global neoliberalism, optimistic anthropology trumped its dark alternative, even in a field where the latter seemed, to me at least, to constitute the majority of everyday orientations. This is not to say that protest, resistance, and solidarity were not part of the scene for some people in Greece. Quite simply, they were not the only spaces of everyday practice (or ideology) of future actualization, and were certainly not a major part of my field on the agricultural plains of Thessaly. In the 2010s, this led to a hierarchy where only some aspects of suffering, some forms of political action, were deemed “right” for academic scholarship. David Henig and Anna Strhan (2022) do an excellent job summarizing the debates of “dark” and “good” anthropology in the work of scholars such as Ortner and Joel Robbins (2013), homing in on the somewhat messy interpretation of neoliberalism’s all-encompassing ills. For Ortner, an anthropology of suffering under the global neoliberal condition is a reflection of “the harsh and brutal dimensions of human existence, and the structural and historical conditions that produce them” (2016, 49). The anthropology of the good is, in Ortner’s eyes, a countermovement to the dark heart of neoliberal global order and associated social relations, whereas Robbins recognizes the need to appreciate culture difference and relativity in how people experience trauma, suffering, and exploitation. Henig and Strhan (2022, 6) critique Ortner’s insistence that dark anthropology reflects the real world and, pacing Heath Cabot (2019, 262), argue that the real world often indexes crisis-chasing; anthropologists pursuing the suffering subject “in crisis,” pandering to current public interests, funding schemes, and, no doubt, career advancement. Thus, neoliberal ideals of the academy are reproduced by those claiming to interrogate the impact of the neoliberal condition on subjects in crisis. While I agree that there is much reactive anthropology and that some ­academics may, quite understandably, chase funding and no doubt sensationalize suffering, for some of us crisis is the real thing to study and does not readily flag-up categories of “good.” Rather than a kneejerk change of direction,

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crisis as condition (Vigh 2008) just happens to be our field, often not by choice but by happenstance. And the ongoing consequences of crisis as sudden rupture and long-term chronic condition inevitably lead to scholarship that may be classified as “dark” as we try to best represent our field. This is no less “real” than the protest, resistance, and political (counter)movements that others choose to highlight. Optimism in central Greece in the crisis years came in microforms rather than grand statement movements, being local interpretations, in Robbins’s terms, of the fallout from neoliberal policy and crypto-colonial intervention. But these optimistic portals might not be the right kind for those seeking activism, advocacy, or a certain political stance, reflecting as they do interlocutors’ entanglement in, rather than outright resistance to, a world of neoliberal socio-economics. While I do not want to get too mixed up in this never-ending cascade of post-modernist reflexion, it does lead to the first of two analytic points of this chapter: What constitutes the right kind of optimism? Should anthropologists only be concerned with optimism that is ethically palatable and in line with recent trends toward “the good,” hope, and activism? That is an optimism, almost by definition, at odds with the structural and historical conditions of neoliberalism. Following what I see as Robbins’s intended tone, I support embracing cultural difference, not flattening human experience of neoliberalism, suffering, or for that matter optimism, but better presenting diverse possibilities of individual and collective human striving (Robbins 2013, 457; Knauft 2019, 2; Henig and Strhan 2022, 8). Through Jan Bock’s perspective on the concept of micro-utopias and Debbora Battaglia’s “breaktime,” I will present here some micro-instances of optimistic endeavours in a field of chronic crisis to show how optimism does not have to be a polemic of dark anthropology. Optimistic orientations are not solely the property of anti-neoliberal, anarchic, “happy” movements, but can be somewhat “conservative” or individual while nevertheless offering a view of how the world could be otherwise. Assuming we take these micro-utopias seriously, the second endeavour is to interrogate my recent analytic framework for studying the long-term fallout of crisis, the concept of the vertiginous (2021; Knight, Markowitz, and Frederiksen 2022). While interlocutors report experiencing a state of social vertigo in its most unwelcome guise—their disorientation of peering into the existential abyss is, it would seem, wholly undesirable, negative—in social theory, the concept of the vertiginous takes on an all more positive semblance, indexing exhilaration, joy, novelty, and future-making. From Roger Caillois’s vertigo-inducing fairground rides and Michel Serres’s turbulent Becoming, to Eelco Runia’s obligation to leap and Søren Kierkegaard’s possibility of possibility, the vertiginous is a state of optimistic potentiality and creativity. I tend to the frictitious intersection where ethnography and social theory grind together by returning to micro-utopias and breaktimes as a third way where vertiginous optimism may be found in what, I maintain, is the most pessimistic of fields.

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Ethnographic Vertigo and the Right Kind of Optimism I recently decided to frame my 15 years of field research on the social consequences of the Greek economic crisis as “vertiginous life” (Knight 2021). Social vertigo is a concept that captures how people experience intense temporal disorientation across different scales, aesthetics, and materialities. The vertiginous is indicative of epochal crisis, where people encounter a sudden rupture which gradually loses its eventedness and becomes a chronic condition—a once attention-grabbing explosive new scenario becomes the everyday norm over an elongated period. Vertigo is boundary-, scale-, and typology-defying; my concern is not with the duration or magnitude of crisis, for the vertiginous may be individual, shared, societal, or even global. It may last seconds, days, or years—indeed, it may remain partly or wholly immeasurable. I argue that certain situations and events are affectively vertiginous, laced with a sense of hyperconsiousness, stuckedness, or a constantly shuddering movement. People experience nausea, dizziness, the sense of falling or light-headedness, dissociation with former Self, déjà vu, palpitations, and breathlessness: Lifeworlds are sent careening. In Greece, the vertiginous is observable in distinct ways—through local vernaculars and narrative trends and as an atmosphere or “cloud” sweeping the nation. People talk about “feelings” and describe the textures of vertigo (“it is like…”). These utterances feed directly from a more general anxiety about social change and precarity. Here, the vertiginous, an atmosphere or aesthetic “that contains inescapable affective and emotional resonances,” or a timespace “with a certain tone of feeling” (Böhme 2017, 12) transcends easily recognizable words and phrases. Vertigo is that “something in the air,” a cluster of “free floating” intense affects, identifiable through association with a repetitive narrative trend (Lepselter 2016, 2). As such, the vertiginous can be understood as an expressive modality of seeing and making sense of a world of rupture and crisis, captivity, and entrapment. In a state of vertigo, one is confounded by the dynamics of a social situation or inner state, a sense of futural trajectory is obscured, and the lucidity of socio-historical context is obliterated in moments of acute disorientation. For the people I work with, the vertiginous is a distinctly negative state, indicating the loss of Self, an inescapable condition of constant (social and affective) sickness, and a belief that the future has been erased; the threshold to cross the horizon out of crisis is ever-receding. The concept of the vertiginous is the outcome of engaging in extensive research on a crisis context, long after the original event has attracted the attention of the world’s media, academic funding bodies, and reactionary researchers. It best frames the unfolding of immediate and chronic crisis on individual and collective lifeworlds, focusing not on utopian visions of a post-rupture state or on one social movement or domain of life. Vertiginous Life considers the multifarious ways people experience vulnerability

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and precarity in engagements with lost pasts, present circumstances, and horizons of the future. Within this context, most stories I encounter are of loss, detachment, disillusionment, and psychosocial trauma (documented at length in Knight 2021). On occasion, however, hints of optimism in individual business ventures have appeared amid crumbling worlds. The early years of financial meltdown opened windows of opportunity for small business owners to buck the trend and diversify in order to serve continuing social demands. But, as I have been told by numerous colleagues, highlighting such instances is undesirable and unhelpful since it perpetuates the neoliberal line that crisis can be overcome with a little hard work and entrepreneurial nous. This individual, business-type optimism is not the right kind of positive orientation. Let me illustrate with two short vignettes. In 2005, Stella, in her mid-30s with an eight-year-old son, took out a small loan as part of a European Union scheme offering incentives to people wanting to start up private enterprises. When the crisis hit without warning in 2009, Stella owed over 20,000 euros to various investors and family members. While many such businesses went bust, Stella quickly managed to save her travel agency by identifying an ongoing demand for unusual vacations that was linked to deeply engrained local practices of competitive consumption and social status competition. Through personal connections and a lot of hard graft, Stella rapidly transformed her business from offering exotic long-haul vacations and “cultural” visits to New York, London, and Paris to focus toward activity-based long weekends in Greece—scuba diving, abseiling, cut-price hang-gliding lessons, and adventure trekking. Her clientele still had a unique experience that fed social status and competitive consumption, but without the financial outlay. In Stella’s words, her travel agency was “hanging on, still seeing the glimmer of light” while others “broke down in the darkness without a future.” A comparative tale of diversification comes from Takis, a 45-year-old father of three who worked as a car mechanic in his privately owned garage. With the onset of the economic crisis Takis’s business was floundering since people no longer had the expendable income to customize their motors. Like a substantial number of mechanics and engineers, Takis found a lifeline working on renewable energy installations as part of a European Union–endorsed programme to encourage agriculturalists with unproductive land (since wholesalers had gone bankrupt, the haulage sector was in turmoil, and markets had crashed) to replace crops with photovoltaic panels and wind turbines on 25-year contracts. Takis found cash-in-hand secondary employment installing solar panels that allowed him “to put food on the table for the family” and “not have to sit around all day staring at the wall waiting for non-existent customers (in the garage).” Although few and far between, stories of people like Stella and Takis speak to occasional optimistic orientations in a time of intense social suffering. Both were optimistic about their chances of navigating crisis. However, to my initial surprise, when I suggested that a minority of people had found a positive pathway

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through the crisis years by way of business diversification, I was chastised by colleagues at conferences and in email exchanges since this was not deemed the right kind of opportunity and certainly nothing to be happy about. It did not represent solidarity, social cohesion, or collective resolve against the occupying Other, but rather was indicative of how the neoliberal North expected individuals to survive crises by way of business creativity and innovation. Some colleagues suggested that no Greeks were really like Stella and Takis in finding opportunity within the workings of neoliberal business, no “educated Greek” would ever recognize optimistic opportunity within conditions of structural austerity. Some went as far to say that demands for consumerist items such as holidays and cars never existed. But Stella and Takis were well aware of their engagement with the neoliberal system of entrepreneurship (Stella) and collaboration on EU programmes (Takis). They also both expressed a belief that they had discovered only shortterm solutions and that creativity would soon be required again to dodge the next bullet.2 But this self-awareness and self-declared optimism did not serve the interests of the anthropological trends of the time—it was neither indicative of dark anthropology, nor was it politically correct as an activist countermovement. Instead, I suggest Stella and Takis had found what, in the context of the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in Italy, Jan Bock has termed micro-utopias (or microtopias): short-lived moments that do not seek to change the future; their creators are content to instigate a limited social encounter. The utopian future has been replaced by a microtopian present…limited to the construction of particular pockets of social connectivity. (Bock 2016, 103–104) These supposedly unpalatable, “unethical,” forms of optimism experienced as micro-utopias directly relate to Robbins’s (2013, 457) insistence that the anthropology of good is not dialectically oppositional to dark ethnography. Instead, the stories of Stella and Takis illustrate the different possibilities of human striving, imagining a better life, and their own versions of good that is detached from wider political agendas. Their optimism is short-term, is limited, is individual, is consciously engaged with a system of global power and exploitation but nevertheless does provide a positive futural orientation through everyday practice—“a glimmer of light,” in Stella’s words. It is not to be dismissed. Although I think that “utopia” is rather a strong word which conjures imaginations of an ideal telos of a land of milk and honey, I follow Bock in invoking Davina Cooper’s work on everyday utopias as spaces which provide “glimpses of something else and other” (2014, 44).3 Cooper suggests that micro-utopias are not supposed to indicate stability and long-term change, but instead offer fleeting portals to potentially optimistic worlds. Importantly, micro-utopias are connected to concrete circumstances of the here-and-now; they are “neither

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temporal nor spatial islands. Their proximity to mainstream life is a defining feature of their existence, of what they are capable of achieving as well as the constraints under which they operate” (2014, 221f).4 The concrete circumstances for Stella and Takis are of austerity and potential bankruptcy, a struggle to provide for the nuclear family, and a fear of return to the hardship of times past. Their glimpses of optimism are to be found in engaging with existing social and historical structures enforced by the European Commission, International Monetary Fund, and European Central Bank (the so-called Troika). Their optimism is no less real than that found in solidarity and protest movements, nor is it more or less ethnographically “desirable” (although some might call it cruel in a Berlantian sense but, again, that would seem to be an analytical judgement).5 Cooper suggests that operating within existing structures relocates the utopian from the realm of futural imagination and speculation into the arena of present possibilities (cf. Manley 2019). This, she insists, increases the chances of widerscale actualization: It is the first small step toward something else, an otherwise. Commenting on Cooper’s thesis, Bock aptly observes that The prospects they (micro-utopias) might offer to shape a different kind of reality beyond the defined sites of engagement are neglected by those who establish and maintain those spaces: “everyday utopias assert the importance of maintaining and sustaining what is, rendering the pursuit of further change secondary to securing and protecting existing forms of innovative practice.” (Bock 2016, 105, original emphasis) Optimism is thus relocated from the domain of radical change to everyday action, with concrete micro-utopias being bubbles where people consciously play within existing socio-historical and politico-economic structures to protect what is, but without giving up their determination to actualize possibilities of the future otherwise. Optimism as orientation thus escapes oppositional categories of dark and good and destabilizes political agendas polarized as radical and conservative. Recently, I returned to pages of ethnographic material and an archive of critique on the right kind of optimism when discussing with colleagues whether the vertiginous was uniquely a condition of crisis or if it could be found in other social contexts (Knight, Markowitz, and Frederiksen 2022). I was encouraged to think about instances in social theory where the vertiginous indexed “lightheadedness,” “being sucked up in jubilation,” “feeling high,” and in “an excited state of hyper-arousal.” With ethnographic examples of micro-utopias, could the vertiginous life that I describe as a feeling of free-falling, anxious captivity, loss of Self, and incessant nausea actually be turned on its head to account for vertiginous moments of exhilaration and happiness? Was the vertiginous as discussed in the context of Greece actually more multi-layered than as presented in

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Vertiginous Life? I have taken up this challenge here by way of thinking through some instances where vertigo is encountered in the work of Michel Serres and Roger Caillois, and, briefly, where dizziness and nausea are explored by Søren Kierkegaard. Can vertiginous optimism be located in the ethnographic record beyond the business diversification discussed above? Are there micro-utopias of pleasure that provide “breaktime” trajectories (Battaglia 2022) from the crisis condition?

The Vertiginous in Social Theory Vertigo lurks in the background noise of much philosophical musing on event, where the individual meets the chaos of the world; in Ernesto de Martino (anguish and presence), Søren Kierkegaard (dizziness, anxiety, possibility), Marcel Proust (giddiness), Eelco Runia (vertiginous leaps), Jean-Paul Sartre (nausea), and Michel Serres (turbulence, surges), for starters. Much philosophical prose features a precipice or edge, often a high cliff, where people experience the urge to create new history by throwing themselves into the whirlpool of the abyss on the other side. As well as the edge being a site of symbolic (in) decisiveness, one may be intoxicated by the boundary—becoming swept up in a hurricane, by the twisting trajectories of a cyclone, being forcibly squeezed to the point of ejection, or becoming light-headed by a world in excitable spasm (Caillois, 2001, 23). In social theory, the vertiginous is at the precipice of creativity, audacity, and the creation of novel histories/futures. It almost becomes an obligation for people to embrace vertigo, to “take the plunge,” for the greater good of humanity (e.g., Runia 2010). Vertigo is an exhilarating condition, although not without its risks. What beams strongly through philosophies of the vertiginous is that vertigo is a positive state of creativity that can be enjoyable, even fun. The optimist embraces the vertiginous: A state of being in vertigo can be optimistic.6 In Caillois’s typology of gaming, the deliberate pursuit of vertigo inflicts “a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.” There is a spasm, seizure, or shock which shreds reality (2001, 23–24). When promoting the pleasures of being in vertigo, both Caillois and later Michel Serres talk of being projected into space, citing gravity-defying pastimes such as jumping and trampolining, playground games of rapid rotation, waltzing, and sailing the high seas. Lovemaking. “Have you forgotten the delightful pleasures of the merry-go-round, or the swing,” Serres asks, “where some return ‘beaming with delight’ while others are seen ‘vomiting forth their seasickness?’” (Serres 2012, 126–127). For Serres, the turbulence of life should be wholeheartedly embraced—being thrown around in space and time allows for unexpected branches, trajectories, and connections to emerge (Serres 2020; Bandak and Knight forthcoming). We might say that Stella and Takis have found new branches in the midst of a cataclysmic event owing to their audacity to think with the crisis condition, to connect their own everyday

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concerns with the unstable environment. Optimism is situated amid the orientations people find to navigate the turbulence of society and history. Vertigo may be of the moral order, Caillois suggests—the “desire for disorder and destruction”—which is usually suppressed (2001, 24). This can be readily located in the lyrics of punk and metal music, where mayhem and chaos, spinning worlds and dizziness, are desired and glorified. Or, similarly, in the psychedelic highs sought in genres of rave and trance. The pursuit of such vertiginous pleasure, Caillois and Serres insist, is a mark of audacity and invention: “Temporary destruction of equilibrium” provoking “an abdication of conscience” (Caillois 2001, 44). To step over the cliff edge, to allow oneself to “unravel,” is to embrace possibility; “the elation of inventive discovery” (Serres 2012, 138). Does [vertigo] prevent us from learning or, on the contrary, does it accompany us, an ancient witness to our very first straightening up?…[D]o we experience the distress of the spins so as to get beyond it, after having severely experienced it, and to finally understand that the body undergoes it as an obstacle and makes use of it as a passage?…Do we owe our best balance to these whirlwinds or the vertical circle to these vortices? (Serres 2012, 126–127) One small step over the edge could create new history, new trajectories, new connections. Denying vertigo confines us to a stuckedness in familiar formats of society and history. Serres (2014) sees endless cyclical repetition if we do not learn from vertiginous surges. No emergent novelty. Serres: [E]very body honestly plunged into authentic life and into direct and courageous learning receives from them a force equivalent to this body directed upward, vertical, toward discovery. Amid the spins and the vertigo, we never find anything but while naked. Lifted by joy. (2012, 151) If the crisis is survived, Serres suggests, the body learns and takes an entirely different path when later faced with the same scenario. Instead of returning to its earlier state, which would “imply a loop-like return to the original course leading to crisis” (2014, xii), the organism remodels itself and finds a new route through a new connection or hyphen—resonating with Stella and Takis, Serres notes this remodelling as an innovation, secondary pathway, or glimmer of optimistic light. A critical event “propels the body either towards death or to something new it is forced to invent” (2014, xii). The analogy of the body encountering crisis can be scaled in many directions to tell us more about life in the contemporary world, whether the crisis is economic, medical, climatic, individual, corporeal, or planetary. A return backwards, or to remain stationary, is simply no good—the problem must be challenged head-on, and we must learn from previous routes.

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A “recovery” to the previous status quo would lead us straight back to crisis, as in a cycle. We have to come up with something new, to delight in porous movement across concepts, and accept parasitic and symbiotic collaborations. “Many fear the obligation to invent,” Serres reasons, “[but] I have the audacity to delight in it” (2014, xiii). Although from a different corner of social theory, Søren Kierkegaard also attributes the dizzying effects of vertigo to the obligation to invent and identifies the pedagogical manifestations of anxiety to be founded in freedom of choice. The vertiginous moment is one of possibilities, insists Kierkegaard. Vertigo is caused by the realisation of the possibility of possibility. He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when…freedom looks down into its own possibility.…Freedom succumbs to dizziness. (1980, 61) The possible creativity of vertigo depends on how the condition is navigated and upon educating the Self to find originality on the frontier of destruction. The terrifying assaults of anxiety are fraught with danger, but can also awaken the senses to potentiality beyond; vertigo can be both destructive and generative if navigated appropriately and only in certain intersubjective interactions. (Knight 2021, 12–13). Serres’s and Kierkegaard’s talk of innovation, novelty, and learning from crisis might come across to some as an endorsement of neoliberal pedagogy. It evokes learning to cope, diversify, and navigate precarious situations and to make your own future. Other readers may identify the portals where Stella and Takis have navigated the cliff-edge of destruction by finding possibilities despite the terrifying assaults of chronic crisis. Poignantly, Caillois notes that vertiginous pleasure is usually temporary, fleeting, and he offers caution in advocating the potential benefits of the vertiginous, maintaining that among pathways to pleasure, the vertiginous can lead to a dangerous vicious circle, life inside the whirlpool, clawing away at body and mind, from where there is only erosion, no escape (Caillois 2001, 141; Knight 2021, 16). In Greece, the audacious pursuit of vertiginous pleasure may not be as dramatic as fairground rides and punk mayhem. Only on occasion do small gateways emerge indicating novelty and sublime connection, passage toward a future otherwise. But this does not make them any less real in their constitution of the ethnographic record. Dimitris, a 32-year-old civil servant, says that he has found excitement in very small things of beauty,

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I had not noticed beauty for ten years, until I saw a wild purple flower beside my greenhouse last spring (2018)…there must have been flowers there before, but the sickness was too all-consuming…From then on, my senses spiralled. I started tuning in to the music on the radio at work. The radio was always on, but now I could hear the songs. I noticed a new shop open in town, a small success. My senses came alive, I got quite swept away in my excitement with these new experiences, I began to seek out the light, with bated breath. The purple flower opened a cavern of micro-utopias for Dimitris as one optimistic experience led to another and, in a cascade effect, his sensorial world came alive again. The background noise7 of crisis and foreclosure, in a Serresian sense, no longer surged forth to stifle, swamp, and drown Dimitris’s senses. At the eye of the vertiginous whirlpool he found a vortex of calmness and beauty. Dimitris did not take a stance of protest or resistance, nor did he join a collective countermovement of some radical form. Instead, Dimitris’s optimism absorbed him by way of the senses—sights, smells, and sounds that emerged from the background noise of crisis to propel him toward a different texture of existence. A comparable micro-utopia was shared with me one Sunday morning in the spring of 2016, when a steady stream of some 30 bicycles with riders adorned in all colours of the rainbow passed outside my home on the central plains of Greece. Never in my years of research in the region had I witnessed such a spectacle. On further enquiry, it turned out that this was an outing of the recently founded cycling club. I was reliably informed that the political situation of 2015, which included an infamous referendum on a new bailout plan (where the leftwing Syriza government ignored the result of the vote and signed up to a new Troika funding package anyhow), had led people to search for forms of escapism in their everyday activities. One such outlet was the now booming cycling club. With new infrastructure for a bike-friendly town centre and the expense of running a car causing more people to choose two wheels, it seemed a natural progression for cycling to also become a leisure pursuit. In later research on the emergence of new, or at the time extremely rare, hobby clubs, people would often cite the need for a “distraction” or “escape” from the captivity of the crisis environment that engulfed their lives. Cycling, I was told, helped people feel at one with the elements; wind in the hair, experiencing sights and smells that were lost in the usual rat race. What had started as a Sunday afternoon ride for five friends had quickly turned into a local craze. Being swept along on two wheels was the novel route for people to escape the everyday pessimism of the crisis cyclone. The cycling club was creative and even audacious within the longstanding and relatively rigid culture of leisure in the region. Once again, the micro-utopia of the bicycle club and Dimitris’s sensorial awakening are neither in the register of dark anthropology, in repeating and

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sustaining a neoliberal system, nor do they represent stories of radical protest. They are instead fleeting yet concrete micro-utopias located in everyday action that in their duration provide people with an optimistic orientation. These timespaces of escapism resonate with what Debbora Battaglia (2022) frames as “breaktimes.” Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, Battaglia illustrates how “positive” vertigo can provide a break from the doom and gloom of a world in crisis—for her, spontaneous urban play in New York City, which includes poetry recitals and laundry cart rides. These optimistic portals to the otherwise sweep people up from the relentless humdrum of crisis as “social antigravity” where a “lightness of being can feel essential to survival of a sense of aliveness.” The breaktime constitutes a form of “active forgetting” that does not change the existing structure on any grand scale, but momentarily shifts the tempos and orientations of everyday life (Battaglia 2022). As the rupturing event of economic crisis has slowly merged into a chronic condition, for most people the vertiginous continues to index nausea, dizziness, palpitations, and loss of Self in their most unwelcome guise. Being tossed and turned, slung and spun, accentuates vulnerability, anguish, and existential questions. Yet, there are occasions where the vertiginous provides optimistic orientations, momentary breaktimes from the crisis environment. These micro-utopias may not radically alter the structural conditions, but do prove personally and socially meaningful. Both Dimitris and the bicycle club have a focus on senses as the route to imagining an optimistic otherwise. Like Caillois’s fairground rides or Battaglia’s breaktimes, they represent temporary disruptions of the social status quo. Dimitris’s reengagement with the natural world has provided him with new momentum to press on into the future with a perspective of guarded optimism. At the cycling club, people experience escapism. An audacious new pursuit leads to a sense of being alive again, if only through active forgetting. For some social commentators, this might not be deemed enough in terms of changing the ills of the world, but the individuals involved are creating new history, (re)writing their lifestories. They are working in concrete ways to explore new possibilities that provide a life in a downward spiral with a micro-optimistic orientation.

Conclusion Although they may be perceived as conservative or individualistic from the perspective of activism or radical politics, micro-utopias are windows of optimism if we take optimism to be a plural concept with each version including unique bundles of relations and trajectories. To quote Willow’s Introduction to this volume, the optimism found in micro-utopias represents “compelling alternatives to the destructive and dissatisfying ways of life now widely normalized within industrial societies” in that they open windows of satisfaction and escapism within their spatiotemporal limits.

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I set out two tasks in this chapter: To interrogate the right kind of optimism (and ask who is to judge the hierarchy of optimism) and to present how small spaces of optimism can be identified even in the most pessimistic of fields. Optimism in a fieldsite of chronic crisis can be located as micro-utopias that provide optimistic orientations on how the world might be otherwise. Concrete but fleeting, the micro-utopias work within existing social and political structures without necessarily endorsing them. These forms of “locally constructed… optimism” (Knauft 2019, 4) do not endorse activist anthropology or a radical restructuring of socio-politics, but allow an insight into individual and collective human responses within as well as against neoliberalism—here a decade of internationally imposed austerity (Henig and Strhan 2022, 9). Micro-utopias may not immediately shift the collective status quo or be politically palatable, but they are socially meaningful timespaces where optimistic orientations are formed that provide momentum toward a future otherwise. They may be individual, temporary, “conservative,” or based on intangibilities such as the senses, but all offer an excursion to a better life. In central Greece, the crisis-chasing is long over. In the eyes of the academy, the field has settled down. The anthropological take on the media fanfare led to scholars flooding the region, promoting the sublime, and bowing to the fetishized demands of funders. For those working in places like Greece before and after explosive “crises,” the concern is to account for what happens when it all goes quiet, when most commentators have left town. In my experience, people simply want to get on with their lives as best they can, to navigate and find pathways through the existing structures while searching for momentum toward bettering their lives. They strive to hold down jobs, bring up children, pay their bills, and engage in the rhythms of day-to-day existence. Imagining the future involves creating micro-utopias where optimistic orientations flourish as “breaktimes”—creative and novel activities, decisions, and diversions that allow them to imagine how the world might be otherwise. These are not grand in spatial or temporal scale. Many focus on the individual. Nevertheless, they are creative and audacious in their own right. For my interlocutors, micro-utopias offer optimistic orientations to the future without pretence to grand narratives of radical change, or by playing into stereotypes of the suffering subject that have long been the domain of dark anthropology. They add to the polychromatic picture of optimism as orientation in its plurality and ask us to reassess the ethical stances of both researcher and subject.

Notes 1 Optimism can be a general orientation with an undetermined telos, as with “hopefulness.” For a discussion of the orientations of hope and hopefulness and their relative specific/general activity timespaces, see Bryant and Knight (2019, chapter 5).

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2 Entrepreneurism and opportunity in contexts of chronic crisis have long been topics of anthropological interest in Africa (e.g., MacGaffey 1987; Clough 2014). In what is perhaps indicative of the double standards of the discipline, here the constant need for creative resourcefulness is seen as something to be praised, even away from radical politicization. 3 For a recent review of work on utopia, see Manley (2021) and for an excellent ethnographic engagement with the theme in the context of the Scottish independence movement, see Manley (2022). 4 Micro-utopias are what we might call teleoaffective activity timespaces (Bryant and Knight 2019). 5 This is akin to how Angelique Haugerud’s (2013) satirical “Billionaires” seek to highlight problems with social welfare, poverty, and the increasing income gap in the United States by engaging with existing political and economic systems rather than striving to overthrow and replace current structures. 6 Part of this section appeared online in the Anthropological Theory Commons Debate collection ‘The Vertiginous: Temporalities and Affects of Social Vertigo’ (2022). The author maintains the copyrights. 7 On background noise, see Serres 1995, Serres and Latour 1995.

References Bandak, Andreas, and Daniel M. Knight, eds. Forthcoming. Porous Becomings: Anthropological Engagements with Michel Serres. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Battaglia, Debbora. 2022. “Breaktime.” In The Vertiginous: Temporalities and Affects of Social Vertigo, edited by Daniel M. Knight, Martin Demant Frederiksen, and Dafna ShirVertesh. Anthropological Theory Commons (accessed 10 July 2022). Bock, Jan Jonathan. 2016. “Approaching Utopia Pragmatically: Artistic Spaces and Community-Making in Post-Earthquake L’Aquila.” Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia 5 (1): 97–115. Böhme, Gernot. 2017. The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, translated by Jean-Paul Thibaud. London: Routledge. Bryant, Rebecca, and Daniel M. Knight. 2019. The Anthropology of the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cabot, Heath. 2016. “Contagious Solidarity: Reconfiguring Care and Citizenship in Greece’s Social Clinics.” Social Anthropology 24 (2): 152–166. Cabot, Heath. 2019. “The Business of Anthropology and the European Refugee Regime.” American Ethnologist 46 (3): 261–275. Caillois, Roger. 2001. Man, Play and Games. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Campbell, John. 1964. Honour, Family and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clough, Paul. 2014. Morality and Economic Growth in Rural West Africa: Indigenous Accumulation in Hausaland. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Cooper, Davina. 2014. Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dalakoglou, Dimitris. 2011. “Crisis and Revolt in Europe.” Anthropology News 52 (9): 36. Dalakoglou, Dimitris. 2012. “Beyond Spontaneity: Crisis, Violence and Collective Action in Athens.” City 16 (5): 535–545. Haugerud, Angelique. 2013. No Billionaire Left Behind: Satirical Activism in America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Pres.

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Henig, David, and Anna Strhan. 2022. “Introduction: The Good between Social Theory and Philosophy.” In Where is the Good in the World? Ethical Life Between Social Theory and Philosophy, edited by David Henig, Anna Strhan, and Joel Robbins, 1–32. New York: Berghahn. Pp. 1–32. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1980. Th e Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in the View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin. New York: Liveright. Knauft, Bruce. 2019. “Good Anthropology in Dark Times: Critical Appraisal and Ethnographic Application.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 30 (1): 3–17. Knight, Daniel M. 2015. History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece. New York: Palgrave. Knight, Daniel M. 2021. Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen. New York: Berghahn. Knight, Daniel M., Fran Markowitz, and Martin Frederiksen. 2022. “The Vertiginous: Modes and Moods.” In The Vertiginous: Temporalities and Affects of Social Vertigo, edited by Daniel M. Knight, Fran Markowitz, and Martin Frederiksen. Anthropological Theory Commons (accessed 10 July 2022). Lepselter, Susan. 2016. The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. MacGaffey, Janet. 1987. Entrepreneurs and Parasites: The Struggle for Indigenous Capitalism in Zaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manley, Gabriela. 2019. “Scotland’s Post-Referenda Futures.” Anthropology Today 35 (4): 13–17. Manley, Gabriela. 2021. “Utopia.” In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, edited by Vlad Petre Glăveanu. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Pp. 1–7. Manley, Gabriela. 2022. “Reimagining the Enlightenment: Alternate Timelines and Utopian Futures in the Scottish Independence Movement.” History and Anthropology. DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2022.2056167 (accessed 11 July 2022). Ortner, Sherry. 2016. “Dark Anthropology and its Others: Theory Since the Eighties.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47–73. Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2016. “Solidarity: The Egalitarian Tensions of a Bridge Concept.” Social Anthropology 24 (2): 142–151. Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (3): 447–462. Runia, Eelco. 2010. “Into Cleanness Leaping: The Vertiginous Urge to Commit History.” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 49 (1): 1–20. Serres, Michel. 1995. Genesis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Serres, Michel. 2012. Variations on the Body. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. Serres, Michel. 2014. Times of Crisis: What the Financial Crisis Revealed and How to Reinvent our Lives and Future. London: Bloomsbury. Serres, Michel. 2020. Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent. London: Bloomsbury. Serres, Michel, and Bruno Latour. 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Vigh, Henrik. 2008. “Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline.” Ethnos 73 (1): 5–24.

3 “MOVING ON AND MOVING UP” Productive Angles of Exploring Optimism Kelly A. Yotebieng

Perspective Is Everything: On How We Choose to See the World We will not find what we are not looking for. For those of us who have read anything in the field of anthropology, we have probably found that optimism is not a key part of most of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks on our reading lists. Furthermore, anyone listening to side conversations during one of our conferences or in the hallways of our departments will likely overhear jaded or cynical conversations. This is not a critique, per se. I am guilty of this too, and for many of us, this jaded cynicism is an effect of bearing witness (through personal experience or vicariously) to extreme inequality and suffering. Hence, optimism is not given much consideration in the various frameworks and methods that anthropologists use. However, by way of omission, we forget to ask important questions about hope and optimism. We fail to look for it in our participant observation or while analyzing our data. We go in expecting, and then unsurprisingly finding, a grim reality, documenting it in rich detail through our thick descriptions, and then being asked by critics and sometimes research participants themselves, questions like, “What is the point of all of this? You have explained the situation and we get that there is a lot of suffering out there, but now what?” As the critics of academic research get louder, for our own survival we can benefit enormously by pondering these questions. This includes thinking about what we could do differently to earn our “situated usefulness” (Yotebieng 2020). In this chapter, I reflect on my 20 years of professional experience as a practicing anthropologist, engaging the ways in which I have (sometimes without knowing it) included optimism in my theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches as a way of looking for and understanding practical actions of hope DOI: 10.4324/b23231-4

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(see also Widener and Choate, this volume). I argue that there is enormous potential to underline the utility of the knowledge we generate by opening our eyes, perspectives, and minds to optimism. We can do this in part by pulling on learnings from anthropologies of the future (Collins 2007; Appadurai 2013; Bryant and Knight 2019). One’s approach and perspective shape the way that person sees the world, similar to the glass half empty or half full adage. I have worked as a practicing anthropologist for nearly two decades, and while I fundamentally agree that it is important to acknowledge the structures and circumstances standing in people’s way and inflicting suffering, it is also important to understand how optimism, as practical action driven by hope, represents people’s agency to both resist unfavorable circumstances and work toward articulating and realizing alternative visions of what their futures can and should look like. Since 2003 I have been working as an applied medical anthropologist, starting with a foray into applied medical anthropology through a field school with the University of South Florida in Costa Rica, then catapulting into a Master’s of Public Health, where I worked under an applied medical anthropologist, and finally, landing in over a decade of living and working in humanitarian contexts in Francophone Central Africa with various international partners. This work focused primarily on bridging health disparities in their many forms, with a lens on gender, refugees, and displaced persons, and persons living with disabilities. Unsurprisingly, much of the research on these geographic and programmatic areas was grim, yet the work we were doing was striving in some way to alleviate human suffering. It was imbued with optimism by its very “raison d’être” in thinking that we could really make any difference at all. Yet, while I agree there are many critiques to be made of international humanitarian aid and global health, I found that even research on the various efforts of organizations to do anything to alleviate human suffering was also often highly cynical and pessimistic. I came back to do my doctorate in Cultural Anthropology with this ­experience—and a million questions—under my belt. I also returned to academia with the optimistic plan of taking my PhD and returning to applied work, which is exactly what I did. As a mother, I am always telling my children to look at the world with optimism and curiosity, as these tend to be productive approaches to any roadblock or issue. Similarly, I found that many of the mothers I worked with over the course of my fieldwork focused on their children’s futures, sometimes even justifying suffering in the present as “worth it” if it led toward a more optimistic end. Youth also, even in the most challenging circumstances, were bursting with hopeful visions of different versions of the future that dramatically veered from their current lives. Anthropological research frameworks and approaches imbued with optimism have the power to affect our moods and emotions and drive every decision we make, both us and our research participants. Indeed, research has shown that many of our most powerful and transformative emotions are products

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of optimistic worldviews and approaches (Brown 2021). For this reason, optimism and hope are also productive approaches to our research (Robbins 2013).

Forcing Ourselves to See the World Differently Let us be honest, many of us were drawn to the social sciences because of a certain impatience with the injustices we experience directly or observe around us, as eloquently underlined in the Introduction to this volume. However, though it was the pain and injustice of social suffering that drew us in, I argue that focusing only on this suffering can be limiting and counterproductive. Cynicism can be pervasive, affecting researchers and our research participants as well as those that consume our research. One example that I observed over the course of my research and fieldwork is how the focus on a particular form of suffering can change the way our research participants see themselves. This can inadvertently serve to strip them of their dignity and humanity. I observed that many people I worked with defined themselves by the very thing that is oppressing them as a way to demonstrate their worthiness for something (eligibility for a service, to be part of a research project, etc.). In initial introductions they often introduce themselves like “I am Annette, and I am HIV positive” rather than “My name is Annette, and I am a mother, an aspiring lawyer, and a community activist for HIV prevention and access to universal treatment” (this is a real example using a pseudonym of how a research participant introduced herself versus how over time I observed her). Rather than labeling people as suffering subjects, an anthropology of optimism shifts the lens and focus on what could be and what people are working toward. If we are not careful, focusing solely on suffering could serve to further strip those we research of their other socio-cultural human qualities as they become to be attached to an identity of suffering (e.g., HIV positive, survivor of gender-based violence, survivor of torture, diabetic) (Yotebieng 2020). I would be an enormous hypocrite if I said we should stop paying attention to the various forms of suffering in the world altogether. On the contrary, I argue that we should try to understand and document suffering—and the injustices that underlie and result from it—in a way that leads to something other than detailed descriptions of the problem and its root causes. Using an optimistic approach in our research can have profound effects of identifying emic (or insider) visions of a different future and mapping out paths on how to get there. This shift can help us to go beyond identifying the causes and consequences of suffering to illuminating the alternative futures that our research participants want. We do not need to take radically dichotomous approaches of choosing either social suffering or optimism; we can find ways to bridge them together through our theoretical approaches, conceptual frameworks, and methods. After all, optimism is all around us; it is just that with its omission from our theoretical frameworks, we tend to overlook it.

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I first tapped into optimism in my research while jewelry shopping during a field visit to Mozambique in 2004. As a young humanitarian, prior to arriving in the vibrant city of Maputo, I read as much as I could about the long and bloody civil war that had recently ended in Mozambique. In turn, I boarded my flight and disembarked with every expectation of seeing suffering and hopelessness all around me. Of course, I did find this, especially as I was looking for it. However, I also could not escape the beauty of the country, the music, the food, and the fact that the country and its people were moving forward and less focused on the war than some of us humanitarians and researchers. On one of my free afternoons before I left, I decided to go to the local market to see if there was anything I could take with me as a souvenir. There, I had an “ah-ha” moment that would forever push me toward taking a different angle in my work from a man who was taking an optimistic angle in his work, an artist. In the middle of the crowded market, bursting with colored fabric, dried fish, makeshift thrift shops, and basically any necessity that you could imagine, I found a quiet man named Bernard (a pseudonym) sitting at a table full of artistic objects in front of a large sculpture of a woman holding a basket and looking up to the sky. The sculpture caught my eye, though it was certainly out of my price range and would be hard to get on an airplane. What captivated me most about the sculpture was the story behind it. I stood in front of the table and asked Bernard if he was the artist who had made all of the pieces surrounding him. He looked up at me with an enormous smile that showed off the two long dimples on both sides of his face and affirmed that he was “the magician who transformed materials” into what I was seeing in front of me. Bernard then went on to tell me that this art represented what he referred to as “moving on and moving up.” I asked him what he meant by that, and he started to show me different coils and twisted metal that served as the main base material within each of his pieces of work. He explained to me that all of this metal came from a local nonprofit that was working to remove unexploded ordinance from buried landmines in the ground. These landmines were obviously planted with malicious intent during Mozambique’s long civil war. That war was now over, and once the landmines were fully disarmed, the metal from this unexploded ordinance was sold at low prices. Bernard was taking advantage of that to use this unexploded ordinance originally destined for destruction as materials of construction in his art. Bernard told me he was transforming, in his hands, the gruesome potential of these materials, to something beautiful that could shed Mozambique in an entirely different light. I was so moved by this story that I bought a few pieces of jewelry from him, and to this day, nearly 20 years later, I am still telling his story. I wonder if he knows how profoundly he marked me and my subsequent approach to my work. I spent the next several decades continuing to work in the humanitarian space, addressing devastating issues such as gender-based violence, stark health disparities, forced migration, and neglected tropical diseases that leave those affected by

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them with lifelong disabilities that hinder their quality of life. While working on questions related to gender-based violence, this focus on optimism led me to shift my focus from documenting the ways in which gender-based violence manifests and is justified across contexts to seeing the survivors as people who wanted to put an incident or long series of incidents behind them and build something better for themselves. This led to programs focused on supporting survivors to access the various forms of capital and structures they needed to move their lives forward, while also addressing preconceived ideas, stereotypes, and stigmas placed on women who survived gender-based violence that often blames them (rather than the perpetrator) for what happened to them. I recently shifted gears to apply my many years of humanitarian and gender expertise to a more or less new area for me, neglected tropical diseases. One of the things that drew me to this work, and I am sure drives a lot of donors toward it, is the optimism in our language around these diseases, which cause early death and severe disability in some of the world’s poorest countries, with women often bearing the brunt of higher potential of infection and lower access to prevention and treatment. However, despite the gravity of the diseases themselves and the socio-cultural obstacles toward reaching everyone, there exist simple and cost-effective solutions to prevent these neglected tropical diseases. Furthermore, with these approaches and enough investment, there truly is a possibility of elimination of these conditions. I was impressed at how this optimistic language around what we were doing led to an incredibly dynamic, engaged, and passionate set of people working toward the goal of challenging the very continued existence of these conditions. In this way, optimism very clearly has led to concerted actions and efforts. In other words, this is another example of how optimism is productive. As I work to better understand grim topics rooted in structural violence and social suffering, every day I ask myself what I can do about the issues I am focusing on professionally, and my mind often wanders back to the art market. Perhaps the answers lie in tapping into optimism to ask new questions of myself and those I work with: What would a world without Issue X look like? What does a better life look like? And what are the obstacles and opportunities in getting there? I have always been uncomfortable with the practice of research for research’s sake, with no links to some sort of action. Therefore, I chose the path of an applied career. However, it is increasingly evident that research that only focuses on suffering can be less useful and harder for practitioners to translate into action. In fact, I found that even many of the practitioners I work with avoid reading a lot of new social science research because they find it too grim and problem focused, rather than productive and solution focused. Wilkinson and Kleinman (2016) underline the need to act on the applied implications and potential of our work. From making art out of unexploded ordinance to understanding what drives the clandestine immigration that leads to opportunities for potentially exponentially better lives (and finding safer ways for persons engaging

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in risky border crossings to pursue their goals), to leveraging resources toward eliminating diseases that primarily affect some of the world’s most marginalized, optimism provides a productive angle to address grim topics while underscoring dignity and focusing on human beings and their potential rather than simply their hardships and circumstances.

Theoretical Implications: Why Thinking about Optimism Is Important We all want to be useful, right? And even if not internally driven toward usefulness, the increasingly difficult funding environment and the heightened volume of voices critiquing academic research means we should at least think about it. Not to mention the fact that those of us who have worked in the realm of social suffering know very well that our research participants also question the usefulness of our work, either implicitly or explicitly. Rather than brushing this aside, I have argued elsewhere that we should take very seriously how we can be useful in understanding the power dynamics in our relationships and what is within our power to do, or our “situated usefulness” (Yotebieng 2020). Optimism is a productive angle that we can include in our conceptual frameworks that pushes us, as researchers or practitioners, from the stance of a patronizing “poor them” to a “from your point of view, what should be different and how does this happen?” This shift underlines the humanity, agency, and dignity of the persons we are working with rather than boiling people down to their circumstances and suffering in a way that only may be useful to create a dehumanizing pity of our research participants (Brown 2021). In turn, optimism can better serve to challenge and disrupt the structures standing in people’s way. One way we can expand our theoretical lens and conceptual frameworks is to identify the ways in which optimism may drive behavior by linking what people say with what they do. For example, in studying health risk behavior, we may realize that when a woman talks about making sacrifices to ensure that she has enough money to support her child’s education, this may mean engaging in risky ways of making money or finding savings by cutting back on her essential medicines or food for herself. Understanding the reason why she is doing these things could help inform programs aiming at decreasing a particularly risky behavior by finding ways to support her in sending her child to school. We can also include questions related to hope, and the ways in which this drives optimism in our interviews and discussions with research participants. For example, rather than just asking our research participants about their suffering, we can add questions to ask them what a world without that suffering could look like and digging into what feasibly would need to change in their current daily life to make that alternative future seem more possible. In fact, including these components in our theoretical and conceptual frameworks pushes us to think very seriously about what it is that people want, rather than etic (or outsider) versions of a better life

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defined by donors or implementing agencies. These descriptions and responses also help us to understand what obstacles stand in the way or opportunities present themselves that may influence how optimistic someone is about achieving a particular objective related to this better future. I posit that this shift from a particular form of suffering to optimism as a theoretical approach can underline the humanity and dignity of our research participants. As explained earlier, over the course of my applied research career, I found that my research participants began to categorize themselves by the labels given to them by the theoretical or conceptual frameworks we were using, introducing themselves with adjectives such as “chronically ill,” “a person living with HIV,” an “orphan or vulnerable child,” among others (Yotebieng 2020). By placing such enormous emphasis on forms of suffering themselves, we are forcing our research or program participants to prove their worth by showing how much they have suffered, or what Fassin (2009) refers to as bio-legitimacy, where a person has to use a particular health condition to be deemed eligible for things like access to vocational support programs or legal status in the country s/he resides. Of course, this theoretical shift has important methodological implications too.

Methodological Implications: How This Changes What We Do Without optimism, are we providing fuel to feed the fire of critiques who ask what is the point of anthropologists even doing our work? Why should we be spending taxpayer dollars just to document everything wrong with the world? Understanding suffering is critical, but framing it from a productive angle of optimism can help us to bridge our research to the “then what?” that we can, should, and will be asked of our students, colleagues, friends, research participants, and critics. This shift has important implications for the ways in which we design our research methodologies and questionnaires. Including optimism within our theoretical approaches and conceptual frameworks prevents us from focusing on only the suffering of the now and the reasons why this suffering is happening. At the same time, it also forces us to focus on agency and the future. We can ask questions about aspirations and desired futures as a way to help design new programs that are based on emic visions of a better life, and both identify and understand the obstacles that may lie in the way. People are so much more than a list of problems that they are facing, and complicating our methodological approaches to ask more about optimism and the future underpins this while giving us concrete suggestions and pictures of a better world (Ferguson 2010; Hage 2016). As anthropologists who often catalog hours and hours of people’s stories, we really owe this to the world, our research participants, and people living in similar circumstances elsewhere. Indeed, a future-oriented shift toward optimism and linked actions to achieve better futures allows researchers, practitioners, and research participants to work together toward solutions, thus challenging a problematic status quo.

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Optimism as Fuel for Advocacy I am a strong believer that different people have different roles in advocacy. You do not need to be an advocate to contribute to advocacy. Frankly, with the concise punch lines and bulleted lists often needed for effective advocacy, the longer academic articles, chapters, and books authored by anthropologists are insufficient to use without tweaking them toward this end. However, even if we are not going to engage in advocacy directly, the work that we produce can serve as important material for advocates to use and adapt to make an empirical case toward change. This is especially true when our research offers concrete solutions, steps, or ideas. By including optimism as an angle and engaging it in our conceptual frameworks and research methodologies, we can do just this! As anthropologists, we can produce some of the knowledge and research that advocates use in order to do make compelling cases. In my work on humanitarian and global health issues, much of our research and many of our programs were focused on identifying various forms of suffering and finding ways to address it. However, we risk relying on overly etic perspectives of solutions to address this suffering if we are not careful. Indeed, outsider solutions are often used, and while well intentioned, can lead to programs falling flat on their faces (Cernea and Maldonado 2018). Advocates can avoid proposing outsider solutions in pushing their agendas toward fairness and equality forward if they are relying on research that builds more respectful relationships between researchers, practitioners, and research or program participants by allowing emic solutions to be proposed. Similarly, in an increasingly limited funding environment, programs that focus on clearly building a better world with optimistic visions to do things like, “eliminate” debilitating diseases or “improve” women’s access to various forms of capital and decision making as a way to increase their different forms of power and decrease their susceptibility to become survivors to gendered-based violence will resonate with more donors. Furthermore, if designed in culturally appropriate ways that identify emic solutions situated in the vast knowledge on social suffering that social science has produced, these programs can truly change the world.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso. Bryant, Rebecca, and Daniel M. Knight. 2019. The Anthropology of the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Brene. 2021. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. New York: Penguin Random House LLC. Cernea, Michael M., and Julie K. Maldonado. 2018. Challenging the Prevailing Paradigm of Displacement and Resettlement: Risks, Impoverishment, Legacies, Solutions. London and New York: Routledge.

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Collins, Samuel Gerald. 2007. All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future. New York: Berghahn. Fassin, Didier. 2009. “Another Politics of Life is Possible.” Theory, Culture and Society 26 (5): 44–60. DOI 10.1177/0263276409106349. Ferguson, James. 2010. “The Uses of Neoliberalism.” Antipode 41 (S1): 166–184. Hage, Ghassan. 2016. “Questions Concerning a Future-Politics.” History and Anthropology 27 (4): 465–467. DOI 10.2214/AJR.09.3938. Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (3): 447–462. Wilkinson, Iain, and Arthur Kleinman. 2016. A Passion for Society: How We Think About Human Suffering. Oakland: University of California Press. Yotebieng, Kelly. 2020. “We are Tired of Telling Our Stories: Finding our “Situated Usefulnes” Through Activim in Anthropology.” In Anthropology and Activism: New Contexts, New Conversations, edited by Anna J. Willow and Kelly A. Yotebieng, 149–159. London and New York: Routledge.

4 WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE? Planting Optimism in a Disrupted Ecology Mankei Tam

Introduction “The radiation remaining in the forest is so high that its access should be forbidden. People who are returning function like they are living in a jail; they can only stay in their houses,” advised the campaign manager of an international environmental organization when I interviewed him in his Tokyo office immediately before the reopening of Iitate, the village where I would be living for the remaining months of my fieldwork. In a recently published investigative report, the organization’s team used an illumination technique to visualize hotspots surrounding a villager’s house, corroborating their assessment of radiation risk and offering evidence in opposition to the official announcement that Iitate was safe.1 With apparent certainty, the campaign manager blithely dismissed the reality of returning villagers and myself, resting his case on the external knowledge produced and validated by dosimetric science and technologies.2 In this environmentalist’s version of Iitate, life outside one’s home is uncertain and dangerous. Impossible. The village should be abandoned. Any hope for a normal life on a decontaminated landscape is fabricated by the Japanese state, nothing but a false hope. Iitate, and the area of Fukushima that was polluted by the nuclear fallout, seemed to some observers to lie in ruins like the ghost towns near Chernobyl—a familiar imaginary that anti-nuclear groups have invoked and propagated in reports, videos, and tweets through social media and press conferences.3 In contrast, however, another Iitate is alive and well, one that is reconstructed through recovery programmes and infrastructures of radiation monitoring in which state ministries have invested since 2011 and which will last for decades (Iitate Village Office 2015). Iitate’s future is thus dichotomized as uncertain/certain,

DOI: 10.4324/b23231-5

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endangered/safe, and ghostly/lively in the dissonances generated by risk assessments calculated by anti-nuclear activists and by the Japanese state. Yet, these risk assessments share the same repertoire of dosimetric technologies, a consortium of scientists who parachute in from Tokyo or Europe, and outsiders’ “knowledge” that takes Iitate’s environment as an object for scientific inquiries. They are essentially two sides of the same coin cast by polemical interpretations of data extracted from the radioactive landscape (Tam 2020). The environment in which I have lived and that I have experienced in Iitate does not abide by these dichotomies. Indeed, black bags and temporary storage facilities—kariokiba—that store radioactive waste mark their presence as much as the wild grasses, boars, and macaques that thrived after the retreat of Iitate’s human inhabitants. With topsoil scraped, farmlands are decontaminated but still render villagers’ livelihoods uncertain. The boundaries marked by monitoring posts (see Figure 4.1) set up by the environmental ministry to separate people’s homes from radioactive substances sunken into nearby forests are unclear, guaranteeing no one’s safety. To misquote Clifford Geertz via Tim Ingold, “Man,” inhabiting the vastness of the fallout, “is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (2000, 173). In this chapter, I add flowers cultured by my Iitate interlocutors to this web. During the first summer of Iitate’s reopening, Sugiyama, my host, was the only returnee who experimented with rice cultivation. A few others grew vegetables and almost all of the villagers planted flowers in their gardens to signify their homecoming. Flowers blossomed on the fringes of the strict inspection system that the agricultural ministry imposed on edible produce. Their colors, scents, and radiance, glowing in the once abandoned farmlands, coalesced to symbolize hope. This hope, I suggest, is also embedded in the web of significance that Ingold elucidates as both discursive and material, involving humans and nonhumans, with “its source in their enmeshment within an all-encompassing field of relations” (Ingold 2000, 187). Drawing on fieldwork conducted during Iitate’s

FIGURE 4.1 

(Left) Temporary storage facility in Iitate for black bags of contaminated soil (kariokiba) and (right) the monitoring post at T-joint facing Sugiyama’s paddies. (Photos by author).

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reopening in 2016–17, I describe how four interlocutors, including Sugiyama, use varieties of flowers, ways of cultivation, and aesthetic moments through floriculture to mediate, comment on, and translate the Japanese state’s optimistic version of life that posits Iitate as a clean and safe place to return to. Through flowers, I trace lines of thought, action, and practice through which my interlocutors have been able to re-orient themselves to participate in liveable futures with animals, plants, forests, and lingering radiation. Understanding their stories is important for activism, as the futures we imagine, conjure, or advocate for are connected. As hope is central to all activism, environmental activists should learn to embrace the hopes of the people in all their diversity. Here, I explore the role of flower cultivation and its relations with the environment after the fallout; in short, I study the ecology of optimism. In new gardens and on formerly abandoned farmlands, flowers tell stories about the symbiotic relations my interlocutors co-constitute with other living and non-living beings that make it possible for villagers to thrive again. Significantly, such relations between my interlocutors and the flowers they planted are by no means dominant because multiple relations emerge from interactions with other living and non-living beings when the flowers grow, blossom, and finally wither. Attending to abandoned forests in Italy, Andrew Mathews (2017) observes that chestnut trees assume multiple forms—as a gnarled tree, for example, that engages with goats, people, sheep, and terraces in partial relations that evolve in correspondence with each other (see also Ingold 2022). He combines “practices of walking, looking, and wondering” (Mathews 2017, G145) with ethnographic observations to trace these partial relations that he believes may provide imaginaries of alternative Anthropocene futures. Echoing Mathews, I use Iitate’s flowers to pursue the same task.

Methodology Iitate is located in the Abukuma mountain range in Fukushima prefecture, northwest of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNP1).4 Threequarters of the village consists of forested land at an average altitude of 450 meters above sea level. Before the nuclear disaster, it was home to a population of 6,000 people scattered over 250 square kilometres of mountainous, forested terrain. On March 11, 2011, a 15-metre-high tsunami bypassed the breakwater at the FDNP1 and flooded the seaside reactors. The operator, Tokyo Electric, or TEPCO, had failed to provide backup power to cool the three reactors, resulting in a series of hydrogen explosions in the days that followed. A radioactive plume, containing mainly of cesium-134 and -137, with half-lives of two and 30 years, respectively, joined seasonal winds and snow to arrive at Iitate shortly after the first explosion, irradiating Iitate’s landscape unevenly in the initial months following the meltdown. In April, the Japanese state declared Iitate a forced evacuation zone (Figure 4.2).

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FIGURE 4.2 

( First part) Map of the designated evacuation areas as of April 1, 2017, released by the Fukushima Prefectural Office and (second part) a map of the 20 hamlets of Iitate; my interlocutors are living in Sasu and Komiya.

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This chapter is based on uninterrupted ethnographic fieldwork conducted over 14 months beginning in June 2016. I met Sugiyama during my pilot visit in 2015; he later became my host. He was one of the earliest villagers to return to Iitate and resume agricultural work. In 2011, he joined Asakura, a retired entrepreneur who had survived Hiroshima and was a student activist in the 1960s,5 and Harada, a soil scientist, to create a non-profit organization called Living Together with Fukushima (hereafter “LiFu”). Together they mustered and organized like-minded people to assist other villagers in the decontamination and radiation-monitoring efforts as well as in experimenting with new ways to practice agriculture on Iitate’s radioactive landscape. I began living in Iitate after its reopening in April 2017. I conversed with would-be returnees and those who had already settled in other places as well as with villagers who were struggling to adapt to new life circumstances shaped by radiation. I participated in hamlet assemblies and workshops organized by LiFu and learned about villagers’ worries and concerns regarding the uncertainties of radiation—despite the fact that the environmental ministry had completed decontamination and declared that it was safe for residents to return to their homes. As was the case with Sugiyama, all the interlocutors I interviewed for this chapter were introduced to me through LiFu’s organizational network. They were active farmers in their 60s when the nuclear fallout arrived at the village. According to the official statistics, they were among the 20% of Iitate’s population to return during the first year of reopening. Returnees were mainly elderly because young parents typically migrated with their children to other places in Japan, splitting households in two, sometimes in three when young fathers stayed in Fukushima to work and mothers lived with the children in other prefectures. During my fieldwork, I also interviewed the village head and listened to many villagers who had decided, willingly or otherwise, to leave. Some of them became activists and collaborated with the anti-nuclear groups to make claims for justice and compensation from the Japanese state.6 They represent a different voice from my interlocutors who, facing a diverse range of life circumstances, were trying to inhabit the radioactive landscape.

Surviving the Fallout with Suisen (Narcissus) One April day, I stood with Hirosawa in his fields, surrounded by blossoming narcissus jonquilla, known as suisen in Japanese. We chatted about how I cultivated bulbs of Chinese sacred lily (another type of suisen that is grown for the Chinese New Year season) with water only. A quiet old man of 76 years old, Hirosawa was so energized that I almost did not recognize him as he enthusiastically introduced me to the tulips, rhododendron, and other flowers in his garden. He had transformed the small hill behind his house and the fields in which he once grew rice, buckwheat, and vegetables into a flower garden. Yet, what fascinated me was not the vastness of the garden—it was roughly half the size of a football

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pitch—but the way Hirosawa had sowed the narcissus seeds in each furrow of the paddies, orderly and evenly, resembling the nature and aesthetics of the agricultural life that he had co-designed with his crops. The nuclear fallout had abruptly cut off Hirosawa’s relation with rice, typically central to the identity of Japanese farmers (Ohnuki-Tierney 1994). Hirosawa had lived with his mother since he was born in Komiya hamlet, south of Iitate and next to Nagadoro hamlet, which remains a no-return zone (see Figure 4.2). Unmarried and the eldest son of the family, he was one of the very few villagers who had refused to evacuate. Hirosawa had worried that his elderly mother would die if she lost hope of a homecoming. His fears were not misguided; some caretakers and physicians observed that the evacuation had led to earlier deaths among the elderly as a result of deteriorating mental health in unfamiliar temporary housing.7 Shortly after the disaster, decontamination workers from the Ministry of the Environment (2012) scraped all of the topsoil from Hirosawa’s farmland and replaced the soil with mountain sand. He was told not to wander into the forest or eat anything that grew there. Radioactive cesium, strontium, and iodine precipitated into Iitate’s forests, soils, and villagers’ homes and barns. Invisible radiation invoked villagers’ fear of the air, water, mushrooms, and soils they breathed, drank, ate, and touched. It also worried the citizenry that food from Fukushima would draw radiocesium into their metabolisms; worse, people evacuated from Fukushima were sometimes discriminated against. The toxicity of the radiation was an unknown, yet radiation had created a toxic atmosphere that isolated villagers from the rest of the world. Determined to stay, Hirosawa assisted Professor Harada in his experiments with rice and buckwheat cultivation in the summer of 2012. His mother was baffled, discounting the effort as “unrealistic.” Hirosawa hoped to convince her that something good could happen in the rice paddies that had been left barren. He spoke with Asakura and called on friends in Hokkaido and Chiba for help. In 2013, a group of 120 volunteers from all over Japan came to Iitate to plant cherry trees; small tags with donor names and hometowns were attached to the trunks of the trees. The trees had barely flowered twice before his mother passed away in December 2015, leaving him alone in Komiya. Meanwhile, the village office capitalised on financial subsidies from the Japanese state to construct an infrastructural promise—an amalgamation of, among other things, a radiation-monitoring network, a shopping mall, a civic centre, a school with a stadium and gymnasium, and highways and tunnels connecting the area to major municipalities (Iitate Village Office 2015). Officials were committed to organizing care activities and health check-ups to engage with single elderly individuals like Hirosawa and other hikikomori (socially disconnected single adults) in the kyoten (hub to gather people). However, Hirosawa struggled with the idea of resuming rice cultivation because he did not want to apply for a permit from the village office and have to submit his grains to the agricultural ministry for radiation inspection. He found these “infrastructures”—institutional

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arrangements designed to reassure the citizenry that food from the region was safe for consumption—not so much untrustworthy as disengaged from the everyday life he was searching for. Since then, Asakura had noticed that Hirosawa ate less, sometimes nothing for a whole day, and spoke little. Had he lost hope for the future? Asakura was worried. Yet, he also noticed that horticulture created a lifeline connecting Hirosawa with people of all generations who were visiting from Japan and other countries. Asakura persuaded him to focus on refurbishing his flower garden to show visitors Iitate’s natural wonders—and its future. That was why Hirosawa had hand-sowed tens of thousands of narcissus seeds in fields that had formerly been rice paddies. The narcissi, with bright yellow petals surrounding small, flattened center cups, embodied his passion for rice and the loss brought about by the human-made disaster and safety-oriented bureaucracy. He also rediscovered hares, frogs, birds, and insects in the gardens, along with katakuri (a pink-flowered species of trout lily native to Japan) that grew in forests where he once foraged for wild vegetables. After visiting Hirosawa and learning of his everyday experiences with radiation (Asakura advised him to keep a daily dosimetric record of radiation exposure), a group of university students collaborated with him to build the “Garden of Iitate” in the summer of 2017. This project created a rose garden that lit up at night to map out Iitate’s 20 hamlets, symbolizing Iitate’s identity and the bonds between villagers and the people of Japan. In addition to launching this event, the students also proposed creating a hiking trail around Hirosawa’s home to attract more visitors who could learn from him about the local ecology and culture. Since then, flowers have replaced rice to become Hirosawa’s companion species, with which he inhabits an environment disrupted by fallout and modified by lingering radioactivity. I intended to start this chapter with a life-affirming story about flowers. Flowers have re-animated Hirosawa’s life, sparking the imagination and creativity of those who adopt what Ingold calls a “dwelling perspective” when they are situated in “the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with the surroundings.…Only because they already dwell there can they think the thoughts they do” (2000, 186). With these remarks in mind, I move on to consider Matsuda’s sunflowers.

Himawari (Sunflower) and Attunement to a Disrupted Ecology Matsuda and Sakiko, his wife, became the “poster couple” for returnees during Iitate’s reopening in 2017. In a photograph widely circulated in the national media and local gazette, they were shown smiling and practically embraced by sunflowers in the paddy-turned-garden in front of their refurbished house. The village office gave sunflower seeds to every returning household. Imagine driving along roadways and passing endless pitches of blooming sunflowers that replaced the shattered homes, abandoned farmlands profuse in wild grasses, and kariokiba that the meltdown had left behind. In the same way, the ceremony

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that celebrated Iitate’s reopening was planned to take place in the brand-new shopping center surrounded by sunflowers that blocked the view of the nearby kariokiba. Sunflowers marked the end of the disaster, symbolizing hope—or so the village office hoped. In reality, this idea served to expose how few returnees there were and helped Matsuda achieve a bit of short-lived fame. It also proved a convenient way for me to instantaneously spot who had returned over the course of my fieldwork. For most observers, Matsuda represents an “ordinary” Iitate villager. His house and paddies neighbour those of Sugiyama (my host), with the Mano River running along the edges of his backyard and forests across the road from his front door. Born after the Second World War, he had lived before the disaster with his first son and two grandsons in a three-generation household. After the evacuation order was lifted, Matsuda’s household was split as his son’s family’s livelihood stabilized elsewhere in Fukushima. Matsuda followed Sugiyama and Asakura’s advice that children should not return to the village for safety’s sake. Nevertheless, his elder grandson returned to live with him to finish the last year of junior high school. With compensation from TEPCO, Matsuda rebuilt his one-storey house and bought new furniture to replace what had been thrown away in black bags stored in the kariokiba. Like Hirosawa’s, Matsuda’s paddies were filled with impoverished mountain sand that villagers called “guest soil” (kyakudo). He reckoned that no good rice could be grown on this substance to feed his grandsons and cut back production, growing vegetables for his own needs only. He was categorized as practicing “agriculture for subsistence” (ikigai nōgyō), which differs from “agriculture for sale” (yarigai nōgyō), where produce must undergo food safety inspections. With two-thirds of his paddies barren, Matsuda was tempted by the village office to turn them into kariokiba. Many villagers had accepted such proposals, as the prospects for engaging in agriculture to secure a livelihood were dim; some chose to abandon their paddies and leave for good. This is the trajectory of biopolitical violence experienced by many Iitate villagers, and Matsuda would have been among them had he not acted together with Sugiyama to reject the village office’s offer to store black bags loaded with wasted soil on his paddies (see the following section for more on this topic). In Iitate, soil has invited villagers to experience new interspecies encounters. When villagers ceased working with soils and claiming lands as their property, wild grass proliferated and converted the landscape into a place that favored macaques and boars as well as animals not seen for decades, such as bears and goats. Macaques and wild boars had learned not to cross the road guardrails or break into human property. After the disaster, however, their populations expanded to outnumber the humans in the region. In the case of boars, no one goes into the forest to hunt them and no one dares to eat those caught in traps, because neither state agencies nor the village office can assure villagers that the boar meat is not permeated with radiation. Matsuda often hears boars digging in the wild grasses that conceal them and sometimes sees them in his vegetable

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garden. The wild grasses have “made villagers feel exhausted,” as Sugiyama once told me, but their profusion has encouraged boars to pursue deterritorialization and expansion of their foraging grounds. Matsuda cleared the paddies where he was not growing vegetables and sowed sunflower seeds on one of the largest. The sunflowers did not require as much labour as rice, as the plum rain (tsuyu) in summer nourished them. As the sunflowers grew, the wild grasses were suppressed, and the boars were also diverted away from his vegetable gardens. Himawari, the Japanese word for “sunflower,” literally means “rotating around the sun.” Sunflowers absorb and transform the immense energy radiated by the sun into long, sturdy stalks holding sizeable flowers. They are as beautiful as they are nutritious. Matsuda cut the withered sunflowers and laid them in abundance on the paddy to form a layer of fine compost. They carried his faint hope of improving the imported guest soils so that they might once again become suitable for cultivating vegetables and rice. Thus, the widely circulated photograph of Matsuda and Sakiko is realistic but not naturalistic: Surrounded by sunflowers, Matsuda has joined other villagers in making a collage of joy and smiles that bolsters the Japanese state’s claim that Iitate is safe for resuming a normal life with a promising future. But sunflowers represent more than a symbol of hope; they co-work with Matsuda to fuel aspirations of persistent life amidst the slowly unfolding disaster in the wake of the fallout. They demonstrate Matsuda’s attunement to a disrupted ecology. Such attunement is a skill, not a submission to the state (Grandia 2021; Shapiro 2015).

Experimenting with Kosumosu (Cosmos) “Can he touch the grass again?” Sugiyama asked himself when he saw his now late father staring at the rice paddies before the entire family was ordered to evacuate in April 2011. The Japanese state disappeared in Sugiyama’s hour of need when the radioactive plume arrived in Iitate. Official scientists and ministry bureaucrats parachuted in to tell villagers to stay home, but within weeks they ordered them to evacuate. Sugiyama lamented that the scientists were illequipped with radiation data to estimate the risks. Villagers had been saddled with the responsibility of judging their own health and safety amidst huge uncertainties (Tao 2020). Nonetheless, watching his father, Sugiyama was determined to recover the paddies and return to live in Iitate. Later, he joined Asakura and Professor Harada to create LiFu. Like most members of citizen science groups that formed at that time, Sugiyama had been a novice to the dosimeter and its science (Morita et al. 2013; Kimura 2016; Sternsdorff-Cisterna 2019). Yet, seeing the official experts’ perplexed faces, he became aware of the salience of data and participation in data generation, which involved “seeing” radiation that was marked by perpetual uncertainty (Tam 2020). LiFu also experimented with alternative methods for separating the radiocesium that penetrated into Sugiyama’s paddies in order to

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preserve the nutritious topsoil, which enabled him to be the first rice grower after the disaster. He rebuilt his cattle barn as a makeshift living space that became LiFu’s hub, from which the group organized its activities. There, in front of the barn, Sugiyama dug a new garden to welcome his father’s return—a display of his own creativity—covering the guest soils with lavender, ornamental grasses, a trellis for bitter melon to climb, and fruit. Yet, the optimism he demonstrated is a refraction of LiFu’s technostruggle with the uncertainties imposed on Iitate by the actions of the Japanese state.8 Across the road from a paddy on which LiFu’s rice-cultivation experiments had been conducted since 2012, there is another paddy that was decontaminated by the environmental ministry. Officials had offered Sugiyama a stipend in return for converting the paddy into kariokiba. They also promised him that the paddy would be prioritized for restoration and returned once they found new substitute land for kariokiba. Other villagers, including Matsuda, received the same offer, one that was semi-officially called the kari-kariokiba (“temporary-­temporary storage facility”) proposal. But how long would “temporary” be? Nobody could answer at that time. In fact, the entire negotiation was extra-legal, as this way of obtaining land was not authorized by Act No.110.9 The term kari-kariokiba was never acknowledged in contracts or in any official report. Nonetheless, Sugiyama had almost given up on cultivating the paddy for the “common good,” as the head of Sasu hamlet persuaded him that other villagers could benefit from the unproductive farmlands. But Asakura contended that the accumulation of black bags is an open-ended process that would accelerate the abandonment of land, making kariokiba the antithesis of LiFu’s mission of revitalizing the flow of life in Iitate. Profiting from radioactive waste is not a benefit, but a double sacrifice to the interests of state officials in the name of the common good, following a timeline that let the nation come first and contribute to its fastest revival (Walker 2010). Sugiyama and Matsuda therefore openly rejected the offer and halted the proposed kariokiba in the hamlet. I had not heard the whole story when one day the cosmos on that particular paddy drew my attention. They were played down and neglected by many visitors, who were more amazed by other wonders around Sugiyama’s home. Sugiyama said he liked cosmos more than sunflowers. Exhibiting varying heights in many colours, cosmos created a starkly different aesthetic moment composed by their form, shade, and diversity, marking their presence among other paddies colonized by black bags and mountain sand or dominated by sunflowers. If we consider these options as non-human categories enlisted by the Japanese state, cosmos are specific individuals that Sugiyama has chosen, sowing their seeds in soils that he plowed with the tractor. The unwanted intimacies with non-living things produced by decontamination forced Sugiyama to rethink how to be responsible to those living beings who were made suffered and what actions were needed to address their suffering and sacrifice. The cosmos, therefore, represent an ethical responsibility that Sugiyama takes on as a grower (Gan and Tsing

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2018; Puig de la Bellacasa 2015). In this sense, the cosmos are historic, as they commemorate LiFu’s struggle with kariokiba and Sugiyama’s insistence on trying something else in response to the fallout and its pervasive uncertainties. Like digging the new garden by the barn, planting cosmos on the paddy is an act by which Sugiyama adorns his place of dwelling to celebrate his family’s return, despite the fact that his sons and grandchildren had decided to leave due to the radiation sunken in the forests. In Sugiyama’s plan, sunflowers play another role. After the paddies were occupied by crops, vegetables, and new vinyl greenhouses, he invited me to fill up a small remaining patch of paddy with sunflower seeds to mark my presence in Iitate, which was now both my fieldsite and a second hometown (furusato). Not far from Sugiyama’s rice paddies, on the hillside next to the expressway, a small piece of land about approximately 30 × 5 square metres in size was cleared, with new solar panels installed two meters above the ground and sunflowers growing below the panels. A student group from a local university would undertake an experiment to extract sunflower oil from seeds collected later in the summer of that year. For Sugiyama, cosmos are personal, whereas sunflowers became a vehicle carrying his passionate and flickering optimism to make new “kin” (Haraway 2008)—a mutual and enduring relatedness with humans and nonhumans evolving around LiFu in a post-fallout world where traditional familial relations are ripped apart by the long-lingering effects of radiation.

Resuming a Normal Life with Kikyō (Turkish Bellflower) I want to close with the story of Koike’s family. In his late 60s, Koike returned with his wife and only son, who was unmarried. He received financial subsidies from the prefectural government to rebuild floral greenhouses, which are equipped with the latest technologies from the local university to regulate the temperature, moisture, and air circulation of the environment to support the cultivation of Turkish bellflower (toruko kikyō) targeting the domestic market. Four white vinyl greenhouses were built on what was originally a rice paddy, with one side facing a large solar farm that blocked the view of the kariokiba behind it. The flowers grown inside are exempt from the radiation inspections that target edible produce in Fukushima. Outside, for his own meals, Koike grows vegetables, samples of which he brings to the village office to be tested for undesirable radiocesium. His son was hired as a school bus driver when job opportunities were scarce. Between Hirozawa, Matsuda, and Sugiyama, Koike is the only one whose family remains intact and who has been able to resume an “agriculture for sale” mode of farming life much as if the nuclear disaster had never occurred. In Japan, the floriography (hanakotoba) of white and purple kikyō, the main varieties in Koike’s flower beds, are called “compassion” and “hope,” perfectly capturing his mode of living with radiation in a techno-scientific new normal secured by the Japanese state. For anti-nuclear activists, though, Koike’s story

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emblematizes the forgetfulness (fūka) that conceals most people’s abandonment and sacrifice while eschewing the risks of lingering radiation that are gaslighted as “harmful rumours” (fūhyōhigai) by official scientists and experts (Kimura 2016). Ostensibly, Koike’s new livelihood is contradictory to the hopelessness and impossibilities of life that anti-nuclear activism advocates if we neglect the hardship he has experienced. Koike, like many villagers, was forced to stay in Iitate in the first months following the disaster, as he did not have enough money to leave and stay in another prefecture. He had no income because he had been ordered to throw away all his produce and was forbidden from growing new vegetables. His savings for buying food and groceries were running out. Eventually, he did not need to worry about money as the state agency promised to provide a monthly subsidy and evacuate his family to temporary housing near Fukushima City. There, he joined other evacuees to grow vegetables and found that subsidies plus the sale of vegetables enabled him to earn a better income than he was able to earn before the disaster. When Iitate was reopened, he was given the choice to stay on but would need to pay rent once the state agency abolished the subsidy as planned. Although Koike could live an affordable life without the subsidies by selling vegetables, the entire family decided to return to Iitate. “This is the life I want,” he told me, even though income from selling flowers was as uncertain as the risks of radiation. Koike was not terribly worried about the ambient radiation because LiFu had conducted a dosimetric survey before the greenhouses were built. He was more cautious about radiation entering his body. Thus, he wore a thumb-sized personal dosimeter provided by the village office and measured the radiocesium in vegetables he had eaten to keep track of his internal exposure. He was careful not to forget the risks of radiation and not to spread harmful rumours. Regarding flower cultivation, new equipment sponsored by the prefectural government did little to bring back the customers Koike had lost in the blank space of the six-year-long evacuation. The label “former evacuation zone” gave him no competitive advantage. Kikyō and the first batch of lilies were expected to be ready for delivery and sale in August. He took care of them attentively. “Every day, I examine each stalk and remove buds that sprout too small or appear too low. They should grow to eighty centimetres, with one flower and one leaf on every stalk.” After 25 years of practicing floriculture, this was the first time that Koike had put so much extra time and work into his products. Notably, this was also a laborious process through which Koike embodies the hardship associated with his livelihood in an uncertain environment, transforming it into a re-animated intimacy with his flowers. I noticed through my observations of Koike and other returning villagers that sweating together with their produce—flowers, rice, vegetables—is the pathway that reconnects their homes with the lands they had been forced to abandon. Sweat let Koike feel the breeze better while enjoying the scents of the flowers; sweating trims

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his body, as he becomes healthier when losing the round belly that many villagers acquired after they quit farming. Koike bore a delighted smile when he talked about the hardship involved in his new floriculture practice during my interview, as if he had overcome it with no difficulty. Apparently, radiation has fostered a new kind of intimate, if unwanted, relationship with Koike’s body through the cultivation of flowers. Kikyō has become more than a saleable commodity but also a subject of care embedded in practices that he initiates to nurture symbiotic relations, old and new, between himself and the disrupted ecology (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015). In Iitate, there is no easy pathway to resuming a normal life and maintaining business as usual. Articulating traces of Koike’s everyday life suggests a possible point of departure for anti-nuclear activism from the narrative of abandonment and forgetfulness, emphasising new alliances and solidarity.

Conclusion The story we choose to tell about the future matters for how we act in the present (Willow 2020). Had we followed the lines of thought suggested by my environmentalist friend, we would have connected the homes of my interlocutors to irradiated forests that release sunken radiocesium in rainy seasons, the crippling reactors that pollute underground water at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station to be released into the Pacific Ocean, and the pervading kariokiba that store radioactive waste. According to that story, the future is overflowing with indefinite uncertainties associated with radiation, leaving no space for hope beyond the walls of one’s home. Knowledge generated by data monitoring makes predictions about radiation risk, informing returnees with certainty about the only safe and secure act of homecoming—staying indoors as long as possible. In yearning for certainty, the present leads to a dead-end enclosure. The dichotomy between uncertainty and certainty has cast Iitate’s present as an impossibility, leaving abandonment as the only choice. The lives of the returnees that I have described in this chapter—of Hirosawa, Matsuda, Sugiyama, and Koike—present a starkly different pathway for inhabiting a radioactive landscape, one that is uncertain and unpredictable, yet also possible. For all of these individuals, the first move is to no longer regard home as a given and to step outside its walls to expose themselves to uncertainties. Exposure renders them vulnerable through the bodily hazards imposed by lingering radioactivity in Iitate and the unknowns involved in the social-political complexities of post-disaster Japan. Yet, the vulnerabilities of exposure also render their lives open-ended. For them, the second move is to call on lifelong agricultural skills for planting, casting them forward into the future. Planting flowers, vegetables, and rice puts them back in the field, where they can retool skills born out of past experiences and practices to make sense of and take action in disrupted ecologies (Miyazaki 2014). As their lives proceed forward, they acquire

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new knowledge to chart and learn to abide with the uncertainties that unfold in each cyclical repetition of planting. In this way, planting makes possibilities of life reappear in uncertainty. Ingold uses the metaphor of walking to illustrate how this happens: Every step entails a moment of jeopardy. Falling forward on one foot, you tumble into the void, only to regain your balance as the other foot comes to land on the ground ahead. Here, the bodily skill of footwork comes to the rescue, just before it is too late. What begins in the vulnerability of exposure ends in the mastery of attunement, providing in turn the ground from which the walker can once again submit to the hazard of exposure, in an alternation that continues for as long as the walk goes on. (2022, 9) For my interlocutors, planting is not a choice but the sole pathway to affirm their lives and sustain their livelihood in post-fallout Fukushima. As fundamental as walking, planting allows them to rebuild homes they have refused to abandon and reclaim the ground on which, as the anti-nuclear novelist Tsushima Yūko (2016) highlights, hope lies. Flowers, not limited to the varieties and colors described in this chapter, join with my interlocutors in replenishing the agentive capacity that sets them free from the dichotomies of safe/unsafe and certainty/uncertainty, offering persistence in place of the dissonances generated by risk assessments proffered by the Japanese state and anti-nuclear activists. In planting flowers, my interlocutors experience new encounters with other living and non-living things with whom they experiment in exploring together ways of coinhabiting an environment that has become uncanny with fallout. These new modes of habitation include planting flowers but can also begin with growing rice or vegetables to cultivate the symbiotic relations, old and new, that enable Hirosawa to survive the fallout and Sugiyama to experiment with alternatives, while supporting Koike’s version of a new normal life and Matsuda’s mutual attunement with boars, monkeys, and wild grasses. From these symbiotic relations, many futures emerge and new possibilities are opened up. My interlocutors are energized as they aspire to (yaruki ga deru) something that they have not done or experienced before. This is an optimism that happens in the “here and now.” In the campaign language of anti-nuclear activists, both nationally and internationally, Fukushima is a testament to the dead-end future posed by nuclear power; yet we are still waiting for a future powered by clean and renewable energy. To realize this future, resistance is organized to stop nuclear reactors from restarting on unpolluted lands while evacuees like the Iitate villagers are mobilized outside their hometowns to claim justice and compensation from the Japanese state. My interlocutors consider this future both far-reaching and farfetched. Attending to the “here and now,” their plantings, I suggest, constitute a

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form of double-resistance in response to the futures posed by the Japanese state that they understood as dead ends. Through overt refusals, Hirosawa ignored the evacuation order and insisted on staying home while Sugiyama opposed the official offer to surrender farmlands for kariokiba. In the Japanese state’s master plan, Iitate’s recovery comprises the decontamination and monitoring of radiation as well as the construction of various infrastructures to augur a promising future before villagers are reinserted into the blighted landscape. As dwellers, my interlocutors join with flowers to make their own plans that deride, deviate from, and divert the official timeline designed to facilitate the resumption of normal life as quickly as possible. Their optimism lies in the next blossom season. When alternative future-makings immerse them into the contaminated landscape, a new persistence of life also takes shape. Persistence is a resigned form of resistance (Lora-Wainwright 2017). Flowers have offered me clues for navigating through the persistence of Hirosawa, Matsuda, Sugiyama, and Koike, who lead by example to show other villagers and the younger generation that something can be done in their hometown. Flowers conjoin with locally constituted imaginings of a future with optimism. Hope is central to all activism. Anti-nuclear activists might do well to embrace the hopes of people in all their diversity. After all, as a symbol of hope, a flower can also carry the agentive capacity necessary to bring us into solidarity.

Acknowledgments This article has been possible thanks to the support of the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (PDFS2021-4H05).

Notes 1 The illumination technique revealed radiation levels above the government’s safety limit concerning the average hourly exposure for humans. The organization also incorporated the government’s measurement standards to assess radiation risks of several houses in the evacuation zone. 2 Dosimetry refers to the measurement, calculation, and assessment of the ionizing radiation dose absorbed by the human body. When radiation enters the human body through an external (e.g., X-ray) or internal (e.g., radioactive cesium released from the meltdown reactors entering the food chain) source, it may induce an ionization effect on cells that causes breakage of chemical bonds or oxidation of the cellular molecules. The Sievert (Sv) is the unit of measure for the biological effects of ionizing radiation, whereas the Becquerel (Bq) is its counterpart that measures the extent of radioactivity. In the case of DNA breakage, the damaged DNA will attempt a repair; however, when the damage is severe, a so-called misrepair may occur, resulting in “induction of mutations, chromosome aberrations, or cell death” (Radiation Effects Research Foundation n.d.). 3 For example, see Greenpeace International 2016; Greenpeace Japan 2017. 4 For the history of the siting and construction of FDNP1, see Jones et al. (2013) and Dusinberre and Aldrich (2011).

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5 In the 1960s, Asakura was a doctoral student in high-energy physics when “Atoms for Peace” propaganda had been trumpeted for more than a decade and TEPCO and the state were pursuing the siting of the first nuclear power plant in Fukushima—later named FDNP1. Engaged in heated debates over nuclear power and weapons development, Asakura would never forget a professor’s pronouncement that “nuclear power is 100% safe.” These dormant memories and thoughts were reactivated when he came to Iitate to seek “something to do” in June 2011. After that, Asakura visited Iitate on a weekly basis over the next six years, moving to Iitate in 2018. 6 Readers who are interested in this side of story could follow the works of Hasegawa Kenichi (2016). After recording the slaughter of his cattle under state orders, Hasegawa first learned to photograph and film the deterioration of homes and paddies and began telling his stories across Japan. Then, he brought more than half of Iitate’s villagers together to file a class action suit against TEPCO. 7 In fact, the evacuation was much more stressful for old people than for the younger generations. In some cases, it became an unbearable burden that caused untimely deaths, with suicide among the most conspicuous and common. For example, Ōkubo Fumio, then 102 years old, hung himself at home after hearing the news that Iitate had been designated as mandatory evacuation zone on April 11, 2011 (Mainichi Shinbun 2018). 8 Kath Weston (2017) coined the notion of technostruggle to analyze the use of flexible technologies such as handheld dosimeters that produce new science and knowledge about radiation and facilitate people to make decisions that contend with the course of action asserted by the Japanese state. 9 The full name of Act No.110 is “Act on Special Measures Concerning the Handling of Environmental Pollution by Radioactive Materials Discharged by the Nuclear Power Station Accident Associated with the Tōhoku District—Off the Pacific Ocean Earthquake that Occurred on March 11, 2011.”

References Dusinberre, Martin, and Daniel P. Aldrich. 2011. “Hatoko Comes Home: Civil Society and Nuclear Power in Japan.” The Journal of Asian Studies 70 (3): 683–705. Gan, Elaine, and Anna Tsing. 2018. “How Things Hold: A Diagram of Coordination in a Satoyama Forest.” Social Analysis 62 (4): 102–145. Grandia, Liza. 2021. “Canary Science in the Mineshaft of the Anthropocene.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 12: 203–226. Greenpeace International. 2016. “Fukushima: Living with a Disaster.” https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=oe_TCM7f71w (accessed May 9, 2022). Greenpeace Japan. 2017. No Return to Normal: The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster. Tokyo: Greenpeace Japan. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hasegawa, Kenichi. 2016. Fukushima’s Stolen Lives: A Dairy Farmer’s Story (English Edition). Trans. Amy C. Franks. Reportage Laboratory Co. Ltd. Iitate Village Office. 2015. Iitate Madei Reconstruction Plan [5th edition]: New Village in the Form of Network (in Japanese). http://www.vill.iitate.fukushima.jp/uploaded/attachment/ 2031.pdf (accessed May 9, 2022). Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Ingold, Tim. 2022. “On Not Knowing and Paying Attention: How to Walk in a Possible World.” Irish Journal of Sociology Special Issue: 1–17.

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Jones, Christopher F., Shi-lin Loh, and Kyoto Sato. 2013. “Narrating Fukushima: Scales of a Nuclear Meltdown.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 7: 601–623. Kimura, Aya Hirata. 2016. “Radiation.” Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima. Durham: Duke University Press. Lora-Wainwright, Anna. 2017. Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Mainichi Shinbun. 2018. 福島地裁 男性自殺、東電に賠償命令「原発事故負担影 響」 (Fukushima District Court Issued Compensation Order to TEPCO, a Man’s Suicide Case Caused by Burdens of the Nuclear Power Plant Accident), February 20th. https://mainichi.jp/articles/20180220/k00/00e/040/319000c (accessed July 22, 2022). Mathews, Andrew S. 2017. “Ghostly Forms and Forest Histories.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, G145–G156. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ministry of Environment. 2012. Implementation Plan in Special Decontamination Area: Iitate (in Japanese). http://josen.env.go.jp/area/details/pdf/josen-area_p-iitate.pdf (accessed May 9, 2022). Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2014. “Saving TEPCO: Debt, Credit, and the ‘End’ of Finance in Post-Fukushima Japan.” In Corporation and Citizenship, edited by Greg Urban, 127– 140. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Morita, Atsuro, Anders Blok and Shuhei Kimura. 2013. “Environmental Infrastructures of Emergency: The Formation of a Civic Radiation Monitoring Map during the Fukushima Disaster.” In Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima Daiichi: Social, Political and Environmental Issues, edited by Richard Hindmarsh, 78–96. London: Routledge. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. 1994. Rice as Self: Japanese Identities Through Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. 2015. “Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity and the Pace of Care.” Social Studies of Science 45 (5): 691–716. Radiation Effects Research Foundation. n.d.. “How Radiation Affects Cells.” https:// www.rerf.or.jp/en/programs/roadmap_e/health_effects-en/basickno-en/radcell-en/ (accessed July 21, 2022). Shapiro, Nicholas. 2015. “Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime.” Cultural Anthropology 30 (3): 368–393. Sternsdorff-Cisterna, Nicolas. 2019. Food Safety After Fukushima: Scientific Citizenship and the Politics of Risk. Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press. Tam, Mankei. 2020. “Enlivening Data: Reassembling Life in Post-Fukushima Japan.” STS Encounters. Special Issue: Engaging the Data Moment. 11 (1): 199–226. Tao, Yoichi. 2020. Challenges from Iitate: Towards Living with Nature (in Japanese). Tokyo: Chikuma Publishing. Tsushima, Yūko. 2016. From the Song of Dream (in Japanese). Tokyo: Inscript. Walker, Brett L. 2010. Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Weston, Kath. 2017. Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-tech Ecologically Damaged World. Durham: Duke University Press. Willow, Anna J. 2020. “The World We (Re)Build: An Ethnography of the Future.” Anthropology and Humanism 46 (1): 4–20.

5 INDIGENOUS OPTIMISM IN THE COLONIALCENE Natasha Myhal and Clint Carroll

The immediacy of climate change is here. This fact presents immense changes in all areas of life and calls for societal adaptations across the globe, including and especially among Indigenous peoples. It is now widely known—even if often exaggerated to the point of stereotype—that Indigenous peoples rely on and have complex and deep relationships to their environments for spiritual, cultural, and subsistence practices (see Nelson and Shilling 2018 for an important contribution). The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs asserts that “Indigenous peoples are vital to, and active in, the many ecosystems that inhabit their lands and territories and may therefore help enhance the resilience of these ecosystems.”1 Our chapter demonstrates how Native nations in what is today known as the United States (specifically the Cherokee Nation and the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians) are actively responding to climate stressors while pursuing programs that seek to restore culturally important nonhuman relatives in their own ecosystems. Yet, even before the onslaught of climate change, Indigenous peoples have had to contend with the ramifications of European imperialism and colonialism, and they continue to navigate the ongoing structure and violent manifestations of settler colonialism today. In this light, what is Indigenous optimism? What are the contexts in which Indigenous people/s express and enact it? How might these expressions and enactments of optimism differ from the term’s common use and meaning in mainstream society? Although we do not purport to speak for all Indigenous peoples, we write as Indigenous environmental anthropologists who are engaged in work with Indigenous communities that illuminates possible answers to these questions. If the common use of optimism connotes a positive outlook on what

DOI: 10.4324/b23231-6

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the future may hold, then it is important for us to distinguish between optimism as a disposition and optimism as a distinctive approach to survival—the former conveying an individual’s sense of hopeful promise that can border on naïveté; the latter indicating a severe lack of alternative choices that individuals or collectives may face (“there’s nowhere else to go from here but up”). Amid widespread stay-at-home orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, many Indigenous communities shared a common perspective that, as peoples, we’d been here before. Although, as individuals, many of us had not experienced the magnitude of sickness and loss that the novel coronavirus was causing, our communal memory of disease and devastation wrought by colonialism’s own novel viruses (including biological ones, but also viruses of the mind— domination, exploitation, and extractivism) had instilled in us the realization that, indeed, we had already experienced the end of the world and had emerged on the other side. It is from this point of reference that we engage optimism, and further, that we discuss future-building community projects that envision our worlds beyond mere survival. Indigenous scholars Lawrence Gross (2014) and Cutcha Risling Baldy (2014) have discussed how, for many Indigenous peoples, the apocalypse has already occurred. Colonialism and its genocidal policies have resulted in the ending of worlds for Indigenous communities—so much so that Potawatomie scholar Kyle Whyte characterizes present-day Indigenous struggles as playing out on the stage of “our ancestors’ dystopia” (2017, 2018a). This framing of the Indigenous present as post-apocalyptic dystopia, in turn, serves to reorient scholarly discussions of the Anthropocene that identify the actions of specific humans rather than the universal anthropos. As Heather Davis and Zoe Todd write, By linking the Anthropocene with colonization, it draws attention to the violence at its core, and calls for the consideration of Indigenous philosophies and processes of Indigenous self-governance as a necessary political corrective, alongside the self-determination of other communities and societies violently impacted by the white supremacist, colonial, and capitalist logics instantiated in the origins of the Anthropocene. (2017, 763) Thus, for Indigenous peoples, the Colonialcene—rather than the Anthropocene— more accurately describes our experience with human-induced change on a geological scale, considering the impacts these policies, practices, and mindsets have had on our peoples and the land. And yet, rather than living in perpetual fear or dread, Indigenous peoples are actively building futures that defy colonial attempts at elimination through the restoration and renewal of relationships with their lands and more-than-human relatives. Our work proceeds from this standpoint. We approach climate action from the locally and tribally specific acts of regenerating and perpetuating land-based knowledge, practices, and

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relationships—including our languages, which allow us to frame all the above within Indigenous understandings of the world. As William Lempert asserts, such future-building perspectives and projects shift away from viewing the present as an inhabited dystopia to instead emphasize the post-apocalyptic as “a place of beginnings, in which the apocalyptic informs the past and present yet does not foreclose future possibilities” (2018, 203). Thinking and writing in the space of Indigenous futurities (specifically regarding Aboriginal Australian communities), Lempert articulates “generative hope” as an enactment of Indigenous self-determination and an investment in future generations through the restoration of relationships with land and morethan-humans: “[Aboriginal Australians] remain optimistically oriented toward a generative hope for kinship futures on Country, emphasizing connection to family and place as the proper path for living a good life” (2018, 207). In what follows, we discuss optimism in the context of our ongoing projects and fieldwork with Indigenous communities. Carroll is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and has worked with Cherokee Elders, knowledge-keepers, and natural resource managers since 2004 toward the goals of cultural revitalization, land conservation, and community-based environmental governance. Myhal is a citizen of the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians and is conducting her dissertation fieldwork with the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians on the maintenance of reciprocal relationships with nmé (lake sturgeon) through ecosystem restoration. We frame our respective work—and our roles as community-based researchers within it—as facilitating and contributing to Indigenous futurity in the same vein as Lempert’s discussion above. Before turning to our individual cases, we offer some thoughts on how we inhabit and engage the field of anthropology as Indigenous scholars.

Optimism and Indigenous Anthropology As scholars trained in the critical intellectual tradition of American Indian studies,2 we find that Indigenous histories, philosophies, scholarship, and languages heavily inflect our work and our approach to anthropology—not least of which include the interventions of decolonizing and Indigenous research methodologies made by Indigenous scholars over the past 20-plus years (e.g., Smith 1999; Wilson 2008; Kovach 2010; Chilisa 2011). This body of work has opened and sustained discussions regarding the purpose, ethics, and form that research takes with Indigenous communities. The authors cited above also intentionally discuss the role of Indigenous researchers as key players in co-creating meaningful, lasting, and positive changes in Indigenous communities (many of which they are a part) that may arise out of community-based and/or participatory research projects. We inhabit the field of anthropology vis-à-vis Indigenous environmental studies, combined with our training and focus in applied methodologies, in ways that affirm and extend Indigenous sovereignty, question so-called objectivity, and

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privilege research questions guided by community priorities. Thus, in common with many other Indigenous anthropologists, we acknowledge the field’s dark history while using its tools to affect community-driven change (see Medicine 2001; Atalay 2012; Lewis 2021).3 We also resonate with Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck’s (2009) call to suspend attention to damage narratives in research and instead devote our energies to “desire-centered research” programs. This call invites us to think about how research can be a liberatory and strategic arena for knowledge production. Our role as Indigenous anthropologists, and specifically Indigenous applied anthropologists, is to engage—and sometimes facilitate—tribal programs, while offering our analyses as situated participant-observers in ways that privilege Indigenous knowledges and prioritize Indigenous futurities. Knowledge production then becomes a tool for the community to reflect, adjust, and proceed accordingly with strategies for building sustainable and just Indigenous futures. Desirecentered research is an endeavor that centers Indigenous epistemologies and proceeds in the service of community goals. Our involvement in and commitment to this future-building work is our entry point into Indigenous optimism and hope. As situated participant-­ observers, we observe acts of hope that our research partners carry out “in the field.” At the same time, as Indigenous anthropologists who carry “relational accountability” (Wilson 2008) and therefore have clear investments in the futurity of the communities with whom we partner, we are also ourselves actively hoping. This active hope as practitioners of Indigenous applied anthropology lends insights into how we might reimagine anthropology as offering a set of critical tools for building Indigenous futures. If applied anthropology is the act of understanding current community issues, how people are responding to them, and helping to formulate solutions, Indigenous applied anthropology could be additionally characterized by its emphasis on decoloniality as a future vision and goal (cf. Harrison 1991). We thus engage anthropology through the decolonial and critical traditions of Indigenous studies, further specified by our research interests in Indigenous environmental studies. The subfield of Indigenous environmental studies, broadly construed, aims to better understand (1) Indigenous relationships to each other (as human beings) and to the earth (as a network of more-than-human relatives, including plants, animals, water, and land), (2) the challenges Indigenous peoples have faced and continue to face in enacting those relationships within and across Indigenous homelands and territories, and (3) how to protect and sustain them into the future through the assertion of Indigenous land-based practices, governance, and inter-generational knowledge transmission—what Cherokee scholar Jeff Corntassel calls “sustainable self-determination” (2008). Indigenous environmental studies analyze the political, cultural, and ecological contexts in which Indigenous peoples seek to uphold foundational obligations of care and kinship with other peoples and the land.4

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We view this methodological and conceptual positioning as an inherently optimistic stance due to its focus on Indigenous flourishing in relationship with land and more-than-human relatives into the distant future. Relationships take many forms in community work for Indigenous researchers and, for us, our understanding of relationships draws from the harmony (and hope) that exists within Indigenous communities. In addition, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2017) has asserted, relationality forms the basis of Indigenous social science research. In our respective sections below, we describe how relationality influences and shapes our understanding of Indigenous conservation and revitalization work. This approach builds stronger relationships within our research partnerships. The importance of relationships influences our methodological point of entry as we bring together our thinking, experiences, and interpretations in the context of Indigenous environmental studies.

Indigenous Land Education and Community-Based Conservation in the Cherokee Nation In November of 2017, I (Clint) gathered with the Cherokee Nation Medicine Keepers and the staff of the Cherokee Nation Environmental Resources Department near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, to discuss the development of a curriculum for a land-based education program.5 We conducted the workshop as the inaugural activity of a five-year National Science Foundation grant, the scope and goals of which we had been discussing over the past two years leading up to the successful proposal and the initial gathering. Our collaborative work on the perpetuation of Cherokee ethnobotanical knowledge and the protection of Cherokee land spans over a decade and has resulted in numerous projects and policy outcomes.6 The curriculum development workshop marked a significant step toward fulfilling our goal of preparing younger Cherokee people to take on pressing environmental challenges, centering Cherokee knowledge, language, and land-based practices. We called it the Cherokee Environmental Leadership Program. Over the course of the two-day workshop, the elders discussed their perspectives on education, including the “informal” education they experienced through the teachings of their family and community members, as well as the “formal” education they received from Indian boarding schools in their youth. Their discussion of their boarding school experiences was a stark reminder that the assimilatory policies and projects of the settler colonial state were not distant occurrences. This prompted them to intentionally position the land education program as an opportunity to push back against colonial models of education and thereby privilege Cherokee cultural practices and knowledge in the curriculum. The workshop location, style, and setting were indicative of this broad goal: On both days, we met outdoors at culturally significant sites in the Cherokee Nation, seated around a fire, with the Elders leading the discussion (Figure 5.1).

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FIGURE 5.1 

 arroll and Medicine Keepers Phyllis Edwards and Bonnie Kirk at the C land education curriculum development workshop. Photo by Nancy Rackliff.

The Elders’ discussion during the curriculum development workshop arose out of this hopeful setting and context. Despite assimilatory attempts at eradicating their cultural and land-based knowledge, their deliberations spoke to its continuation and their future investment in a small group of younger people who might help carry it forward. These deliberations resulted in four principles that guide the program activities today and serve as interrelated teachings for the student participants.

Building a Strong Relationship to the Land The concept of relationality is expressed in the Cherokee language as ᏂᎦᏓ ᎫᏍᏗ ᏗᏓᏓᏛᏂ/nigada gusdi didadadvhni, or “we are all related.” As is common in many other Indigenous cultures, this teaching includes human beings but also extends beyond the human to express relatedness with the land, water, and all life. At the workshop, Medicine Keeper Gary Vann stated, “We were always told, ‘You come from the land, and everything you need comes from the land. It’s your fault if you go hungry.’” These words from Gary’s parents stress the connection that Cherokee people have with the land and the responsibility to maintain that connection for spiritual and physical sustenance. The Medicine Keepers also discussed how past generations had to prepare for winter throughout the year. These practices entailed in-depth knowledge about seasonal availability of foods

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and medicines that directly inform Cherokee environmental knowledge today. Although the Medicine Keepers remarked how changes in lifestyles and climate have affected many of these practices, they simultaneously stressed the importance of incorporating Cherokee land-based values and cultural knowledge into everyday life.

Teach by Showing; Learn by Doing The Medicine Keepers emphasized the importance of the Cherokee language in conveying culturally specific knowledge and values. One example is the word for “teach.” The English concept of teaching comes across as pushy to many Cherokee speakers. Additionally, as expressed above, “education” carries negative connotations for many Cherokee elders who, as children, experienced the assimilative force of Western educational systems. By contrast, the Elders wanted the program to offer a different approach to education, centering the Cherokee phrase for “teach me”—ᏍᏇᏲᎲᎦ/squeyohvga—which more accurately translates to “show me.” The Medicine Keepers discussed how teaching by showing is a traditional Cherokee educational method. They remember that their Elders would say, “Come help me do this” when they sought to teach something. They discussed how, gradually, there came a point when you realized that no one was doing it with you anymore, which indicated that you had successfully learned the task. Furthermore, the Medicine Keepers noted that a descriptive language like Cherokee lessens the need for detail-oriented lessons. Fluent speakers today say, “We see pictures,” when someone is describing something in Cherokee. The Elders thus conveyed the importance of using the language in tandem with experiential educational methods to give students the opportunity to connect language use with traditional activities.

Communal and Spiritual Values The Medicine Keepers stressed the concept of working together as a guiding principle for the program. Crosslin Smith, spiritual leader and adviser to the Medicine Keepers, continually emphasizes the need to be in accord with each other and with all creation in order to live right spiritually. Medicine Keeper Ed Fields also emphasized the need to see one another as family in the program— to depend on each other and respect each other as relatives. Medicine Keeper Anna Sixkiller described the concept of working together in the language as ᏍᎩᏃᎩᎦᏪᏍᎦ/sginogigawesga: “If we work together, we’ll get somewhere.” This principle stresses interdependency and communalism as the building blocks of Cherokee futurity; recognizing one another’s strengths and putting them to use for the benefit of the community will result in a favorable outcome for the collective.

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Having a Good Time Lastly, the Medicine Keepers acknowledged the importance of having a good time and laughing often during the process of learning on and from the land, broadly conveyed in the language as ᎠᎵᎮᎵᏥᏓᏍᏗ/alihelitsidasdi: “enjoyment” or “pleasure.” They recalled that traditional Cherokee education always made plenty of room for storytelling and good-natured joking. They stressed that the program should strive to incorporate this important component of Cherokee instruction by creating a space for fellowship and learning that is fun and promotes overall well-being in all who participate. Considering relentless historical and ongoing colonial attempts to assimilate Indigenous people and dispossess them of their lands, expressing and experiencing joy on the land as Cherokees is indeed a radical act. Collectively, these principles assert and guide the enactment of relationality and optimism for Cherokee people: Envisioning a thriving future in good relationship with the land through learning and working together to perpetuate Cherokee knowledge and lifeways. The students and Elders have put these principles into practice in the context of the program, and although activities were necessarily stalled by the Coronavirus pandemic, the program and the ongoing work of the Medicine Keepers have garnered recognition and praise in numerous forums.7 One related and significant result of our work together is the establishment of the first-ever tribal conservation area in April 2022. The Cherokee Nation Medicine Keepers Preserve, or ᏅᏩᏙᎯᏯᏛ ᏅᏬᏘᎢ/nvwatohiyadv nvwoti’i/“the peaceful place of medicine,” is an 800-acre tract of tribal land located in Adair County, where the students and Medicine Keepers carry out many of the land-based education program activities. Its establishment marks the recognition by Cherokee Nation elected officials of the broad goals of the Medicine Keepers to perpetuate Cherokee land-based knowledge and to protect and care for reservation lands (Figure 5.2). The Cherokee Environmental Leadership Program is a Cherokee expression of land education, a model that has arisen out of the need to invest in Indigenous futures that can restore reciprocal relationships with the land toward the flourishing of all life. As Eve Tuck, Marcia McKenzie, and Kate McCoy write in their introduction to a special issue on Indigenous land education, “Land education de-centers settlers and settler futurity as the primary referents for possibility. Land education seeks decolonization, not settler emplacement. Land education is accountable to an Indigenous futurity” (2014, 18). In addition to their participation in the land education program, the students also assist in a community-based research project that is guided by Indigenous methodologies. We are working with three rural Cherokee communities to understand how Cherokee people are navigating fractionated landscapes to access plants for traditional uses. We hope this work can facilitate adaptive communitybased strategies for tribal land conservation and reacquisition. In doing so, we

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FIGURE 5.2 

 he Cherokee Nation Medicine Keepers Preserve (ᏅᏩᏙᎯᏯᏛ ᏅᏬᏘᎢ). T Photo by Clint Carroll.

orient ourselves not only to the damages that have led to the present—including the loss of nearly 98% of our land base since Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and the subsequent fencing, clearing, and fragmenting of the prairies, creeks, and forests where Cherokee people once gathered, fished, and hunted. We intently focus as well on the desire that Cherokees have to regain that access and thus regenerate the relationships and obligations to care for the land that this entails. In all, we view this work as future-building, addressing the pressing issues of our place and time—including climate change and the continued assaults on our lands and cultures—using Cherokee perspectives and strategies. This is an optimism that arises from loss but is nonetheless tempered by it. It is an optimism that perseveres in its desire to set in motion a reversal of that loss and to create a path toward flourishing.

Setting Nets and Planting Seeds: Nmé Restoration, Slow Movement, and Facing Climate Change On a sweltering fall day, I (Natasha) woke up to my first day of my fieldwork in Manistee, Michigan.8 It was September 202l, and the day of the annual Nmé Release Ceremony for the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians (Little River Ottawa) Natural Resources Department (NRD). The Little River Ottawa have

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been working to restore nmé to the Big Manistee Watershed for nearly 20 years. Nmé were once thought to have inhabited the waters of this area, but due to extensive settler policies, which led to the creation of dams and prominence of the logging industry, nmé’s habitat was destroyed. Today, nmé are listed as a threatened fish species in Michigan. The release ceremony, which happens annually in the fall, is when the community is invited out to release young fry back into the Manistee River. As I left town and entered the Manistee National Forest, the landscape began to change. The forest became much more extensive, and I passed fewer and fewer homes and more and more farm and fruit fields. As my GPS told me to turn down a road within the Manistee National Forest, I was greeted by an extensive tree canopy as the road turned from pavement to dirt. As I pulled up to the streamside rearing facility, the Big Manistee River came immediately into view. I saw that only a few cars were parked there, mostly by fisherman getting onto the waters early. The facility, situated next to the Big Manistee River, shares a parking lot with a boat launch, a popular spot for anglers. Where the sturgeon facility sits is Little River Ottawa tribal land, but most of the area is within the Manistee National Forest (Figure 5.3). I got out of my car and a fisherman immediately asked me if I could share more about

FIGURE 5.3 

Manistee river. Photo by Natasha Myhal.

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the release ceremony that would soon be happening. I shared what I could and proceeded to walk toward the streamside facility. My role that day was to volunteer and help out where needed. I set up the NRD swag table, where people could pick up totes, stickers, magnets, all with the sturgeon life cycle on them. Inside the streamside facility, I helped organize the buckets, where sturgeon would be placed and then released into the Manistee River. As people started to gather in the field in front of the release facility, some were masked, while others were not—a stark reminder of the ongoing COVID19 pandemic. As the event began, people gathered in the grass in front of the facility. First, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) conducted a pipe ceremony. Everyone listened intently as he spoke about the background of the ceremony and why he was doing it today. Next, the NRD lead of fisheries said a few words about the program’s history. He thanked all the partners in attendance and shared a brief history of the program. Then, everyone filed into the sturgeon facility and picked up buckets. Each bucket had two–three juvenile sturgeon and everyone walked to the edge of the boat ramp—as close as one could get to the water—and gently placed the sturgeon in the stream. Roughly 400 sturgeon were released that day. I distinctly remember how some nmé darted away quickly, while others hung back close to the rocks, apparently apprehensive to leave (Figure 5.4). The river represents a new environment, in a sense, since prior to this they lived in a streamside rearing facility. However, since these sturgeon originally come from the same water they were being released back to, it was almost as if they were beginning to re-learn these waters. The hope is for many of the nmé released to survive and return to the same area to spawn when they become mature adults. This release ceremony embodies both optimism and apprehension, as the Little River Ottawa continually work for a better future for nmé and other non-human relatives, while also recognizing that these nmé will now be vulnerable to a changing environment in the waters. Nevertheless, the elements of the release ceremony support a feeling of hopefulness as the community gathers to send nmé off in a good way. The cultural and scientific methods employed during the sturgeon release represent a continuation of sturgeon knowledge. The continuation of nmé knowledge provides hope and optimism for Indigenous restoration science. I saw a clear divide between science and culture at the release that day. The science was clearly delineated with the NRD, while the spiritual part of the release was conducted by the THPO. This division, whether intentional or unintentional, describes an uneasiness of acknowledging Indigenous knowledge as science or the interconnectedness between the two. Western thought would have these categories as separate, but within Indigenous communities, there is no way to separate the two.

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FIGURE 5.4 

 mé about to be released in the water, with the Forest Service sign in N the background. Photo by Natasha Myhal.

As I released my bucket into the river, a little kid next to me shouted excitedly to the nmé he was about to release “Have a good day!” This moment showed the sheer joy as nmé were released for the first time. Each person who attended that day formed a relationship with the nmé they released, and many said a few words to wish them well on their journey. Hope was fueled by the enjoyment of being out on the land. Everyone who attended the ceremony was able to release a nmé, thereby playing a role in the continuation of the individual fish’s life and the species’ presence in the region’s waters. As nmé are brought back to their home waters, a feeling of optimism and even joy follows. Yet, those who work closely with the program know that nmé’s environment has changed significantly. These changes present a whole host of unknowns for this Anishinaabe relative. However, the above excerpt from my field notes attests to continuing hope. Hope exists within a world that is always changing. The Anishinaabe use stories (both old and new) that teach one how to “survive and live in an ever-changing environment” (Doerfler et al. 2013, xxii). Colonialism is expressed through metaphors of Wiindigo (a giant cannibal monster featured in many oral narratives). Wiindigo interrupted Anishinaabe

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lifeways, through oppressive US governmental policies such as forced relocation, the creation of reservations, and boarding schools (Fleming 2017). As many Anishinaabe see it, Wiindigo is also behind climate change, as its destructive power disrupts the natural world and continues to alter Indigenous environments. Anishinaabe (Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe) communities continue to live with Wiindigo’s effects, which are now exacerbated by climate change. These effects include extreme weather events and more unpredictable seasons. These impacts affect tribal nations’ ability to practice traditional lifeways if their habitats are continually under ecological stress. Despite these deliberate campaigns, Indigenous peoples continue to enact self-determination to protect non-humans important to their communities. Indigenous optimism is apparent through the continuation of the Nmé Stewardship Program. Many Little River Ottawa citizens are learning alongside the sturgeon program, making it a vital source of cultural and scientific knowledge for the community. The program’s continuation continually renews interest from the broader public and the tribal community to learn about nmé practices.

Conclusion Optimism gestures to both affect and time; it is an affective sense as much as it is an assessment of where we’ve been, where we are now, and where we might be going. Indigenous optimism, then, takes stock of colonial pasts and presents, focuses on Indigenous persistence and renewal despite these impositions, and envisions decolonial futures that do not re-create the traumas experienced under these systems of rule and the domination of people and the Earth. This type of work is both intellectual and practical. We’ve sought to show how, through our community-based work, we are helping to build futures that do not replicate colonial landscapes and mindsets. Cherokee land-based education, coupled with community-based research on land access and conservation strategies, seeks to perpetuate Indigenous knowledge while creating the space on which to practice it. In turn, Indigenous conservation seeks not only to protect lands, but to enact our relational obligations to caretake them. Nmé restoration presents an outlook of hope through not only the continuation of the program, but the revival of the Anishinaabeg’s oldest clan relative. With this revival, nmé knowledge will make its way back to the community. Initiatives like these require thinking against assimilatory and dominating policies, be they mainstream Western educational systems or colonial models of natural resource management. Putting this into practice entails a shift toward relationality—an investment in the future that seeks ecological restoration through the restoration of relationships (see Kimmerer 2013). Indigenous optimism arises out of struggle, and, as Diné scholar Melanie Yazzie asserts, the necessity to “keep the story going.”9 For Indigenous communities, expressing optimism does not forget or ignore the current impacts of colonialism they continue to navigate and fight against. Rather, Indigenous optimism is an

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approach laden with caution due to the everyday manifestation of these impacts on Indigenous lands (Johnston 2000) and concern for the world that future generations will inherit. It is also an optimism informed by ethical and moral teachings handed down across generations, as expressed in the acts of regeneration, restoration, and revitalization that we observed and described during our fieldwork. Echoing Yazzie’s words, as Indigenous peoples, we can’t afford not to keep moving forward, fighting against the destruction of Indigenous worlds, and building hopeful futures for all people through Indigenous relationality with a living land.

Notes 1 “Climate Change,” Climate Change, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/climate-change. html (accessed August 11, 2022). 2 We intentionally state our training in American Indian Studies to specify the particular places and intellectual genealogies in which our respective academic programs arose. Myhal received a bachelor’s degree in American Indian Studies from the University of Minnesota–Morris (the site of a former Indian Boarding School), and Carroll received a minor in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona (which houses the first established PhD program in the field). We also acknowledge the variations (and resulting new directions) that these intellectual traditions have inspired as articulated by Native American and Indigenous Studies and Critical Indigenous Studies (Myhal received a master’s degree in Indigenous Studies from the University of Kansas and both Carroll and Myhal are active members of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association). For more intellectual and institutional history on the field and its various iterations, see Champagne and Stauss (2002) and Moreton-Robinson (2016). 3 It is notable that the American Anthropological Association recently released a formal apology to Indigenous communities in November 2021, citing the aforementioned dark history: https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/AnnouncDetail. aspx?ItemNumber=28239 (accessed August 2, 2022). See also Cattelino and Simpson’s (2022) informative and provocative review. 4 For introductions to this burgeoning field, see Evering and Longboat (2013) and Whyte (2018b). 5 This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS 1654217. It is further supported by a grant from the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. 6 See Carroll (2015, 2020) and Carroll et al. (2018). 7 For more information on the program, see the project website and blog: https:// knowingtheland.edublogs.org. 8 This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS 2116945. 9 Statement made by co-host Melanie Yazzie on The Red Nation Podcast’s Red Power Hour episode, “Hope Is Revolutionary, Hope Is Indigenous (Pt. 2),” published January 2, 2022.

References Atalay, Sonya. 2012. Community-Based Archaeology: Research With, By, and For Indigenous and Local Communities. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Baldy, Cutcha Risling. 2014. “Why I Teach ‘the Walking Dead’ in My Native Studies Classes.” The Nerds of Color. https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2014/04/24/why-i-teachthe-walking-dead-in-my-native-studies-classes/ (accessed May 30, 2022). Carroll, Clint. 2015. Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Carroll, Clint. 2020. “Cherokee Relationships to Land: Reflections on a Historic Plant Gathering Agreement between Buffalo National River and the Cherokee Nation.” Parks Stewardship Forum 36 (1):154–158. Carroll, Clint, Eva Garroutte, Carolyn Noonan, and Dedra Buchwald. 2018. “Using PhotoVoice to Promote Land Conservation and Indigenous Well-Being in Oklahoma.” EcoHealth, 15:450–461. Cattelino, Jessica R., and Audra Simpson. 2022. “Rethinking Indigeneity: Scholarship at the Intersection of Native American Studies and Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 51: 365–381. Champagne, Duane, and Jay Stauss, eds. 2002. Native American Studies in Higher Education: Models for Collaboration between Universities and Indigenous Nations. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Chilisa, Bagele. 2011. Indigenous Research Methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Corntassel, Jeff. 2008. “Toward Sustainable Self-Determination: Rethinking the Contemporary Indigenous-Rights Discourse.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 33 (1): 105–132. Davis, Heather, and Zoe Todd. 2017. “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16 (4): 761–780. Doerfler, Jill, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark. 2013. “Bagijige: Making an Offering.” In Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World Through Stories, edited by Jill Doerfler, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, xv–xxvii. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Evering, Brigitte, and Dan Roronhiakewen Longboat. 2013. “An Introduction to Indigenous Environmental Studies: From Principles into Action.” In Contemporary Studies in Environmental and Indigenous Pedagogies: A curricula of Stories and Place, edited by Andrejs Kulnieks, Dan Roronhiakewen Longboat, and Kelly Young, 241–257. New York: Springer. Fleming, Bezhigobinesikwe Elaine. 2017. “Nanaboozhoo and the Wiindigo: An Ojibwe History from Colonization to the Present.” Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education 28 (3). https://tribalcollegejournal.org/nanaboozhoo-wiindigoojibwe-history-colonization-present/ (accessed May 30, 2022). Gross, Lawrence W. 2014. Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being. New York: Routledge. Harrison, Faye V., ed. 1991. Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association/Association of Black Anthropologists. Johnston, Alison. 2000. “Indigenous Peoples and Ecotourism: Bringing Indigenous Knowledge and Rights into the Sustainability Equation.” Tourism Recreation Research 25 (2): 89–96. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.

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Kovach, Margaret Elizabeth. 2010. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lempert, William. 2018. “Generative Hope in the Postapocalyptic Present.” Cultural Anthropology 33 (2): 202–212. Lewis, Courtney. 2021. “Brief Research Commentary: The US Indigenous Food Sovereignty Movement’s Impact on Understandings of COVID-19 in Indian Country.” Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 43 (2): 107–133. Medicine, Beatrice. 2001. Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining “Native”: Selected Writings of Dr. Beatrice Medicine. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, ed. 2016. Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2017. “Relationality: A Key Presupposition of an Indigenous Social Research Paradigm.” In Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, edited by Chris Anderson and Jean M. O’Brien, 69–77. New York: Routledge. Nelson, Melissa K., and Daniel Shilling, eds. 2018. Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press. Tuck, Eve. 2009. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review 79 (3): 409–428. Tuck, Eve, Marcia McKenzie, and Kate McCoy. 2014. “Land Education: Indigenous, Post-Colonial, and Decolonizing Perspectives on Place and Environmental Education Research.” Environmental Education Research 20 (1): 1–23. Whyte, Kyle. 2017. “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene.” In The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, edited by Jon Christensen, Ursula K. Heise, and Michelle Niemann, 206–215. New York: Routledge. Whyte, Kyle P. 2018a. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1 (1–2): 224–242. Whyte, Kyle P. 2018b. “Critical Investigations of Resilience: A Brief Introduction to Indigenous Environmental Studies & Sciences.” Daedalus 147 (2): 136–147. Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing.

6 PUTTING THE PIECES IN PLACE Optimistic Futuring in Transition Culture Anna J. Willow

In February of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world and one of the most intense extratropical cyclones on record brought severe flooding to the United Kingdom, I attended an online forum featuring Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition movement and the author of several books popular in permaculture and resilience circles. An international “movement of movements,” Transition offers a proactive, relocalizing response to resource scarcity and climate change. Transition is known for its sanguine approach, and Hopkins himself exuded positive energy. During the question-and-answer portion of the session, I had the opportunity to inquire where, given the gravity of our current situation, his abundant hope came from. “Pessimism,” Hopkins told me pragmatically, “is a privilege we simply don’t have.”1 This volume defines optimism as the belief that the future will be better for our present efforts; this chapter considers optimism’s role in shaping how Transition movement participants approach the future and the actions they take to create it. The Transition movement originated in 2006, when citizens of Totnes, England, began exploring ways to reduce local energy consumption and end fossil fuel dependency. From there, the idea spread rapidly. Today, Transition is a loosely integrated global network with over 1,000 official registered groups (and countless unofficial ones) in dozens of countries. Several interrelated attributes set Transition apart from other environmental social movements. First, Transition is intentionally self-organizing, with each local group coalescing as a unique corollary of its community of emergence, its members, and their interests (Biddau, Armenti, and Cottone 2016; Felicetti 2017). Second,

DOI: 10.4324/b23231-7

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Transition is not a protest movement in any conventional sense but rather empowers participants to determine their communities’ destiny through practical here-and-now action (Henfrey and Kenrick 2015). Profoundly skeptical of top-down policies and prescriptions, it encourages personal experimentation with better ways to live. Transition thus exemplifies an “environmentalism of everyday life” that seeks to replace unsustainable practices and circulations of power with more sustainable ones (Schlosberg and Coles 2016, 161). Third, Transition is explicit about its goal of changing and generating culture. Far beyond simply conserving resources and protecting regions, Transition calls for a clear and intentional shift “from one ideology to another” (Polk 2015, 92). Finally, Transition is distinguished by its positive tone. Its “applied optimism” (Hopkins 2008, 15) has been welcomed by individuals and groups struggling to respond constructively to the conjoined challenges of ecological decline, climate change, and social injustice. Transition movement participants are far from alone in believing that Western industrial society’s exploitative, extractivist worldview has not only charted a course for our collective demise but also engendered profound personal dissatisfaction and despair. Arturo Escobar recently proposed the new interdisciplinary field of Transition Studies to encompass scholarship and engagement surrounding a diverse array of transition discourses and frameworks (Escobar 2018, 138). The quest to reconsider the dominant model and concurrently cultivate other, more fulfilling alternatives is underway around the world. In the global Great Transition, all communities—wealthy and impoverished, privileged and marginalized, North and South—are sites in which new ways of existing might be discovered. At the center of this new field is the shift from a worldview that accepts only one dominant reality to one that embraces the simultaneous existence of multiple realities—what Escobar calls the pluriverse. Conventional thinking about reality and possibility—based as it is upon duality, developmentalism, patriarchy, and their trappings—will not allow us to achieve the other, better worlds we desire, he proclaims: We must “imagine possibility differently” (Escobar 2020, x). While unique in their cultural specificities and local logics, transition visions share the conviction that change is inevitable. Modern society—and much that goes with it—will meet its end in the foreseeable future. Instead of a disastrous future, Transition anticipates a potentially magnificent transformation. Transitioners worldwide understand that we have the capacity to use mindful foresight to design a multitude of desirable futures. Eager to experiment, they believe in the value of personal transformation and grassroots action. Both those involved in the Transition movement and those who participate—sometimes unknowingly—in informal transition processes endeavor to tell a courageous new story about human trajectories and possibilities. As Rob Hopkins observes, in contemporary society

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we are surrounded by stories of the unlimited power of technology to overcome any problems, of a world that will forever amaze us with the brilliance of its own inventiveness; or by stories that tell of the rapid and disastrous unravelling of everything in an apocalyptic societal collapse. Transition tells a different story. (2011, 76) Drawing on ethnographic research, reflexive experience as a “native anthropologist” (Bunzl 2004) in my own central Ohio Transition group, and a comprehensive review of transition-related literature, this chapter explores movement participants’ future-oriented assumptions and conscious future-creation practices in order to trace the significance of optimism in Transition culture. I use the phrase optimistic futuring to indicate a positive, purposive, and active relationship with the future as a temporal frame. Optimism in Transition culture is conveyed in participants’ beliefs that change is both inevitable and directable. It is displayed more concretely through daily practices that put pieces of a sustainable and fulfilling next world in place. I argue that optimism plays an important role in shaping the “everyday activism” (Mansbridge 2012, 437; see also King, this volume) that distinguishes Transition from other contemporary environmental social movements, as it manifests in forms ranging from waste reduction and gardening to community building and creative expression. As we will see, alternative worldviews exist not only among the stridently radical, but are all around us, waiting to be uncovered and actualized.

Optimistic Research: Transition as Self-Medication The first time I told someone that my research on Transition was a form of selfmedication, I meant it as a joke. But the more I thought about it, the more I had to admit that my witty proclamation was very close to the truth. For most of my career as an environmental anthropologist, I’ve studied how people respond to imposed—and often extreme—manifestations of natural resource extraction. In the Canadian Subarctic, I worked with First Nations activists forced to defend their land from clearcutting and their bodies from mercury contamination. Closer to home, I investigated how and why citizens in the Midwestern United States resist unwelcome shale energy development in their literal and figurative backyards. This research has always been meaningful, and the people I’ve met along the way are truly inspiring. But environmental destruction and injustice are disheartening topics. While enduringly uneasy about my ability to walk away—even if only temporarily—from devastation, I needed to be able to get up each morning and face my own children and my students. While I never claimed neutrality regarding the struggles I describe, the relationship between my anthropological work and my personal activism has grown

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much closer in recent years. The convergence of tenure (with the perceived academic freedom it provides) and the all-encompassing Trumpian assault of the late 2010s (with its concomitant loss of faith in top-down processes to solve environmental problems) convinced me that working in my own community was not merely an option—it was an absolute necessity. Early in 2017, I started attending meetings and volunteering regularly with Sustainable Delaware Ohio (SDO), an established local sustainability group. We led recycling, composting, and anti-plastics campaigns. With a growing social network and well-known interests in environmental justice and decarbonization, I was invited to join a smaller, overlapping group of individuals seeking to catalyze deeper change. Over many months, we talked (together) and read (alone) about numerous possibilities. With its call for profound systemic change, its adaptability, and its pragmatic positivity, Transition emerged as an appealing option. For me, Transition’s optimism signaled a strategy for survival, both in the personal sense I sought and as I pondered how humanity might endure the tumultuous times ahead. Gradually, the lines in my agenda that formerly separated academic from activist endeavors blurred. I realized that my growing theoretical interest in the anthropology of the future could be nurtured right here at home. In 2018, I began taking notes on the gatherings I participated in and sometimes helped to guide. In the months that followed, my engaged research on the Transition movement became an official project. The ideas in this chapter are informed by several interrelated sources of data. Within my local Transition group, I completed over 140 hours of participantobservation as well as in-depth interviews with key participants. I planned to expand my study in 2020 to encompass other North American Transition groups, but the COVID-19 pandemic put these plans on hold. Nonetheless, I was able to conduct a qualitative open-form survey of 22 geographically distributed individuals. Deliberately designed to approximate the tone of an ethnographic interview in a written format, the survey assessed how Transition participants view the future of their communities and how their visions and current actions coincide (Willow 2022).2 Approaching Transition as a global network facilitated by modern communication technology (especially online interaction in the form of websites, shared documents, social media posts, webinars, and online trainings), I found that my involvement in the movement’s virtual community augmented my fieldnotes and my understanding of its shared aims and internal diversity (see Hine 2015). A review of literature and media published by and about the Transition movement complemented my primary data collection. In what follows, I explore the conceptual and concrete ways in which optimistic futuring is expressed within Transition culture. I first describe Transition’s distinctive approach to the future, including its foundational acceptance of the inevitability and directability of change. I then present a sampling of the daily practices that movement participants undertake as they work to bring pieces of a positive next world into the here and now.

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Embracing (and Creating) Change The conviction that the world we know will soon undergo major transformations is at the heart of transition discourse. Indeed, numerous socioecological systemic changes—the increased frequency and severity of climate-exacerbated natural disasters, political conflicts and population shifts triggered by resource scarcity, and global supply chain breakdowns—are already evident. In agreement with leading scientific experts, Transition participants acknowledge anthropogenic climate change, ecosystem decline, and species extinctions as inevitable. What remains to be determined is not whether or not these disasters will occur, but how catastrophic they will be (IPCC 2018; IPBES 2019). Transition participants agree, too, with critics of business-as-usual economics who insist that growth cannot continue forever on a finite planet (e.g., Daly 1996). The end of economic expansion will upend current social and political arrangements. It is not a matter of if but rather of when and how. Although the end of modern civilization is almost never broached as a possibility by adherents of dominant Western frameworks that accept neoliberal capitalism as the only alternative, Transition takes it seriously (Escobar 2018). Whether it transpires as a catastrophic collapse or—far more preferable—a well-managed descent, change will come. Transition faces this fact and advises us to be ready. In this way, Transition represents a radical departure from the status quo. As philosopher Jonathan Lear asserts in Radical Hope (his book-length meditation on the experiences of Plenty Coups, a Crow chief who bore witness to the end of the Plains Indian way of life), cultures do not typically teach their youth to prepare for the possibility that their entire system of values, ideals, and identities may one day cease to exist. Yet this is exactly what Indigenous North American people endured—and it is what now appears imminent for all of us. Lear’s aim is not to prove or defend Plenty Coups’ perspective; it is instead “to establish what we might legitimately hope at a time when the sense of purpose and meaning that has been bequeathed to us by our culture has collapsed” (2006, 104). In such situations, radical hope emerges as hope for future revival that transcends current understandings of what that future might look like (Lear 2006, 95). Infused as it is with uncertain optimism and pragmatic determination, Transition likewise encourages people to embrace change and avoid despair. Again and again, the Transition participants I spoke with insisted that change is inevitable. As one central Ohio group convener told me, Things are going to change. We can’t sustain this. So, we can either have this complete breakdown into chaos or we can create communities so that when various structures fall out of place—or just disintegrate—we’ve got some cores. We’re not hunkered down in our little bunker trying to shoot our way out like the American mythology says. We are actually building a different world. (Robin, interview, July 15, 2019)

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Survey respondents concurred, declaring (to cite one clear but concise example) that “we must be resilient and flexible and embrace change as it comes” (Leah, survey participant). We must also, as these statements suggest, prepare proactively and respond expediently as we design desirable futures. Transition takes a long temporal view. Looking beyond (and hoping to evade) the stress and suffering likely to accompany dramatic systemic change, Transition regards our current crisis “not as a cause for despair but as a transformational opportunity, a prospective change for the better that should be embraced rather than feared” (Alexander and Gleeson 2019, 106). As noted above, Transition explicitly aims to create new cultural configurations. Transition scholars have recently identified connections between this overarching objective and the intentional future-creation activities associated with the field of design. In the emerging realm of Transition Design, conventional notions of design are expanded to encompass the generation of not only new objects, structures, and institutions, but also of new cultures and new ways of thinking. In common with participants in the Slow City movement—a project that overlaps considerably with Transition and shares its locally focused but globally networked approach—Transition Design seeks to create “the future in the present” and promotes resilience by generating “possible future ways of being” (Pink and Seale 2017, 189). Transition Design, explains Escobar, is “oriented to longer time horizons and explicitly informed by visions of sustainable futures. The creation of visions of and for transitions is the cornerstone of the approach” (2018, 54). Looking forward to decades and generations to come, Transition participants seek to build healthier and more durable environmental, economic, and political relationships (Irwin 2015). While envisioning positive change is a crucial first step, Transition participants make no claim that wishing alone will produce results. Far from a complacent chorus, the optimism that infuses Transition is a call to action: The future will only be better if we take concerted action today. Transition participants view themselves as attentive components of socioecological systems who are capable of impactful preemptive action. By observing current problems, anticipating probable trajectories, and formulating potential solutions, humans become powerful catalysts for systemic transformation. Creating the future does not proceed without limitations and constraints, but we contribute to its creation nevertheless. Acutely aware of their role in the Great Transition, movement participants see their communities as living laboratories—opportunities to test new ways of living. Fittingly, Transition has been described as “a social experiment on a huge scale” (Hopkins 2013, 48) and a “real-life social-innovation design experiment” (Escobar 2018, 145). As Terry Irwin (director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Transition Design Institute) argues, living in and through transition times calls for self-reflection and a new way of “being” in the world. This change must be based upon a new mindset or worldview and posture (internal) that lead to different ways of interacting with others (external) that informs problem solving and design. (2015, 235)

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Transition demands that we think differently about change. Crossing scales by solving monumental global problems at local levels, it urges people to consciously redesign themselves, their communities, and (by extension) the world (Martindale 2015). Most social change movements begin by critiquing what’s wrong with today and push for change toward a specific goal. Transition, on the other hand, begins with an optimistic vision of tomorrow and pulls. This difference was evident at numerous local meetings I attended, where dreams were celebrated as an essential launchpad for directed change. “The first step is to dream,” said one woman. “We’re only constrained by what we think is possible” (fieldnotes, November 27, 2018). “Our job is to dream the bigger dream,” said another (fieldnotes, January 12, 2019). In contrast to fear-based messages that induce people to run away from the possibility of a dystopian tomorrow, Transition envisions a positive future. It gives people something to run toward as well as strategies and support for taking steps in the right direction. This sentiment punctuated my local interviews. “If my vision for the future is apocalyptic, then what’s the point of doing anything anyway?” said one central Ohio Transition participant. “I have to have a different vision or I don’t know what the purpose is [for my actions]” (Meryl, interview, July 15, 2019). The same sense of positive direction was apparent in the visions of brighter futures shared by survey respondents, as they offered comprehensive descriptions of renewable energy systems, green technology and transportation, healthy natural environments, microfarms, and vegetarian diets. Conscious of the ability of a small group of prescient “early adopters” to instigate sweeping cultural transformations, my local Transition group opted to invest time and energy in the creation of a local climate action plan, but never lost sight of the simple significance of talking with neighbors about climate change and role modeling new, more sustainable ways of thinking and living (fieldnotes, October 12, 2019).

Optimistic Futuring in the Here and Now Long-range planning guided by visioning (generating a positive image of the future) and backcasting (working back in time to identify the steps required to accomplish it) are important aspects of Transition’s future-creation process (Willow 2021). Complementing this long-term approach, Transition participants also create the next world in more immediate ways. While some components of the positive futures Transitioners envision require many steps—and many years—to achieve, others can be implemented by individuals and communities in the here and now. Evocative of the phenomenon political scientist Jane Mansbridge calls everyday activism, these ways of talking and acting are not consciously coordinated but are nevertheless inspired and encouraged by Transition and are “consciously intended to change others’ ideas or behaviors in directions advocated by the movement” (2012, 437–438). Through simple, quotidian undertakings—things like waste reduction, gardening, community

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building, and creative expression—Transition participants enact elements of the future they desire in their daily lives. In his aptly titled The Power of Just Doing Stuff, Rob Hopkins argues that these kinds of small-scale actions are essential. In addition to embracing the inevitability of change, he says, people must come to terms with the fact that “no one is coming to the rescue of you or your community” (2013, 36). Transition receives this revelation as empowering rather than daunting. Hopkins leads the way in celebrating the opportunities that arise when ordinary people realize that “they are themselves the ones they’ve been waiting for. They don’t wait for anyone’s permission. They just do stuff. Imaginative, playful, serious and world-changing stuff” (2013, 37). This approach to future-creation lifts the metaphorical weight of the world off Transition participants’ shoulders and encourages them to start making change in their homes, neighborhoods, and communities. Situating modest actions as nodes in a vast global network, participants engage in their local work confident that analogous action is under way elsewhere. As one of my interviewees reflected, it’s not about setting out to change the world all at once. “Look down your block or in your neighborhood and see what you can change there” (James, interview, February 1, 2019). “Dream of a better, more sustainable future for our city. What do you see?” So read an August 20, 2019, post to the 800+ members of Sustainable Delaware Ohio’s Facebook group. Instead of grand futuristic visions, most commenters responded with simple, implementable ideas: “Package free [zero-waste] shopping.” “No more plastic.” “Gardens in every yard.” By implementing these (and comparable) changes, Transition participants begin creating the world they hope for today, thereby collapsing boundaries between dreams and reality, present and future. Reducing the quantity of resources and the amount of energy they consume and minimizing the waste they generate is a goal shared by many Transition participants, with some approaching the high bar set by zero-waste living. One woman I spoke with shared a remarkably long list of actions she had taken to bring sustainability into her everyday life. “I was very intrigued initially by the idea of not making trash,” she said, and I started doing things like bulk food shopping and taking your own containers to the store. And using reusable items: napkins, silverware. Making zero-waste kits. Taking your own coffee mug with you. Whatever you can do to not make trash. I would even take my compost home from work. And the purchases that we make as a family have changed to more sustainable products. Using shampoo bars or shampoos and conditioners that have bottles I can send back to be refilled. Shopping at the farmers market and buying from local growers. Doing things like line drying my clothes, planting a garden, making my own cleaning products, making my own lotions, shopping secondhand, riding my bike, and carpooling when I can. (Margaret, interview, March 20, 2020)

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Many of the actions on this list were echoed by survey respondents who answered my prompt asking them to describe how the actions they take today support their positive vision of the year 2040. While few individuals are able to do everything itemized here, most reported some combination of these activities, in addition to walking where they need to go, giving up their personal vehicle and/or using a car share program, (re)learning basic self-sufficiency skills, and participating in trainings that help them accept the loss of familiar lifeways and acknowledge ­taking action as a personal responsibility (Henfrey and Kenrick 2015). In my own local community, for the North American movement participants I surveyed, and for Transition groups around the world, vegetable gardening is one of the most popular activities associated with the movement. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, eating reminds us—many times each day—of our inescapable connection to the non-human ecologies that sustain us. For another, food is essential to our lives, yet the industrial system that supplies us is unhealthy, unjust, and obviously broken. Not least, gardening is simple, pleasurable, and eminently doable. Growing food is a way to make concrete changes at a local level, a way to demonstrate and partake in more sustainable flows of critical resources and the power attached to them (Schlosberg and Coles 2016). In many cases, this transformation begins only steps from participants’ homes in backyard gardens. Often, it expands to encompass work with community gardens, community supported agriculture cropshares (CSAs), and/or backyard chicken keeping. Many survey respondents highlighted growing food as the most significant thing they do to support their vision of the future. As one woman shared, I am involved with [a] project that plants food to share in public and private spaces throughout the neighborhood. Every year, we expand the number of planters and amount of food that is grown. I have a huge garden of my own and am teaching my grandchildren how to grow food and harvest wild edibles. (Bethany, survey participant) Complementing their small-scale produce production, Transition participants often compost food scraps and eat a plant-based diet (vegan, vegetarian, or flexitarian). For Transition participants, gardening just makes sense: Not only is it a recurring feature of positive future visions, but it also has important implications for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (Hawken 2017) and is easily achievable today. I was initially surprised by the amount of time Transition participants devote to building community connections and social networks. On the surface, strengthening relationships with others appears to have little to do with the environment or sustainability. Within the Transition movement, however, future wellbeing is approached holistically, with social and natural systems viewed as interconnected and equally important. In this context, community is an essential component of local resilience. According to Transition movement author Carolyn Baker,

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“in  a chaotic, collapsing world, neighborlessness may well become lethal. For this reason, we should be cultivating connections with neighbors and others in our communities sooner, rather than later” (2011, 49). Relationships with others are thus a powerful resource to be purposely nurtured—a piece of the next world that we can (and must) put in place today. As one central Ohio Transitioner told me, such relationships are central to his vision for the future. “I’d like to have stronger connections between people and agencies and organizations here in town so that when things happen that might be calamitous or challenging, we bend together and we support each other,” he said. “I think it’s [about] building relationships. Connections with people” (James, interview, February 1, 2020). Likewise, numerous survey respondents discussed their own optimistic future in terms of community building. They described, for example, their ongoing work to “facilitate dialogue to better support and equip people to work together to find solutions to their conflicts” (Tori, survey participant) and their focus on “fostering the network of people who support inner adaptation and transformation” (Becca, survey participant). As another explained, it’s about “building a community, providing resources via website, holding space, having conversations, and inviting action” (Geena, survey participant). Diverse modes of creative expression (music, art, and literature) offer yet another opportunity for Transition participants to insert pieces of the optimistic future they envision into the world of today. For Robin, an accomplished musician and poet, composing and performing songs and lyrics that articulate the possibility of a better world is a way to remind listeners that “we need a different song” to guide our lives and concurrently builds a sense of community by welcoming audiences to public events (fieldnotes, July 11, 2019). For Margaret, an artist and teacher of art, the sustainable changes she has made in her own life constitute an important form of optimistic self-expression. While she once produced more conventional works, she explained that she has recently begun to think differently about art. “For me, living is more a work of art than a painting,” she said, “I’m kind of bored by painting because that’s what everybody thinks, traditionally, is a work of art. But I think coming up with a novel idea and living in a new way is much more exciting” (Margaret, interview, March 27, 2020). In my own writing as well, Transition participants’ visions of the future come to feel tangible and achievable through imaginative ethnographic prose (see Willow 2021). If the goal of Transition is to change our collective cultural story, creative expression has a vital role to play.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have described how the positive, purposive, and active work of optimistic futuring plays out within Transition movement culture. As we have seen, Transition participants approach socioecological change as simultaneously inevitable and directable. By undertaking simple actions that bring elements of

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the future into the present, they put pieces of a sustainable and fulfilling next world in place. Through deliberate action and role modeling, they express their hope for the future each and every day. As one survey respondent declared, her vision of the future is reflected in everything I do now. I live in an all-electric house powered by the sun. I grow organic vegetables and fruits, own an electric car, live gently on the land, volunteer with my Transition Initiative, volunteer in the town, try to be an example, and have lots of fun with neighbors. (Winter, survey participant) “I am trying to live like it already is 2040,” proclaimed another, by “building resilience at home and in my community and inspiring others” (Jamie, survey participant). In the Transition movement and far beyond, pieces of the future are built little-by-little, hour-by-hour. Margaret’s zero-waste shopping trip, Bethany’s garden harvest, James’s neighborly conversation, Robin’s musical performance: These pieces of the future are already present—portals to a promising next world. As Sarah Pink and Juan Francisco Salazar argue, by embracing new forms of creative, speculative, and participatory ethnography, anthropology has the potential to contribute in significant ways to “the making of alternative futures” (2017,  3). This chapter suggests several options for anthropologists seeking to participate in optimistic future creation. We can begin by illuminating how people design their futures, both in the long-term (as they formulate assumptions and plan accordingly) and in the exciting immediate term (as they enact elements of the world they wish to see). We can elucidate connections between what people dream of and what they actually do. And we can amplify inspiring future-creation practices that exist all around us, especially those undertaken by ordinary citizens and often overlooked. What do people believe the future will bring? Which aspects of the future do they choose to implement? Why and how? With what results? At the same time, we can ask questions that reveal future-creation’s complex social and political dimensions. How, for example, do personal visions become collective? Why does optimistic futuring sometimes fail? What (or who) stands in its way? Finally, in our research, writing, and daily lives, we can go beyond enriched understandings of others’ relationships with the future to consider how we might put pieces of our own positive futures in place.

Notes 1 The February 18, 2020 webinar was organized by Transition US. To learn more about the Transition movement, see https://transitionnetwork.org/ and https://www. transitionus.org/. 2 Throughout this chapter, pseudonyms are used to protect interviewees and survey respondents’ privacy.

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References Alexander, Samuel, and Brendan Gleeson. 2019. Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Baker, Carolyn. 2011. Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition. New York: iUniverse Inc. Biddau, Fulvio, Alessandra Armenti, and Paolo Cottone. 2016. “Socio-Psychological Aspects of Grassroots Participation in the Transition Movement: An Italian Case Study.” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 4 (1): 142–165. Bunzl, Matti. 2004. “Boas, Foucault, and the “Native Anthropologist”: Notes Toward a Neo‐Boasian Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 106 (3): 435–442. Daly, Herman E. 1996. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Boston: Beacon Press. Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Escobar, Arturo. 2020. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Felicetti, Andrea. 2017. Deliberative Democracy and Social Movements: Transition Initiatives in the Public Sphere. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Hawken, Paul, ed. 2017. Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. New York: Penguin. Henfrey, Tom, and Justin Kenrick. 2015. Climate, Commons and Hope: The Transition Movement in Global Perspective. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Transnational Institute. Hine, Christine. 2015. Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday. London: Bloomsbury. Hopkins, Rob. 2008. The Transition Handbook. Totnes: Green Books. Hopkins, Rob. 2011. The Transition Companion: Making Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Hopkins, Rob. 2013. The Power of Just Doing Stuff: How Local Action Can Change the World. Cambridge: Green Books. IPBES. 2019. Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Bonn, Germany: IPBES. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3553579 (accessed October 12, 2021). IPCC. 2018. Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty. https://www.ipcc.ch/ sr15/ (accessed September 6, 2019). Irwin, Terry. 2015. “Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research.” Design and Culture 7 (2): 229–246. Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 2012. “Everyday Activism.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, Vol. I, edited by David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam, 437–439. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Martindale, Leigh. 2015. “Understanding Humans in the Anthropocene: Finding Answers in Geoengineering and Transition Towns.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33 (5): 907–924.

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Pink, Sarah, and Juan Francisco Salazar. 2017. “Anthropologies and Futures: Setting the Agenda.” In Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds, edited by Juan Francisco Salazar, Sarah Pink, Andrew Irving, and Johannes Sjöberg, 3–22. London: Bloomsbury. Pink, Sarah, and Kirsten Seale. 2017. “Imagining and Making Alternative Futures: Slow Cities as Sites for Anticipation and Trust.” In Another Economy is Possible: Culture and Economy in a Time of Crisis, edited by Manuel Castells et al., 187–214. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Polk, Emily. 2015. Communicating Global to Local Resiliency: A Case Study of the Transition Movement. Lanham, MA: Lexington Books. Schlosberg, David, and Romand Coles. 2016. “The New Environmentalism of Everyday Life: Sustainability, Material Flows and Movements.” Contemporary Political Theory 15 (2): 160–181. Willow, Anna J. 2021. “The World We (Re)Build: An Ethnography of the Future.” Anthropology and Humanism 46 (1): 4–20. Willow, Anna J. 2022. “Visions of Transition: Centering the Future in Engaged Sustainability Research.” SN Social Sciences 2 (5): 1–17.

7 OPTIMISM AT SCALE Exploring Everyday Activism in Atlanta’s Alternative Food Networks Hilary B. King

Introduction In March of 2020, COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. Disruptions in food systems were a visible example of the ensuing chaos. US grocery store shelves were barren, even for those still able to afford food and other necessities. Many were not: Almost 16 million Americans were added to the rolls of the unemployed between March and April 2020 (Statistics 2022). Food banks described their predicament as “a bucket brigade on a 5-alarm fire” (Vesoulis 2020). Suppliers also struggled: Photos circulated of tractors plowing under acres of plump vegetables due to lack of available people to harvest them (CNN 2020), while farmers agonized that they would have to cull healthy animals destined for closed slaughterhouses (Corkery and Yaffe-Bellany 2020). As an anthropologist of food systems, I watched these news stories with fear, but also curiosity. These dire—and paradoxical—images underscored the fragility of the large-scale, industrial food system. At the same time, contrasting positive headlines countered doomsday images: “As Food Supply Chain Breaks Down, Farm-to-Door CSAs Take Off” (Westervelt 2020) and “Small Farms in N.Y. Are Experiencing a Surprising Boom” (Robey 2020). Atlanta, where I live and work, is a major metropolitan area in the southeastern United States. It is a center of civil rights organizing and home to a vibrant alternative food system with urban farms, farmers markets, and food justice organizations. In the face of the COVID crisis, existing networks jumped into action as local examples of these headlines: The farmers market organization that I have worked with for eight years shifted in two weeks to an online market that aggregated, sold, and delivered goods from 130 vendors. A local gleaning organization pivoted to organize the weekly delivery of thousands of donated produce boxes to at-risk DOI: 10.4324/b23231-8

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families. Mutual aid networks, informal grocery pickups and drop-offs, barter, and borrowing gained prominence. I found myself trading homemade strawberry jam for Sun Gold tomato starts with a neighbor I had never met. As I observed and participated in these acts, I launched a collaborative interview project to document impacts of and responses to COVID-19 among food justice organizers, farmers, and non-profit leaders of Atlanta’s alternative food systems. This chapter explores the ways that small-scale responses like those listed above contribute to the optimism of participants—sustaining their belief in their capacity to create positive change. Pre-pandemic, the people interviewed in this chapter were already working to build more sustainable and just food systems. They were engaged in everyday activism (Mansbridge 2012)—talk and action in everyday life that endeavors to shape others’ behaviors and ideas according to a social movement. Everyday activism, I argue, includes both practical actions and continual subjective effort, what I call iterative self-making. Utilizing food systems in the Atlanta metro area in the United States as a case study, this chapter examines how COVID-19 responses accelerated iterative self-making at multiple scales—between food system organizations, within organizations, and for individual people, thereby compounding people’s experience of their ability to create transformations. Through the combination of practical actions and iterative self-making in everyday activism, people experience their power to create positive change. The chapter is called “optimism at scale” in reference to the multiple scales—or levels—at which iterative self-making can occur. It also refers to the scaling up, or expansion, of optimism through the proliferation of these small-scale, nested activities. It is an example of the ways that optimism “denotes a state of becoming, a process, a direction” (Willow, this volume, introduction). Iterative self-making describes ways that people and organizations re-make themselves in order to create the world they wish to see as part of everyday activism. As anthropologists, naming such processes can support both our own optimism and that of the communities with which we work.

Everyday Activism: Practical Actions and Iterative Self-Making Activism takes many diverse forms; there are myriad strategies for effecting social change. Often, visible activities like sit-ins, boycotts, and marches are heralded. Political scientist Jane Mansbridge’s (2012) definition of everyday activism describes another important form—ways that people talk and act in their daily lives that are not consciously coordinated but are inspired or encouraged by a social movement and are intended to alter others’ behaviors or ideas in movement-aligned directions (see also Willow, this volume, Chapter 6). Mansbridge’s definition is helpful for identifying the simmering power of quotidian actions. But how do people become these agents of everyday activism, and how do they maintain this position? I contend that within everyday activism,

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a reinforcing loop connects people’s daily activities to self-reflection that supports those actions. In this chapter, I explore this subjective aspect of everyday activism—what I term iterative self-making. Within this study, our interlocutors described new ways of working that emerged through the pandemic response. They also recounted how these actions prompted new personal and organizational reflections about how they wanted the world to be and how they wanted to be in the world. In this process, they generated stories about who they are and want to be. This is an example of self-making, how people construct ideas of who they are by telling stories about themselves that dialectically connect them to others, the cultures they live in, and the futures that they imagine (Bruner 2003). Iterative self-making can occur at both individual and organizational levels. As part of everyday activism, people constantly re-make themselves in order to transform to better fit the context that they see their actions as creating. They also do this for the organizations of which they are part. This process takes effort—people have to work to make themselves into the kinds of people that act in certain ways (Freeman 2014). When seeking to create more sustainable food systems, eaters, for instance, train themselves to appreciate certain or even new foods (Spackman and Lahne 2019), while farmers work to learn sustainable production practices (Hassanein 1999). When people change themselves to better match an imagined future, they increase their investment in that future becoming real. Iterative self-making supports optimism—faith in the capacity of human beings to create positive change—as people create, inhabit, and reflect on how changes they make to themselves shape their future actions (see also Willow, this volume, and Willow 2022). This self-work creates a bond between the newly created self and the future that is being actualized through that labor. This chapter explores how Atlanta area alternative food system actors’ pandemic responses accelerated iterative self-making as part of everyday activism.

Making Myself: Working as an Embedded Practitioner in Atlanta Food Systems This chapter’s exploration is tied to my own self-making through work in alternative food systems. I am a white woman anthropologist and had been working in Atlanta food systems for ten years at the time this project began. I arrived in Atlanta as a doctoral student at Emory University in 2010 following several years working in the fairtrade coffee industry. Following my dissertation fieldwork in Mexico in 2014 (focused on grassroots activists and food makers building domestic markets for native maize varieties [King 2017]), I wanted to use my social science training to contribute to Atlanta food systems. I worked with several organizations, co-leading the launch of public transit–based farmers markets, grant writing, strategic planning and conducting evaluations, applying my anthropological training to the issues faced by organizations with which

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I worked. In 2017, I finished my PhD and took a position with the Emory University Master’s in Development Practice, a professional degree that prepares students for careers in humanitarian and development fields. Development practitioners are purposefully part of interventions. In this context, my relationships with local organizations were an asset as opposed to a potential academic liability (Willow and Yotebieng 2020). My deep networks fostered connections with projects within which master’s students could intern as part of their study. I continue to work in both these veins. I inhabit two positions, one as an alternative food systems practitioner and the second as an academic in a development practice program. This dual positioning prepped me to launch this research when the pandemic hit. As a practitioner, I was helping Community Farmers Markets pack boxes of online produce orders and participating in calls to strategize about at-market COVID protocols. As an academic, I was scrambling to transition graduate students who had planned to travel abroad for summer field practicums to meaningful virtual work. Atlanta’s local food systems responses were robust, but no one had time to document them. I designed this project to bridge that gap. I worked with a colleague, three graduate students, and one undergraduate to design the project; we conducted 46 interviews between June and December of 2020.1 The semistructured interviews took place over Zoom and lasted between 30 and 75 minutes. They were conducted by one or two members of the six-person research team. In total, 49 participants included 26 farmers representing 23 small and medium-sized farms that sold produce in the Atlanta area, and 23 representatives of 21 food-related organizations (16 included food banks and food hubs, food policy/advocacy organizations, farmers market umbrella organizations, cooperatives, and a restaurant), two mutual aid groups, and three government entities. As the project began with a focus on organizational responses, demographic information about individual representatives was not systematically collected during interviews.2 The first group of respondents were identified through my own networks. Additional interviewees were identified via snowball sampling. The interviews addressed work prior to COVID, changes that emerged through the response, and lastly, expectations about the impacts of the pandemic on the future of Atlanta’s alternative food systems. Though the interview guide focused on organizational activities rather than on the individual’s perceptions, responses often blurred these lines. Interviews were recorded and transcribed by members of the research team. The author completed all coding and analysis for this paper. My networks facilitated many of these conversations—26 of the 49 interviewees were acquaintances, colleagues and/or friends. Years of active participation and participant-observation largely positioned me and my collaborators as trusted members of the community. It also may have impacted what people shared because they may have had preconceived notions of our interests. This was alleviated when I was not conducting or leading the interview.

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Depending on the participant, my researcher identity was more familiar than my practitioner roles or vice versa. Inhabiting two spaces—as an academic and practitioner—certainly presents challenges to “objective” research (though the possibility of “objective” social science is itself contested [Burawoy 1998]). The truth is that I am invested in the success of these projects; I do this work because it contributes to my own optimism (about which I will comment further in the conclusion). In the face of this personal investment, my effort in this chapter is to answer calls to explore “the analytical potential of things that work” (Osterhoudt 2021, 33), an endeavor that I believe is aided by my embedded relationships with the people and causes concerned.

Scales of Everyday Activism in Atlanta Food Systems’ COVID-19 Responses Human beings exist within nested scales. Individuals are embedded within families, organizations, communities, nations. As such, they have the capacity to act within and across many levels. In the three sections that follow, I explore three scales at which the reinforcing loop between practical actions and iterative selfmaking accelerated everyday activism in response to the COVID-19 p­ andemic— as a community of food system organizations, within organizations, and for people individually. As participants create changes, they strengthened their ­optimism regarding their ability to create the better worlds that they imagine.

Community-Level Self-Making: Expanding Organizational Collaboration The alternative food network in Atlanta is dense. This density manifests in overlapping connections. Staff at one non-profit may serve on the Board of Directors of another. A usual cast of characters will attend many fundraisers and events. Farmers may move from selling in one farmers market to another, but alternative food system actors know and support each other. Despite their interpersonal density, people involved in these initiatives are often stretched thin. Time to plan and coordinate can be hard to come by, as in many non-profit and social change groups. When applying for large grants, it is common for one organization to request a letter of support from each other days before the deadline, with insufficient opportunity to proactively collaborate on program design. This reality shifted quickly in response to the pandemic. Several of Atlanta’s tight-knit but perpetually overworked local food organizations stepped up their coordination. The first example came in March of 2020, when a core group of approximately ten local food non-profits created a COVID-19 task force. A key activity was a weekly conference call. Though many of the participating organizations were familiar to each other and often worked together on programs and grants, these calls made space for new forms of resource sharing.

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In the early days, information was a key resource. Organizations were part of many similar networks, but also distinct elements. Through these weekly calls, network connectivity rapidly shifted in scale and intensity. Organizations became conduits for information from different sources, thereby extending the overall network. Georgia Organics,3 a farmer services non-profit, was invited to weekly calls hosted by the Georgia Department of Agriculture, which enabled both groups to share emergency support information from USDA with other organizations. This allowed the “collaborative collecting of resources” (Interview 12) to expand; as demonstrated by the facilitation of Tito’s Vodka–donated hand sanitizer, masks, and gloves to a large group of food organizations. Pandemic responses also led to new partnerships in sharing infrastructure. Within two weeks of shutdown, Community Farmers Markets (CFM), a farmers market umbrella organization, launched an online platform for customers to order food from 130 farmers market vendors. This required space to receive, aggregate, and sort orders. Common Market, a regional food hub that typically sold to universities and schools, found that their warehouse space was suddenly largely unused. Common Market provided CFM warehouse and cooler space for free during the first few weeks of the online platform. The Executive Director of CFM recounted that “I don’t think [that] would have happened without this constant communication, of us being able to say, ‘we have no home to run our program’”(Interview 12).4 In May, Common Market received a USDA Farmers to Families Food Box Program grant to distribute food boxes to families in need. They could no longer offer CFM warehouse space. However, they needed to source meat for the boxes; CFM connected them to farmers to fill those orders. On the same weekly call, a different organization offered warehouse space to CFM for online order aggregation. Making time to share information resulted in new shared physical space. Another shift was in fundraising. Generally, food system leaders assessed the Atlanta alternative food community as collaborative but cited the existence of “some sensitivity” (Interview 7) around fundraising. The pandemic shifted that sensitivity. Pre-pandemic, the Farmer Fund, housed at Georgia Organics, provided small grants to farmers impacted by natural disasters. It was chronically short on resources. The pandemic was an obvious crisis for which the Farmer Fund could be mobilized. Rather than search competitively for funding for farmers connected to individual organizations, members of this task force jointly fundraised to provide direct support to farmers, no questions asked. By the end of 2020, the Farmer Fund had distributed more than $97,000 to almost 100 farmers. The Executive Director of Georgia Organics recounted that “coming out as a united force for the local food movement” resulted in significant grants, and that the united force made it possible to get “those groups represented on a review committee and everybody’s group name in the application” (Interview 7). These shifts are forms of community-level iterative self-making. The organizations involved are working toward a shared future—more just, environmentally

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regenerative, healthy, and delicious food systems, though they work on different aspects and often do not agree on strategy and vision. Before the pandemic, these organizations were not competitive but they were partially siloed; people caught up in their own work struggled to share information that could accelerate symbiotic activities. In response to the pandemic crisis, they collaborated in ways that produced tangible benefits in terms of information, physical resources, and funding. These examples showed that working in more collaborative ways was both possible and resulted in improved outcomes. That these outcomes move the whole community of organizations in the direction of their shared visions could be enough to support optimism. However, I argue that through everyday activism, they also shift the overall ecosystem in additional subjective ways. The collaborating organizations used the pandemic response to further the kind of ecosystem that many of them envision, one in which they secure grants. Almost more importantly, they secure more power as members of the grant review committee and through recognition for the involved groups. This is an example of a kernel that can be built on to alter power relations, thereby moving all of them toward the more just systems they envision. At this community-level scale, interviewees enacted and reflected on collaborations that both created new outcomes and supported their belief that they can operate in more effective and fulfilling ways. Their activities let them re-make their organizations. Such experiences promote optimism; they showed that changes in connectivity could expand collaboration, knowledge, and shared resources. Iterating on those activities shaped the systems in which their organizations work.

Iterative Self-Making within Organizations: Adjusting Missions and Goals Many people involved in everyday activism understand that communities of action are made up of diverse and not necessarily coordinated organizations. In the Transition movement, for instance, “self-organizing and diverse” groups emerge with some shared values and emphases but each is “tailored to their particular bioregion and community composition” (Willow 2021, 6). In this section, I examine two examples of how organizations used the opportunities presented by the pandemic to change how their organizations addressed racial justice. In both examples, iterative self-making at organizational levels contributed to interviewees’ sense that their organizations could contribute to more racially just and inclusive food systems in Atlanta and beyond. Within the local food space, conversations about existing racial inequities in the food system combined with new opportunities caused by pandemic disruptions encouraged organizations to engage in iterative self-making. On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, sparking global racial justice protests. In Atlanta, police killed Rayshard Brooks in a

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Wendy’s parking lot on June 12 of that year, which catalyzed additional local actions calling for a racial justice reckoning (Wheatley 2020). These built on long-term active efforts to foreground racial equity in Atlanta food systems and the United States more broadly (Alkon and Agyeman 2011; King 2015). Since 2012, Fresh Harvest had been delivering boxes of vegetables and fruits to consumers’ homes in Atlanta. As grocery store shelves became bare, the demand for home delivery services increased exponentially. Pre-pandemic, Fresh Harvest delivered 1,700 produce boxes and signed up 45–50 new customers per week. In March of 2020, more than 2,000 people signed up. They doubled to deliver 3,500 boxes per week by the end of March and suddenly had thousands of households on a waitlist (Interview 8). This expansion necessitated large-scale internal changes. By our July interview, Fresh Harvest had hired 38 new employees and doubled their operation’s size. To expand, they needed to grow their regional supplier networks. As organizers watched and participated in the large-scale racial justice actions, they wanted to focus on racial equity by sourcing from Black farmers. Active work to strengthen relationships with Black farmers and company-wide education efforts were directed toward this goal. In July, employees started an internal book club that began with The Color of Food: Stories of Race, Resilience and Farming, by Natasha Bowens (2015). An employee of Fresh Harvest, who identified as white, explained that: We have worked with farmers of color and we have been trying to connect with more farmers of color. But we’re also kind of coming at it from a very humble approach and trying to be learners. Not like we have this whole thing figured out, but just to say, “We have a platform. We have incredible demand, we need supply, and we want to help you sell your stuff.” It’s definitely become a high priority for us. In a time where we have no time to meet, we’re making time for this book discussion. (Interview 8) As Fresh Harvest confronted a new reality, the people who comprised it incorporated new ways of learning about racial justice to enhance their ability to build more just and inclusive food systems. While the company engaged in organizational self-making by shifting its sourcing, individuals undertook educational efforts geared toward changing company culture. In this context, iterative selfmaking crosses scales; both people as individuals and people as parts of organizations engaged in new forms of self-making prompted by their pandemic response. For another organization, iterative self-making required ceasing or delaying pandemic activities. Global Growers Network connects refugees who were farmers in their home countries to land. Most of the 300 farmers grow food for subsistence or manage their own sales, but several sell through the Global

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Growers cooperative. Prior to the pandemic, Global Growers programs built refugee farmers’ comfort selling their own produce at farmers markets, growing their language abilities and business acumen within an often culturally white space (Slocum 2007) that perpetuates particular ideas of what farmers market farmers look like (Alkon and McCullen 2011). For most of 2020, Global Growers replaced farmers market sales with an online ordering system. This provided income while protecting growers who relied on public transportation, several of whom were in high-risk health categories. However, online sales did not align with the organization’s broader mission of equipping refugee farmers to thrive as active members of the farmers market. The Global Growers Executive Director explained: We’re here to create spaces for farmers to build up the skills and leverage the talents that they already have. We went from having a group of farmers selling at a farmers market to them just growing and harvesting the food. We were selling and distributing it all. Our goal is to get out of the way and we got very much in the way this year.…This group of farmers wants to get back to working with customers directly and online doesn’t allow them to do it. (Interview 22) This example suggests a different kind of internal organizational self-making. Though online sales opened an important channel, Global Growers’ staff saw this opening as inconsistent with the organization’s broader vision for the future—a future in which refugee growers handle their own sales and build culturally inclusive spaces within Atlanta’s farmers markets. In this way, iterative self-making was not only about deciding what to do, but what not to do. Taking practical action, reflecting on it, and then choosing to lessen online sales better aligned with Global Growers’ vision of a just and inclusive food system. The organization became more confident in its ability—and responsibility—to create and act meaningfully within the kind of food system that they were founded to usher in. These examples highlight ways that organizational members leveraged pandemic responses to move their organization in new directions, underscoring their ability to effect positive changes. In this context, “scaling up” organizational capacity to further racial justice took different forms. Both examples show how iterative self-making by these organizations created more of the tangible realities that they want to bring into being. These examples demonstrate the reinforcing loop between iterative self-making and practical action as aspects of everyday activism. In both instances, self-making supports interviewees’ experience of the organization’s capacity to promote positive change, thereby supporting “optimism at scale”—the scale of organizations, not acting in a coordinated way—but that in aggregate shape the ecosystems of which they are part.

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Individual Iterative Self-Making: Optimistic Reorientations Responding to the pandemic also caused people to reflect individually on how their role in building resilient local food systems might evolve. Farmer reflections on increased interest in home garden production in the wake of the pandemic provide a potent example. This shift had a substantial impact on farm businesses and enabled new avenues for iterative self-making. For many small-scale farmers, biannual plant sales are important revenue generators. Spring sales usually occur between March and April. In 2020, this coincided with the start of the pandemic. Farmers that sold seedlings worried that this would be a big hit to their businesses. Perhaps surprisingly, however, plant sales flourished. In addition, news stories highlighted World War II victory gardens as inspiration for people looking to improve their food security and learn new skills. Some farmers expanded their businesses by installing garden beds and advising would-be growers and home gardeners. One shifted his whole farm business: [People] would have me come install gardens for them at their homes, orchards.…[T]he highest increase was people wanting me to show them how to grow their own food. And so, I would consult people on that process and still do that to this day. It’s probably taken up 60% to 70% of the time that I spend now as a business owner. (Interview 29) In theory, the expansion of home gardening presents a threat to this farmer’s livelihood. If others are growing food, it decreases the market for the food smallscale farmers grow. However, this farmer understood the surge of interest in home gardening as a new way to get compensation for their knowledge in addition to selling the food that they grow themselves. In doing so, they engage in optimistic futuring (Willow, this volume, Chapter 6). As one farmer put it, “We hope one day that every neighborhood will have their own neighborhood farmer, that the food will be that local, and that will be just normal” (Interview 36). Iterative self-making by reimagining their roles, allows farmers to evaluate people growing their own food not as a threat to their livelihoods, but as pathway into a more bountiful, sustainable world. As they do so, they envision a world full of the diverse, small-scale food systems that their knowledge supports. They remake their businesses, and themselves, to support an expanded vision of the future. Their present actions help to create it. Through this re-making, they engage with building that world at multiple scales, as individuals, through their businesses, and within the Atlanta alternative food ecosystem, optimistically producing more of what they hope to see. The connection of individual experiences to larger systems made interviewees optimistic. Just as farmers encountered new desires from their customers, others saw value in the dispersed but similar work happening elsewhere. One

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food system entrepreneur reflected that getting farmers markets declared essential businesses was not a fight because of the work that people in many places had already done: We had established national, regional, and state networks of people who are doing this work. That is something that I took for granted as a resource until COVID, and then suddenly I saw the value of being threaded into a larger community that’s doing the same kind of thought work around the same kinds of values that you have. (Interview 19) Pandemic responses, for this interviewee, helped show the power of existing networks. The larger community, with shared values, thus amplifies the impact the everyday activism done by members of alternative food systems across nested scales, from communities, to organizations, and individuals. This experience made her appreciate the foundation that existed and its ability to help build something more.

Conclusion This chapter has explored iterative self-making at multiple scales as an integral part of everyday activism. As such, I hope that I have framed the internal work that my collaborators undertake in a way that highlights one of its more subjective dimensions. As part of everyday activism, iterative self-making connects the practical work of creating transition infrastructure and the subjective experiences that support people to engage in ongoing practices of everyday activism. Through this looped engagement, participants support their “optimism at scale” by participating in multiple levels on which their actions have impact. They see and experience the changes that they create, increasing their optimism that more changes are possible. I have argued elsewhere that anthropology brings various tools to social change. These tools include probing, framing, and furthering (King 2020). Probing consists of asking our interlocutors deep questions and helping them to reflect. Framing puts a name to activities that people intuitively undertake. Furthering strategizes collaboratively with the people with whom we work to advance the visions that we share. For me, bringing these anthropological tools to social change work is deeply optimistic. It allows me to identify changes over time, both within myself and with the community members with whom I work, putting me in my own loop of practical action and iterative self-making. It is my hope that articulating this relationship through the research for this chapter strengthens my, and my interlocutors’ optimism as we work across scales.

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The ability of iterative self-making to produce large-scale changes is not definite. Interviewees expressed hope that change would be lasting. One farmer stated that: people have been woken up a little bit to more of the benefits of community and local businesses and small businesses… how that benefits them, whether it’s benefiting their neighbor or benefiting them socially. I think those things will probably stay. They’ll be a little stronger. (Interview 36) “They’ll be a little bit stronger” does not constitute a completed transition, but it does provide a reason for optimism. This quote demonstrates that everyday activism entails continual processes of self-making, of people “waking up” to themselves and then re-making their own preferences and desires to match the new future they envision. As I see it, everyday activism helps us understand transition processes and their personal and political ramifications. It helps to situate the personal, internal work that is necessary to build—and then inhabit—something new. The notion that we will shoot through a tube to some imagined future where everything is solar-powered and socially just while the fundamental values and structures of our society remain unchanged is fantasy. People and organizations must consciously engage in transformation of themselves as they transform the world around them. Earlier, I remarked that when one changes oneself to better match an imagined future, they increase their investment in that future becoming real. As an anthropologist, I am iteratively making myself and my discipline. I hope to contribute to optimistic anthropology grounded in the contextual, connected self-making that we document, participate in, and amplify. For me, fostering reflexive optimism by recognizing kernels of a brighter future might just be a pathway to building optimism at scale.

Acknowledgments I wish to thank the intrepid research team that co-designed this project: Yulia Chuvileva, PhD, Elizabeth Beling, Jamie Lutz, Hampton Stall, and Tamsin Smith. Thank you to the Emory Office of Sustainability Initiatives and the Woodruff Scholars Microgrant for financial support that allowed us to compensate participants. Many thanks to Anna J. Willow, Andrea Rissing, and Yulia Chuvileva for their comments that vastly improved this manuscript. Sincere thanks to all interview participants.

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Conflicts of Interest The author of this chapter is connected to several of the organizations cited. These connections have been acknowledged in the manuscript and do not negatively impact the research findings.

Notes 1 This research team included Yulia Chuvileva, PhD, Elizabeth Beling, Jamie Lutz, Hampton Stall, and Tamsin Smith as principal collaborators. The author completed all coding and analysis for this manuscript. 2 In several cases, respondents indicated their age, race, or income in the interviews, and these may be included in analysis where applicable. 3 All organizations identified in this chapter gave permission to be named through an oral consent process approved by the Emory University Institutional Review Board. 4 Quotes included in this chapter have been edited for clarity.

References Alkon, Alison Hope, and Julian Agyeman. 2011. Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability, Food, Health, and the Environment. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Alkon, Alison Hope, and Christie Grace McCullen. 2011. “Whiteness and Farmers Markets: Performances, Perpetuations…Contestations?” Antipode 43 (4): 937–959. Bowens, Natasha. 2015. The Color of Food: Stories of Race, Resilience and Farming. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publisher. Bruner, Jerome. 2003. “Self-making Narratives.” In Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self, edited by Robin Fivush and Catherine A. Haden, 209– 225. Mawmah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Burawoy, Michael. 1998. “The Extended Case Method.” Sociological Theory 16 (1): 4–33. CNN. 2020. “Farmer Had to Destroy His Crop Amid Food Shortage Fears.” https:// www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/04/14/farmer-destroyed-crops-coronavirus-covid19-flores-nr-vpx.cnn (accessed July 12, 2022). Corkery, Michael, and David Yaffe-Bellany. 2020. “With Closure of Meat Plants, Pig Farmers Face a Wrenching Task.” New York Times, May 14, 2020. https://www. nytimes.com/2020/05/14/business/coronavirus-farmers-killing-pigs.html (accessed June 3, 2022). Freeman, Carla. 2014. Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hassanein, Neva. 1999. Changing the Way America Farms: Knowledge and Community in the Sustainable Agriculture Movement, Our Sustainable Future. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. King, Hilary. 2015. “Three Strategies to Foster Diversity in the Food Movement.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 5 (4): 183–187. King, Hilary B. 2017. “The Meshwork of Alternative Food Systems: Negotiating Sustainability in Chiapas, Mexico.” PhD Dissertation, Anthropology, Emory University.

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King, Hilary B. 2020. “Probe, Frame, Further: Naming Skills Anthropologists Bring to Social Change Work.” General Anthropology 27 (2): 1–12. Mansbridge, Jane. 2012. “Everyday Activism.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, Vol. I, edited by David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam, 437–439. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Osterhoudt, Sarah. 2021. “Bright Spot Ethnography: On the Analytical Potential of Things that Work.” The Arrow 8 (1): 33–47. Robey, Charity. 2020. “Small Farms in N.Y. Are Experiencing a Surprising Boom. Here’s Why.” New York Times, May 8, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/nyregion/ small-farms-ny-coronavirus.html (accessed May 20, 2022). Slocum, Rachel. 2007. “Whiteness, Space and Alternative Food Practice.” Geoforum 38 (3): 520–533. Spackman, Christy, and Jacob Lahne. 2019. “Sensory Labor: Considering the Work of Taste in the Food System.” Food, Culture and Society 22 (2): 142–151. Statistics, Bureau of Labor. 2022. The Employment Situation—April 2020. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_05082020.pdf (accessed July 7, 2022). Vesoulis, Abby. 2020. “It’s a Bucket Brigade on a 5-Alarm Fire.’ Food Banks Struggle to Keep Up With Skyrocketing Demand.” Time, April 14, 2020. https://time.com/5825944/ food-banks-coronavirus/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign= editorial&utm_term=health_covid-19&linkId=87275834 (access May 17, 2022). Westervelt, Eric. 2020. “As Food Supply Chain Breaks Down, Farm-To-Door CSAs Take Off.”NPR, May 10, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/05/10/852512047/as-food-supplychain-breaks-down-farm-to-door-csas-take-off?t=1591714292511 (accessed May 20, 2022). Wheatley, Thomas. 2020. “23 Days: Stories From the Occupation of the Wendy’s Where Rayshard Brooks Was Killed.” Atlanta Magazine, August 7, 2020. https://www. atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/23-days-stories-from-the-occupation-of-the-wendyswhere-rayshard-brooks-was-killed/(accessed August 5, 2022). Willow, Anna J. 2021. “The World We (Re) Build: An Ethnography of the Future.” Anthropology and Humanism 46 (1): 4–20. Willow, Anna J. 2022. “Visions of Transition: Centering the Future in Engaged Sustainability Research.” SN Social Sciences 2 (5): 56. Willow, Anna J., and Kelly A. Yotebieng. 2020. Anthropology and Activism: New Contexts, New Conversations. New York: Routledge.

8 FUSING OUTRAGE AND HOPE INTO ACTS OF RESISTANCE, VOLUNTEERISM, AND ALLYSHIPS Patricia Widener and Gail Choate

This chapter explores the emotional tensions that surround and give rise to three hopeful and collaborative activities: social justice activism, coastal and wildlife volunteerism, and intergenerational and educational allyships. Many committed residents, social justice advocates, and local educators engage in acts of hope and optimism to counter pervasive social injustices, persistent environmental damage, and looming climate-related crises. As engaged citizens, they act collaboratively to seek transformative change, contribute sweat equity to their causes, and form allyships for healthier and more just futures. By leaning into actionoriented responses, they ignore the derision of others and suspend feelings of apathy, cynicism, or despair. We echo the definition of optimism posited in this volume’s introduction as a “belief in the human capacity to create positive change” (see Willow, this volume) as well as the notion of hope as “a way of pressing into the future” in such a way that people strive to convert grand ideas into reality (Bryant and Knight 2019, 134). Through hope and optimism, people act to effect positive change (however they define it). The dynamic relationship between hope and optimism is conveyed through three actions studied and/or experienced by this chapter’s authors. In this chapter, we demonstrate how optimism, however strong or uncertain, gives rise to what Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone call “active hope” (2012). Contrary to the passive notion that “hope springs eternal” from within, we find that hope arises from a variety of collective actions, including social justice activism, wildlife or environmental volunteerism, or educational and intergenerational allyships. When we research or join these endeavors, we observe conflicting and conjoining articulations of outrage and hope, frustration and optimism, DOI: 10.4324/b23231-9

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and furious dreams of a better future—as negative and positive emotions fuse into the impetus for direct action. Feelings of outrage, anger, frustration, disappointment, and grief arise, along with the belief that one’s actions (especially when enacted collaboratively) create the possibility of generating improved ­conditions and better futures. Oftentimes, community advocates, educators, and citizens-on-the-ground are also our neighbors, co-workers, students, or acquaintances, and their demands, such as ending the US gun violence epidemic or preserving wildlife habitats, sound commonsensical. As engaged residents, they believe they can improve social and ecological conditions through a wide range of actions even though they are well aware of the long fights ahead and seemingly small and incremental advancements before them. Their dedication to making something better pushes them to persist despite potential ridicule, contempt, or external pressure; and it is through their collective efforts that their angry and hopeful labors become profound and expansive. In this chapter, we review the literature on how contradictory emotions ignite people to act. We then consider how researchers might examine expressions of hope or optimism amid despair by stepping into the research as allies and stepping back as critical observers. We caution that to observe or join in these acts is not to succumb to simplistic or aspirational slogans, but to witness and embrace civil society’s anger and optimism, and its disappointment and hopefulness, as conveyed in the actions, demands, and expectations of each generation. We illustrate our argument through short case studies of our personal and/or professional experiences to demonstrate how the emotional charges surrounding hope inspire people to act and how certain actions and subsequent connections further generate hope. First, March for Our Lives, a youth-led movement against gun violence and for stricter gun laws, exemplifies the deep wells of anger, despair, grief, and courage fused with the hope that cultural and policy changes are possible through the mobilization of civil society. Next, we speak to the hope and optimism found among coastal volunteers who connect their disappointment in wildlife protection policies and economic growth narratives with their sorrow over the decline of marine species and habitats with their hope for a healthier future. In this example, exhaustion and elation are found in the actions of sea turtle volunteers. Finally, we share our classroom experiences to highlight intergenerational and educational exchanges that lead to allyships, which over time ideally improve conditions for current and future generations.

Emotional Fusions Planetary uncertainties, wildlife extinctions, a global pandemic, and entrenched social and global injustices trigger emotional reactions that inspire some to act. These actions are often based on the union of competing sentiments, such as

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anger-hope, despair-courage, or sorrow-joy. James Jasper, a leading scholar on emotions and social movements, calls these activating frictions “moral batteries,” in which “the tension or contrast between [positive and negative charges] motivates actions” (2011, 291). So, while pity or pain alone may be demobilizing, pity combined with joy is motivational. In his work, Jasper demonstrates the motivational effects of these tensions through animal rights campaigns that pair the pity and pain elicited in images of abused or neglected animals with the joy and elation produced in images of rescued or healthy ones. Likewise, Deborah Gould’s study of the LGBTQ community’s increasing militancy during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s identified a “grief/ anger/action nexus,” as when grief turned into anger and then into “angry activism” (2002, 183). Instead of a moment of silence for the lives lost, activists began convening moments of loud rage against the government’s slow response. Sadness comingled with feelings of power and purpose, which when combined with hope and agency gave rise to feeling a part of something much larger than themselves. Doug McAdam’s analysis of the Civil Rights Movement similarly argued that people will not rebel against the status quo unless they feel it is unjust or illegitimate and believe that they have the capacity to change it. He termed this process “cognitive liberation” and found that it was both the cause of and the result of protest (McAdam 2009, 69). To further support these findings, Jochen Kleres and Asa Wettergren studied global climate activists and found that the “paralyzing potential of fear is mediated by hope” (2017, 507). These three cases support the mobilizing power of Jasper’s moral batteries. Emotional sparks of anger-hope, grief-courage, and sorrow-joy are found not only in places and among people who have experienced historical and/or global privileges, but also in places of extreme duress or among people who live under conditions of extreme oppression. For instance, during a post-war study of the legacies of suffering in Guatemala, researchers were redirected by the Mayan farmers to focus on the farmers’ current strivings and cultural and economic desires (and defiance) rather than revisit years of extreme duress (Fischer and Benson 2006). Likewise, in a study of community responses along the proposed route of an Ecuadorian oil pipeline, the community perceived by others as being the most marginalized and voiceless expressed a sense of dignity and success in negotiating community-determined compensation funds and projects with the international oil consortium (Widener 2011). In a study of political activism targeted against Angola’s authoritarian regime, a researcher found that activists willingly experienced police violence and imprisonment for the idea of an “optimistic utopia,” which for them meant a better version of democracy and a life with less fear (Blanes 2021, 130). In these cases, some of the world’s most subjugated people exhibited robust and optimistic agency despite systemic hardships as they linked their past struggles with hopeful actions in the present (be it farming, negotiating, or resisting).

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Across these cases, hope and optimism are entangled with emotions and incidents of anger, frustration, pain, or suffering, and it is the charges of positive and negative emotions that move people toward action. With this point in mind, we apply the idea of emotional fusions (i.e., anguish-hope) to other undertakings, including data collection, contemporary social movement activities, wildlife volunteerism, and educational and intergenerational dialogues and allyships.

Positioning Hope and Optimism in Research Before presenting cases of hope in action, we consider how the research design may discern, disregard, or stifle positive narratives. Certainly, some researchers may be hesitant to analyze optimism or hopeful expressions due to their training and subsequent concerns that their scholarship will be misrepresented or not seen as serious or rigorous. Indeed, researchers may have been trained to design studies based on “the embedded academic assumption that there is always richer analytical potential found in cases of hardship compared to cases of well-being” (Osterhoudt 2021, 34). Yet, we argue, there is great value in analyzing positive and hopeful cases alongside or in conjunction with darker cases as the two are frequently intertwined. While this chapter centers on actions of grief-courage, exhaustion-elation, and worry-enthusiasm, it recognizes that the underlying hope and optimism and appeal for action are based on systemic oppression, structural and ecological violence, and social and environmental injustices (see Farmer 2003; Pellow 2018). Indeed, studies of structural violence or injustice appear one-sided without an examination of the potential hope, successful agency, or benevolent aspirations of research participants or interlocuters. Recognizing the dynamics between structural constraints and individual or collective agency (however suppressed, limited, and unequal) may provide a richer complexity to social and anthropological analyses and facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the interplay of power and agency between institutions and civil society. The goal is not a simplistic, uncritical, romanticized, or congratulatory one of the perseverance of marginalized populations. Putting positive spins on atrocities or ecological destruction is also not the suggestion. However, acknowledging how people navigate between structural constraints and individual or collective agency is theoretically insightful and socially instructive. Likewise, researchers could dismiss individuals engaged in acts against much larger and more powerful entities, or they could recognize, as we do, that the individual actions for social and ecological justice are but one in a “repertoire of collective actions” (see Tilly 1977, 493). Social scientists who have been trained to avoid ethical entanglements with their subject of study may choose to ignore or devalue the joy and compassion found in everyday or extraordinary acts by ordinary people. Yet to analyze these polemics is not to be submerged by them, but to transcend the binaries of hope versus despair, optimism versus

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pessimism, justice versus injustice—in order to embrace the emotional and intellectual messiness of life and research, and to observe, record, analyze, and support benevolent corrections. As Josiah Heyman (2011) argues, it is difficult to simultaneously serve the academic norms of research and the interpersonal customs of acting in the interest of participants or interlocuters. However, we suggest, it is not impossible, and both may be better for it. Likewise, Sarah Osterhoudt suggests conducting “bright spot ethnography,” which centers around “what is going well in a place” (2021, 34). Such studies would be designed to balance “narratives of struggle and marginalization” with narratives of personal or collective agency, optimism, and/or happiness (Osterhoudt 2021, 34). By linking a crisis to positive experiences, social scientists may be able to better assess what is and is not working well. In addition, researcher receptivity to participants’ directions or insights may enrich our understanding and dialogue on how hope and optimism work in conjunction with misery and outrage—and a great deal in between. Moreover, some studies are designed from a position of shock or dismay and a belief or desire that a better world or outcome is possible. Even while expressing undesirable feelings of frustration, guilt, discomfort, uncertainty, and/or apprehension, many researchers develop their studies from a sense (or hope) that positive change is possible and that their research will shed light on how beneficial transitions occur. Researchers express these tensions when participating in engaged social movement research as resident-researchers (Smith-Cavros and Widener 2020); conducting an “allied ethnography” (Widener 2021, 12); puzzling through the potential and usefulness of ethnographic activism (Moolenaar 2020); collaborating in solidarity with the “other” as the “other” (Schuller 2014); or envisioning the potential of “anthropology as activism” (Willow and Yotebieng 2020, 83). For researchers and research participants, moments of hope or optimism may occur over a lifetime of more critical engagement or enduring hardships. It is not an either/or scenario, and researchers and participants are not forced to choose between being serious critical observers or optimists. They may be both. Likewise, combinations of anger and hope, caution and optimism, and guilt and aspiration may be found in ethnographic fieldwork, felt by researchers and research participants, and acted upon by all parties in acts of resistance, volunteerism, educational dialogues, and intergenerational allyships. To these points, our chapter is a hybrid of sorts. It presents our ongoing research and personal experiences with social movements; it reflects on our past research and personal experience as coastal and wildlife volunteers; and it considers our experiences of instruction and intergenerational allyship in the classroom in Southeast Florida. Instead of emphasizing one action that arises from a degree of frustration or is inspired by and generative of hope, we have chosen to present three to better reflect how people embrace a multitude of roles over time and given the circumstances, needs, or opportunities. Unlike slices-of-life or

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freezing-of-time studies that depict limited aspects of a person or group’s repertoire of actions or reactions, actions of hope or optimism may occur across a lifetime among critically engaged residents and community advocates.

Grief-Courage Prompts Social Justice Activism In social justice movements, hope becomes a mode of resistance, and resistance becomes a remedy for despair and a platform for regenerative possibilities. Given the perceived severity of grievances and power inequities, engagement in social justice movements is one course of empowerment and action that is fueled by opposing sentiments. In one study of hope as a significant trope for social movements, the authors argued that hope “can be seen as reflecting a thirst for change as much as projections of a better future” and that hope “is detected in the very fact that people do not succumb to oppression” (Kleist and Jansen 2016, 377, 378). Optimism is woven into “projections of a better future.” Another example is found in the resistance to the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the United States. The Electoral College’s vote superseded the popular vote, and the resultant rise of violent rhetoric and repressive policies reinvigorated existing social movements. In what may be deemed a “milestone” (Tilly 1977, 494), the Women’s March of 2017 and its subsequent campaigns demonstrated the internal and cultural transformations of the feminist and women’s movement. Shortly after the first Women’s March, feminist and social movement scholar Jo Reger (2019) titled her edited anthology Nevertheless, They Persisted. In other words, anger, frustration, hope, optimism, and courage endure across multiple waves of resistance, while these sentiments are passed from one generation to the next. In the first author’s study of progressive movements in Southeast Florida following the 2016 election, activists were fueled by their outrage at the Republican Party leadership and the party’s rhetoric, actions, and policy preferences. Simultaneously, the protesters’ acts of resistance signaled optimism and hope that change was possible. At several protests against the proliferation of hate or violence, activists amended the “Make America Great Again,” or MAGA slogan, to one calling for healthier and safer futures for everyone. “Make America Moral Again” was presented during a Families Belong Together rally, organized in objection to the separation and detention of children away from their immigrant parents at the US-Mexico border. At a youth-led March for Our Lives rally against gun violence, a handheld sign demanded: “Make America Safe Again.” And at a United against Hate rally following the death of a counter-protester at a white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Virginia, a sign ordered the nation to “Make America Great for Everyone Again.” Around the same time, several groups for racial justice succeeded in having streets that had been named after Confederate commanders Hood, Forrest, and Lee changed to Hope, Freedom, and Liberty. In this latter example, residents of Hollywood, Florida, demonstrated

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how hope remains an enduring, mobilizing, and aspirational goal and condition that they wanted embedded into everyday life and aligned with calls for liberty and freedom. In another demonstration, both authors witnessed a combination of fear, anguish, and rage expressed by students after the shooting deaths at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Fourteen students and three staff members were killed by a former student on Valentine’s Day 2018. These young survivors quickly became activists, forming March for Our Lives and demanding the ban of assault rifles and military-styled combat weapons along with an end to the gun violence epidemic (see Founders of March for Our Lives 2018). “No more thoughts and prayers” and “We call B.S.” became two of their more pointed directives as they demanded adults, legislators, and the National Rifle Association take responsibility for the relentless gun violence. Four years later, the banner of their website continued to demonstrate their lasting engagement and the nation’s never-ending need: “47,246+ gun deaths under Biden. 167,743+ since the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting.”1 Their fear, pain, anger, and courage fused into sustained political and social action, which continued to be tested by other mass shootings. In 2022, when another armed teen entered an elementary school and killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, existing gun safety groups remobilized and were joined by new activists. They sought to educate, motivate, and inspire young people and complacent adults to demand life-saving policy changes. Eventually, Congress passed a modest and tepid gun safety bill after the Uvalde shooting. When grief and anger collide with courage, active hope arises and endures through achingly painful, deeply infuriating, and unconscionable (and avoidable) tragedy. When researchers or residents join protests or social movement organizations, it is not to endorse aspirational maxims, but to witness civil society’s optimism that a better world is possible and to participate in its realization. Contemporary youth-led demonstrations, whether to promote climate action, defend Black lives, or fight against gun violence, all serve to bind anger, fear, and disappointment into poignantly hopeful and courageous actions. And even as their goals appear both modest and revolutionary, they form the promise of greater cultural and political transformations toward safer and healthier spaces and experiences for this and future generations. Whether articulated or not, hope underpins social justice campaigns. So, to study a social movement’s goals is to study its hopes, dreams, and aspirations for the future. Likewise, to study its tactics and strategies is to study the optimistic processes of achieving those hopes and dreams. Despite the relentlessness of systemic injustices and structural obstacles, resident-activists maintain hope where they live, work, study, and play—because they are occasionally and incrementally successful (e.g., gun safety legislation in 2022). Modest gains found in local, tangible feats are celebrated. A modicum of justice or raised awareness against specific threats is interpreted as an affirmative step. Meanwhile, these successes

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provide the space for the next demand or the next fight in subsequent months, decades, and generations. In this way, hope generates resistance, and in the resistance, many find hope that sustains them through the next round of activism. Yet resistance is only one in a collection of activities adopted to experience, express, find, generate, or inspire beneficial change.

Exhaustion-Elation Realized in Wildlife Volunteerism Hope and optimism along with the emotional tensions of frustration, despair, exhaustion, and elation are also found among volunteers who labor in ecological recovery efforts or wildlife or environmental protection. Studies of volunteers who have participated in oil spill cleanups are filled with earnest depictions of residents and non-residents involved in work they find to be simultaneously arduous, purposeful, and meaningful (deNapoli 2010; Fraser, de Monchy, and Murray 2012; Widener 2021). These volunteers acquire a certain “sweat equity” through their physically demanding, hands-on efforts, which inspire confidence in confronting authorities and holding authorities to account (Widener 2021, 60). Collectively, these studies reveal how volunteers exhibit personal pride in their experiential knowledge and an eagerness to educate, support, and train others. Beyond oil spill cleanups, and even though volunteers may dedicate only a few hours each week, month, or year to local wildlife or environmental initiatives, these activities spark moments of hope and optimism in otherwise gloomy ecological observations and forecasts. Resembling social justice activists, wildlife volunteers are hopeful, but not naïve. They understand the large-scale threats to endangered species and habitats and recognize the small-scale contributions of their efforts. While critics of volunteerism disparage “do-gooder” sentimentalities or stress a savior-complex among privileged people, our analyses from personal and professional experiences reveal that wildlife or environmental volunteers engage in multiple positive-­oriented endeavors. Unlike charity participation among the wealthy that serves as a “substitute for” rather than as a “supplement to” social justice (Kendzior 2018, 62), wildlife or environmental volunteerism, we argue, is adopted as a supplement to other activities in a repertoire of hope-inspired and hope-generating actions for other species and habitats. For both authors, years of volunteering on marine or coastal projects reflect a preferred state of being (to be on, in, or near the sea), continuous curiosity (to participate in and learn from community-based citizen science outside of the academy), and/or a desire to give back while being outdoors (to monitor sea turtle nests or to aid in restoring coral reefs, while also enjoying a night at the beach or a weekend at sea). Hope and optimism may not have been explicit, first-tier motivations for volunteering; however, both emerged implicitly during the act of volunteering. From the volunteers we know, despair and frustration with human-induced ecological threats led each of us to try to do

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something—however minuscule. And we knew our efforts were minuscule compared to worldwide ecological problems and pressures. As volunteers, we experienced and observed hope and awe when a nest of sea turtles hatched, and the hatchlings made their way unimpeded to the ocean. We also experienced and observed hope and awe when listening to younger volunteers or organizers explain why they were interested in protecting South Florida’s endangered sea turtles or coral reefs. Volunteers may spend hours and years of drudgery and exhaustion on the sand, in the dark, monitoring turtle nests and human behavior, educating tourists and residents, and conducting citizen science on how artificial lighting obstructs the migration of turtle hatchlings to the sea. Nevertheless, each time a nest hatches and the hatchlings make their way successfully to the sea, a mini-euphoria that “all is right in the world” erases the memory of physical labor and the grind of inactive nights; erases an irritation at people’s refusal to alter their behaviors for the sake of another species; and erases a frustration with the government that appears to be doing too little to protect marine and coastal species and habitats. As irrational as it sounds, many hours may be volunteered for a fleeting jolt of joy. When one volunteer was asked by email what it meant to them to spend so many hours “watching sand,” waiting for a turtle nest to hatch, they wrote back immediately: There were many, many nights when all I did was sit and watch sand. I calculated once that I rescued around 10,000 hatchlings over [seven seasons],2 which meant that maybe one more turtle survived to adulthood. That’s a lot of time spent on the beach to save one turtle. But I recruited six more rock-solid volunteers over the years, and each of them saved the same, so the numbers start to add up. Besides that, I couldn’t begin to count how many people I educated on the plight of endangered sea turtles. The statistics sound bleak. The images of laboring seven years to save a single turtle or planting a small piece of coral in an attempt to mitigate a planetary crisis appear equally bleak. Yet despite what appears futile, these commitments inspire optimism and hope within and among the volunteers. As seen in the second half of the volunteer’s commentary, a belief in the capacity of others and collective action both reflect and inspire hope and optimism that a healthier ecological future is possible. In short, volunteering is the micro-effort of people mitigating systemic problems a few hours at a time. In addition, volunteering represents moments when one may observe or experience like-minded people who crosscut generations and collaborate outside of the home, workplace, or normal social circles as they endeavor to create something better for others. These actions in turn allow volunteers to ward off ecological despair and to think—however briefly—that at least they tried. The emotional tensions derive from frustration that such

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work is necessary and the elation when their micro-efforts appear beneficial. We offer volunteerism to socio-ecological studies and acts of promising transformations in our effort to identify new avenues of hope, practice, research, or allied ethnography.

Worry-Enthusiasm Shared in Intergenerational Dialogues and Allyships Our third illustration is inspired by intergenerational dialogues and allyships that take place in formal university settings and informal spaces where volunteers, community members, educators, and/or social activists gather. In these situations, we witness people across generations engage in collaborative conversations that forge new understandings and solidarities and advocate for more secure and just futures (however defined). As educators, we witness students share everything from the social hurt of knowing the persistence of social and ecological injustices to confidence that change is possible. As allies (though some students may disagree),3 we attempt to leverage our position, time, and resources to assist, educate, support, and learn from them. And throughout these encounters, crossgenerational angst, worry, optimism, and enthusiasm are shared. Younger Millennials and Generation Z youth own their voices in challenging political inaction on climate change, gun violence, and racial and gender discrimination, and their voices sound angry and afraid, yet also confident and expectant. Coming of Age at the End of Nature is one of the more poignant anthologies on climate change that captures these mixed sentiments (Dunlap and Cohen 2016). Given the decades of inaction, limited public concern, and a long line of inert or indifferent political and economic advisers in recalcitrant institutions and corporations, young people express that they have been left with little choice but to act (Stephenson 2015; Dunlap and Cohen 2016; Widener 2021). In the angry-hopeful words of one young author, “[T]here is nothing so powerful as self-righteous anger, and millions of us are marching on it.…My generation is hopeful, practical, strategic, and muscular—and not naïve.…[W]e want history to write us as the ones who got to work” (Hemphill 2016, 167, 168).4 In classrooms and at community-based workshops, educators and community organizers are afforded unique opportunities to provide spaces for critical dialogues that range from the extreme depths of global inequities to community resiliency, and from the violence embedded in global supply chains to just solutions, equitable transitions, and alternative futures (see Widener 2015; Mullen and Widener 2022). Ideally, these spaces support students and communities in deliberations and collaborations and facilitate the practice of allying, educating, and supporting each other in flourishing, not merely surviving on the fringes of one’s potential. Likewise, educators may find assurances that their teachings are valued when watching Emma González as a high school student (and now known as X González) hold up notes from their advanced placement

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government class as they delivered an impassioned “We Call B.S.” speech immediately following the 2018 high school shooting.5 From our classroom experiences, we offer photovoice as a useful tool to create positive dialogues, facilitate critical thinking, forge intergenerational allyships, and experience how hope and optimism are frequently intertwined and exchanged. Traditionally, photovoice is a data collection tool researchers use with groups or communities to photograph, identify, and discuss the limitations and/or strengths of a place or experience in order to build community-centered dialogues for possible solutions or improvements (Wang and Burris 1997). More recently, photovoice has been adopted in the classroom (Wass et al. 2020). As a low-stakes creative assignment, we have incorporated photovoice into several different courses. We ask students to represent their research or local experience through their photography or a visual montage of others’ social media posts, images, and memes. Everyone’s contributions are then presented to the class, so students can give voice to their research or personal experience within the framework of the course. An exchange of similar and dissimilar memories, feelings, or findings typically ensues. Subsequent discussions then enable deeper understandings of the subject, while expanding everyone’s points of view and strengthening our abilities to locate ourselves and others in a system of positive and negative social dynamics and solutions. As a classroom exercise, photovoice in all of its adaptations provides the time and space to discuss local struggles and celebrations, discover aligned and misaligned interests, conceptualize toxic and nontoxic experiences, and share in expressions of curiosity, hope, and optimism. For example, the second author teaches a course on social movements and asks students to research a movement that is important to them. Throughout the term the class engages in group discussions on the systems that create, hold, and perpetuate injustices. In a culminating project, each student interviews an activist leader or member to better appreciate the movement from the point of view of a participant. As studentresearchers, they also turn to social media to capture the voice, photos, and posts of those they were studying to better understand the movement, which are then shared with everyone. To paraphrase one student following this exercise: Not only can I make a difference, but I have to make a difference. You taught me to speak up and back up my arguments with facts and scholarship. As educators, we have the opportunity to give students a framework and language to critically examine the status quo and to assist them in identifying problems and proposing solutions in ways that they connect systemic obstacles and opportunities to the emotional complexity of their responses and personal or household experiences. As allies, educators, researchers, and residents of a place, we have wondered how these varied roles have become entangled—for the better. For instance, the first author has questioned whether spending two days at a Youth Climate Summit or an afternoon at a Global Youth Strike was meant to collect data on the climate movement, to learn and practice being a better

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FIGURE 8.1 

 esistance: Don’t Support Candidates that Take NRA Blood Money. Gun R Legislation Rally, Fort Lauderdale, February 2018. [Photo by P. Widener].

FIGURE 8.2 

Allyship: Give Me Back My Future. Global Climate Youth Strike, Fort Lauderdale, September 2019. [Photo by P. Widener].

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ally, to support undergraduate attendance, or just to feel a modicum of hope and optimism. (Each objective was achieved.) For the second author, returning to university at age 50 to earn the degrees necessary to teach at the university level was itself an exercise in anger-hope. As a longtime volunteer, community activist, and mom of four, the second author understands all too well her feelings of despair and despondency as well as those raging around her children, their friends, and their future. Becoming an educator allowed her to mitigate her anger, channel the despair of her children, and as an ally, actively share newfound hope with a new generation. Even as we recognize the interplay of micro- and macro-level dynamics and the embeddedness of complex power structures, the classroom provides a structure and space for us (our students and their allies) to expand our theoretical understandings, practice our critical thinking, and exchange with some worry, enthusiasm, and optimism our hopes on improving local-to-global conditions for more living beings.

Conclusion: The Promise of Transformative Actions Engaged citizens know what they are up against and what or whom they are fighting. They are not naïve; and they realize that they may face cultural and institutional challenges and backlashes. They are keenly aware of the unequal power dynamics between them and the culprits they have identified. They are knowledgeable of the obstacles, cruelties, exclusions, and devastations in existence. And yet, engaged residents are not just critical of the ongoing and prolonged crises; they doggedly resist the perpetuation of them in small and grand ways, and in a collection of hope-inspired actions or actions that advance optimistic beliefs. Singly and jointly, the labors of resident-advocates create spaces for even greater aspirations and form the promise of even greater local-to-global social, cultural, ecological, and political transformations—for their futures and the futures of others. This chapter illustrates how individuals and collectives suspend their cynicism and skepticism by amplifying optimistic beliefs into acts of hope. Ideally, acts of allying, celebrating, collaborating, conversing, problem-solving, researching, resisting, teaching, and volunteering lead to ongoing transformations and improved socioecological conditions. And yet to state this point is not to ignore the disproportional power and influence of political and economic systems or to diminish the import of critical worldviews. Instead, our cases provide evidence of where we have observed, researched, or experienced various activities that were inspired by the moral and emotional charges surrounding a given injustice and by the belief that individual and collective responses foster change. While we have highlighted three acts of hope and optimism, engaged residents employ a wide range of actions, including, but not limited to, acts of citizen journalism, community clean-ups, difficult conversations, legal actions,

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letter writing and social media campaigns, and petition and voter registration drives. It is their dedication to making something better that pushes them to persist despite potential ridicule, contempt, or external pressure. Through their efforts, they become extraordinary, and their efforts born out of combinations of anger, despair, elation, exhaustion, enthusiasm, grief, hope, rage, sorrow, or worry become significant. As researchers, educators, and neighbors, we could dismiss individuals engaged in small acts against much larger and more powerful entities or we could recognize that their acts are but a few in a collective of actions seeking an expanded notion of justice for current and future generations and ecologies. Finally, our lingering skepticism as social scientists continuously battles with our cautious optimism as resident-citizens as we witness and hope that these diverse actions are not in vain.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank Anna Willow for her insightful feedback on an early draft and the other panelists and participants for their helpful comments at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 2021 and the Society for Applied Anthropology in 2022.

Notes 1 Accessed February 16, 2022: https://marchforourlives.com/mission-story/ 2 Estimates of hatchlings reaching reproductive maturity suggest anywhere from one in 1,000 to one in 10,000. 3 On the hurdles and benefits of allyship, see Kraemer (2007). 4 Also see Juliana et al. v United States, a lawsuit filed by young climate activists against the U.S. government for climate inaction. 5 See CNN transcript and video: CNN Staff. 2018. “Florida Student Emma Gonzalez to Lawmakers and Gun Advocates: ‘We Call BS.’” February 18: https://www.cnn. com/2018/02/17/us/florida-student-emma-gonzalez-speech/index.html

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Fischer, Edward F., and Peter Benson. 2006. Broccoli & Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Founders of March for Our Lives. 2018. Glimmer of Hope: How Tragedy Sparked a Movement. New York: Razorbill and Dutton. Fraser, Bruce, Pim de Monchy, and Warwick Murray. 2012. The Rena Volunteer Programme (report). Bay of Plenty, New Zealand: Bay of Plenty Regional Council Coast Care Program. Gould, Deborah B. 2002. “Life During Wartime: Emotions and the Development of ACT UP.” Mobilization 7 (2): 177–200. Hemphill, Bonnie Frye. 2016. “We Are the Fossil-Fuel Freedom Fighters.” In Coming of Age at the End of Nature, edited by J. Dunlap and S. A. Cohen, 161–170. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press. Heyman, Josiah. 2011. “An Academic in an Activist Coalition: Recognizing and Bridging Role Conflicts.” Annals of Anthropological Practice 35 (2): 136–153. Jasper, James M. 2011. “Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 37 (1): 285–303. Kendzior, Sarah. 2018. The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America. New York: Flatiron Books. Kleist, Nauja, and Stef Jansen. 2016. “Introduction: Hope over Time – Crisis, Immobility and Future-Making.” History and Anthropology 27 (4): 373–392. Kleres, Jochen, and Asa Wettergren. 2017. “Fear, Hope, Anger, and Guilt in Climate Activism.” Social Movement Studies 16 (5): 507–519. Kraemer, Kelly Rae. 2007. “Solidarity in Action: Exploring the Work of Allies in Social Movements.” Peace & Change 32 (1): 20–38. Macy, Joanna, and Chris Johnstone. 2012. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy. Novato, CA: New World Library. McAdam, Doug. 2009. “Recruits to Civil Rights Activism.” In The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts, edited by J. Goodwin and J. M. Jasper, 66–74. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Moolenaar, Elisabeth N. 2020. “‘You Must Tell Our Stories!’ Moving toward Applied Anthropology and Beyond in the Groningen Gas Field.” In Anthropology and Activism, edited by Anna J. Willow and Kelly A. Yotebieng, 128–142. New York: Routledge Press. Mullen, Casey, and Patricia Widener. 2022. “Dissonance between Framing and Acting for Climate Justice.” Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 27 (5): 586–604. Osterhoudt, Sarah. 2021. “Bright Spot Ethnography: On the Analytical Potential of Things that Work.” The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture & Politics 8 (1): 33–47. Pellow, David Naguib. 2018. What Is Critical Environmental Justice? Cambridge: Polity Press. Reger, Jo, ed. 2019. Nevertheless, They Persisted: Feminisms and Continued Resistance in the U.S. Women’s Movement. New York: Routledge. Schuller, Mark. 2014. “Being an Insider Without: Activist Anthropological Engagement in Haiti after the Earthquake.” American Anthropologist 116 (2): 409–412. Smith-Cavros, Eileen, and Patricia Widener. 2020. “In Our Own Backyard: Navigating Research and Activism in Southeast Florida.” In Anthropology and Activism, edited by Anna J. Willow and Kelly A. Yotebieng, 98–113. New York: Routledge. Stephenson, Wen. 2015. What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Tilly, Charles. 1977. “Getting It Together in Burgundy, 1675–1975.” Theory and Society 4 (1): 479–504. Wang, Caroline, and Mary Ann Burris. 1997. “Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use for Participatory Needs Assessment.” Health Education and Behavior 24 (3): 369–387. Wass, Rob, Vivienne Anderson, Rafaela Rabello, Clinton Golding, Ana Rangi, and Esmay Eteuati. 2020. “Photovoice as a Research Method of Higher Education Research.” Higher Education Research and Development 39 (4): 834–850. Widener, Patricia. 2011. Oil Injustice: Resisting and Conceding a Pipeline in Ecuador. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Widener, Patricia. 2015. “Consuming Violence: Oil and Food in Everyday Life.” In Letting Go: Feminist and Social Justice Insight and Activism, edited by D. King and C. G. Valentine, 201–209. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Widener, Patricia. 2021. Toxic and Intoxicating Oil: Discovery, Resistance, and Justice in Aotearoa New Zealand. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Willow, Anna J. and Kelly A. Yotebieng, eds. 2020. Anthropology and Activism: New Contexts, New Conversations. New York: Routledge.

9 OPTIMISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE WORK OF SYSTEMS CHANGEMAKERS Alison Gold

Context and Background My perspective differs from many of the other contributors to this book. I am not an academic with an advanced degree. After studying anthropology as an undergraduate, I spent nearly 15 years working on social and systems change efforts in the United States. I was employed by nonprofits, philanthropies, and government agencies—often the organizations most directly involved in the dayto-day work and funding of systemic change. I have worked with leaders from many sectors, communities, identities, and ideologies on a wide range of issues as varied as strengthening emergency preparedness and response post-9/11; improving health care outcomes; reshaping a region’s economy; and supporting multi-sector partnerships working to transform systems that contribute to multigenerational poverty in ten US cities. In 2017, I launched a consultancy and chose the name Optimistic Anthropology because it reflects my values and philosophy. Optimism is hopefulness and confidence in the future. Anthropology is the study of what makes us human. I know that by creating an intentional process to learn about cultures and how they developed, and by building the knowledge and know-how to experiment with solutions until we find the “right” ones, we can shape a more positive future.1 (Gold 2017) While I’ve never been hired for a position with “anthropologist” in the title, my approach has always included an anthropological way of thinking and doing. DOI: 10.4324/b23231-10

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In the last decade, that approach has evolved as I’ve continued to learn, practice, and integrate deep equity, defined by Petty and Dean as the need to understand and address [equity and] its multiple systemic, structural, institutional, interpersonal, and individual/internal causes (both historic and current), and recognize the social construction of identity, power and privilege over time. Deep equity requires ongoing attention to hearts, minds, behaviors, and structures. (2017, emphasis in original) In my work, I have learned that there are many ways to be an anthropologist and many people practicing anthropology in the world, whether or not they use this term. I see anthropological work all around me. Journalists like Anthony Bourdain and Katie Mingle integrate anthropology into their work, amplifying the perspectives of people who are part of communities and impacted by systems (as in Mingle’s reporting on the homelessness services system) to a wider audience. Technology has also enabled people to tell the stories of their own institutions, communities, and systems without gatekeepers. For example, The Ear Hustle podcast was created by incarcerated men and volunteers at and shares stories from San Quentin State Prison, while “Indigenous Tiktok/Instagram” creators present their Tribal Nations and communities’ languages, histories, cultures, and activism in the present day.2 In this chapter, I interpret anthropology broadly as the study of what makes us human, rather than strictly in academic terms. I also consider anthropology to be work done in collaboration with a group of people, rather than about, for, or onto a group of people (I take inspiration here from the US Disability Rights movement’s slogan, “Nothing about us without us”). I believe that anthropology should engage with and seek to transform social, economic, and environmental systems in the United States—and beyond—to produce more positive and equitable results. In centering what makes us human and cultivating interdependent relationships, as well as deep belief that systems transformation is possible, this work is rich in hope and confidence in the future. I call it optimistic anthropology.

The Problem with Problem-Solving In the United States, the status quo approach is to address our toughest social, economic, and environmental challenges—poverty, racism, and climate change—by conceiving of them as complicated problems that can be observed and fixed with existing knowledge and individual expertise. Complicated contexts assume an ordered universe, where cause-and-effect relationships are perceptible and “right answers” can be determined based on facts (Snowden and Boone 2007). As a result, the perspectives that are commonly privileged are those of academics, policy makers or experts, and people and institutions with significant financial resources.

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Often, the people who are looked to as “experts” to “solve” problems are far away and/or insulated from the people who do the day-to-day work or experience the direct impacts of the systems because of who they are (identity), the work they do (role), and/or the organizations and/or communities where they live and work (institutions/geography). For instance, the average member of the US Congress has little or no direct experience with the child welfare system—either as someone who works within it or as a child or family member experiencing that system.3 Yet the country looks to Congress to create laws and appropriate funds for the child welfare system. Decisions about systems that supposedly serve the country’s most historically marginalized, excluded, and oppressed people often become intellectual exercises or—even worse—political games. This happens because legislators are distanced from the impacts of the systems over which they have formal decision-making authority and because access to legislators by constituents more proximate to the system and its impacts are limited by factors including time, financial resources, and advocacy know-how. While Congress’s formal authority and financial resources are assets for creating positive and equitable results, they are not sufficient to make meaningful change. A fundamental reimagining and transforming of the intended results, processes, and relationships within the system is required. This work can only be done in meaningful ways alongside the people, communities, and institutions who make up these systems. Congress, like most of the institutions that the United States relies on to “solve problems,” is not set up to work in this way. As the author and activist adrienne maree brown writes: western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other… • •

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We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo. We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home? We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstances. We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in… We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together… We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life.

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In the United States specifically…we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education. (brown 2017, 47–48)

The Possibility of Systems Change The cultural model brown describes provides insight into why it is so challenging to address the United States’ toughest social, economic, and environmental problems, because our problems are not in fact complicated, but instead complex. Complex problems are unordered—there is no immediately apparent relationship between what causes them and the effects they produce. Thus, the way forward can only be figured out by paying attention to and engaging with emerging patterns (Snowden and Boone 2007). Complex problems are not the product of one policy, practice, mindset, or funding flow, and thus cannot be “fixed” by changing an input. Instead, they are created by and the result of a system—a set of interacting components or parts forming a complex whole that produces a specific result. Many individuals, organizations, and communities do not recognize that they are part of a system until they are prompted to see themselves as such. Likewise, many change initiatives mistakenly believe that the [system or] organization needs to change because it is broken. The reality is that any social system (including an organization or a country or a family) is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way. (Heifitz et al. 2009, 17) In other words, “The system isn’t broken, it was built that way” (King 2022). Thus, when faced with complex challenges, the status quo “problem-solving” approach is not sufficient because Systems don’t get solved. At best, we hope to shift systems to a healthier state. Systems don’t just need things fixed. They need healing—healing of relationships, historic inequities, destructive patterns, and the environment. Systems are infinite. There is no finish line that can be crossed in days or even a few years. Maintaining healthy systems is an ongoing task. (Ricigliano 2021) It is not possible to shift a system producing a societal problem to a healthier state with just one person or even a small group of people—especially if their identities and roles are homogenous. And the assumption that disciplinary expertise, power, and resources are all that are needed to sense and respond to

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the factors producing the current results is wrong. This assumption devalues or ignores the expertise, experience, and knowledge of other actors in the system, especially those who do essential on-the-ground work or experience a system’s most direct impacts. Status quo “problem-solving” fundamentally misunderstands the source and context of complex problems, as well as the timeframes needed to bring together systems actors, undertake learning, and move the system to a healthier state. At root, all institutions, communities, and systems comprise people. Transforming them to produce different results requires people to think, act, and be differently in order to produce different results. I use the term systems changemakers to describe people who are intentionally working to move systems to healthier states through their thinking, acting, and being. Systems changemakers do their work in many ways. In this chapter, I highlight three practices of optimistic anthropology that I’ve observed to be vital to their work, and touch upon a fourth. First, systems changemakers recognize that the work of systems change requires the involvement of different actors than status quo problem-solving. They are intentional about including not only the people and institutions with disciplinary expertise, power, authority and resources, but also actors throughout the system. Most critically they recognize the importance of proximate leaders, people who ha[ve] a meaningful relationship with groups whose identity, experience, or community are systemically stereotyped, feared, dismissed, or marginalized. Being a proximate leader is about much more than being exposed to or studying a group of people and its struggles to overcome adversity. It’s about actually being a part of that group or being meaningfully guided by that group’s input, ideas, agendas, and assets. ( Jackson et al. 2020) Second, systems changemakers understand and emphasize the need for people, communities, and institutions to spend time and energy building meaningful understanding and relationships with one another. Recognizing people’s interdependence means “that we can meet each other’s needs in a variety of ways… It means we have to decentralize our idea of where solutions and decisions happen, where ideas come from” (brown 2017, 87). Third, systems changemakers are committed to learning about the goals, history, processes, and impacts of systems. They recognize that actors in a system need to spend significant time and energy learning about the history and present impacts if they are to move systems to healthier states. Fourth, systems changemakers work to reimagine and reshape system goals and cultural models. They recognize that cultural models “are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals”

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(Meadows 1999). Shifting the goals of the system and the cultural models from which they emerge are among the most powerful levers for transforming systems.

The Work of Systems Changemakers What does the work of systems changemakers actually look like? There is no single model, no recipe. As Donella Meadows wrote, Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.… We can’t impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than we could ever be produced by our will alone. We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! (Meadows 2001) In the pages that follow, I share stories of three systems changemakers with very different training, who work in diverse contexts, and seek to move different communities, institutions, and systems to healthier states. Each section explores a key question about how to do the work of systems change and features an example from the work of a systems changemaker seeking to transform (respectively) prison, youth development, and healthcare systems. As noted above, a key tenet of my framing of anthropology is “nothing about us, without us.” Instead of writing about these changemakers from my perspective, therefore, I center their insights and experiences.

Who Needs to Be Involved in the Work of System Transformation? The contemporary US criminal justice system has been shaped by the “expertise” that status quo problem-solving in the country has often relied on—policy makers and experts, academics, and people with financial resources (including private companies that own and operate prisons). While the United States is home to only 4.2% of the world’s population, it houses 20% of the global incarcerated population (~2 million people). The impact of incarceration is not limited to the people who experience it directly; incarceration affects families and communities profoundly. Many people, communities, and institutions—including academics, policy experts, and activists—are now working to change the incarceration system. One such institution is the Arizona State University Center for Correctional Solutions (CCS). The center’s Director, Kevin Wright, is also an Associate Professor in the Arizona State University School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Kevin and I exchanged emails about his practice of system changemaking in June and

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July 2022, which are shared in this section. Kevin could have taken a more traditional path in academia and positioned himself as an academic or policy “expert” on incarceration or the corrections system. But from his very first internship in a correctional facility as an undergraduate student interviewing soon-to-be released individuals about their post-incarceration plans, he recognized that there are things that incarcerated people understand about the system that those who have not experienced incarceration do not. During his tenure as CCS Director, Kevin did many of the things that professors typically do—he taught, advised graduate students, and conducted and published research. More unusual is that he undertook this in collaboration with people living and working in our correctional system. Wright formed collaborations with the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry (ADCRR) and incarcerated men and women at its facilities to (1) bring the Inside-Out Prison Exchange program to Arizona and teach classes that bring together ASU students and incarcerated individuals to learn together and dialogue on topics of crime and criminal justice; (2) develop the Arizona Transformation Project, a think tank that emerged from the inaugural InsideOut Prison Exchange experience and continues as a collaboration between people inside and outside; and (3) co-hosted (with the ADCRR) an annual art show called Inkarcerated: Creativity Within Confinement, which features works by incarcerated individuals that are sold to raise funds for charities that the artists choose. Kevin has also been working to advance a larger-scale effort to “reimagine incarceration” so that people can “be better than when they arrived to live or work in the system—more fully able to contribute to their families, communities, and society.” The effort envisions the university as a full partner with the ADCRR to bring a range of resources available within the University—such as education, job readiness, and health care—into prisons based on incarcerated people’s priorities. In order to identify those needs, Kevin and his colleagues have been conducting participatory research in specific prisons, and training incarcerated men and women to conduct interviews, lead focus groups, and review and help interpret findings from research. Kevin is a systems changemaker who incorporates the optimistic anthropological practice of recognizing that who needs to be involved in the work of systems transformation goes well beyond the traditional, more distant roles of academics, policy experts, and funders. While it is challenging to navigate the dynamics of engaging with both incarcerated people and prison leadership and staff, he sees this engagement as critical to moving prisons and the corrections system to a healthier state. As Kevin shared, Our mission in the Center for Correctional Solutions is to enhance the lives of people who live and work in our correctional system through research, education, and community engagement. “Enhance,” “People,”

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“Live,” and “Work” are all critical to us, particularly in combination. This means that we’re often trying to bridge a divide between those who live (people who are incarcerated) and work (correctional staff), with significant coercion and power imbalances between them. But given they’re both part of the community that makes up the system, we must engage both. And doing so takes us beyond “corrections needs to do this” by ­acknowledging that if we’re enhancing the lives of staff, we’re enhancing the lives of people who are incarcerated, and vice versa. Kevin recognizes that as an academic and a representative of a large and powerful research university, he is also part of systems that he is trying to change. He and his colleagues need to think, talk, act, and embody a different way of being than is expected of them. As he put it, people who live and work in correctional systems are (appropriately!) suspicious of the university. The university often bullies its way in, taking over spaces and responsibility for what happens in those spaces. [Recognizing this] led us to change [our approach from] “assuming fundamental responsibility” to “sharing responsibility.” Kevin also recognizes a history of harm that academics and academic institutions have done to the proximate leaders who live and work in the correction systems “There’s a history of people in prison being experimented on in the name of research,” he noted, and “there remains suspicion that we’re there to study the criminal mind and treat people like lab rats. And people who work in prison don’t want to be told how to do their job by ivory tower academics.” What does it look like practically for Kevin and his colleagues to build relationships with people who live and work in prison? When it comes to working with people in prison, Do what you say you are going to do and be honest about what you are not going to do and why. Then repeat.…People in prison frequently experience cancellations, transfers, shut-downs, etc. They start with an assumption that you won’t be there long. When you show them otherwise, you build trust. This type of consistency has been described in leadership development research as a key element of trust (Zenger and Folkman 2019). Kevin and his colleagues also take the time to learn how people who live and work in prisons view the university. “Frankly, we agree with many of the concerns regarding elitist academics who are out of touch with reality,” he reflected, “and we work to show that we do not embrace many of those.”

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In addition, Kevin and his colleagues seek to “find common ground in what makes people human, regardless of whether or not they are in prison.…We emphasize the things that matter most to people when they are reflecting back on their lives.” In the classes and opportunities he and his colleagues facilitate in correctional facilities, they seek to “embrace and leverage what makes us human rather than focus exclusively on what we may have done as humans.” The practice of listening to perspectives and criticism and sharing where there is alignment, as well as focusing on what connects everyone to their humanity, connects to the final key element of trust: Positive relationships (Zenger and Folkman 2019). Through it all, Kevin recognizes that the work of institutional and systems change in the world of corrections has a long timeframe. While he and his colleagues have made progress in building relationships with groups of people who live and work in correctional institutions, what is “harder still is bringing the groups together to work together, but we’re slowly making attempts at doing so…with the shared understanding that they both exist in this system or environment, and that if that system or environment is ‘better,’ both groups benefit.”

How Do We Cultivate Interdependency among the People, Communities, and Institutions Who Make Up a System? When the scientific study of youth development began in the early 1900s, young people were referred to as “broken” or in danger of becoming so, as both dangerous and endangered, or as “problems to be managed” (Lerner 2005). Alongside this emerging scientific discipline, an array of youth development organizations arose that “were adult-led organizations with agendas driven by adult concepts of what young people needed and should be doing” (Walker et al. 2011). For the majority of the twentieth century, youth development work focused on individual children’s development with little attention to the contexts, relationships, and engagement strategies (Walker et al. 2011). When young people were discussed positively in scientific literature prior to the 1990s, it was not because of what they were doing, but rather because they were not drinking, taking drugs, engaging in unsafe sex, or committing crimes or violent acts. (Lerner 2005). By the 1990s, a response to the deficit model of youth development emerged. The strengths-based Positive Youth Development (PYD) perspective instead viewed adolescents not as problems to be managed but as resources to be developed (Burkhard et al. 2020). However, a review of top academic journals focused on youth and adolescence between 2000 and 2010 found that only 13% of articles used a positive youth development framework (Barcelona and Quinn 2011). I share this to make visible the cultural models and goals that have shaped youth development for much of its history and to contextualize how another systems changemaker and her organization view and practice youth development in a radically different way.

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Archana “Archie” Nagraj is the Executive Director of the Destiny Arts Center in Oakland, California which, for more than three decades, has used movement-based arts to uplift youth voice, supporting pathways for young people to express themselves, advocate for justice and equity, fight against the systemic racism that continues to impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), and build a community where everyone feels seen, valued, and free. (Destiny Arts Center n.d.) Archie and her colleagues at Destiny integrate a second optimistic anthropology practice into their work because they understand and emphasize the need for people, communities, and institutions to spend time and energy building meaningful understanding and relationships with one another. I have partnered with Archie and her colleagues since the summer of 2021 to understand the impact of Destiny’s work. One aspect of our work together has involved defining the organization’s ultimate goal: To help young people live full, connected, and creative lives (Gold and Grant 2022). In addition to orienting toward a goal that centers young people (and their perspectives), Destiny has a deep awareness that young people do not exist in a vacuum, but are part of an ecosystem that includes their caregivers and family members, friends, classmates, and classroom teachers as well as the staff and teaching artists they come into contact with at Destiny. When I talked to Archie about her work at Destiny in June 2022, she reflected that “typically with nonprofits…there’s that sense that we are ‘serving’ or seeing the community as clients.” In contrast, at Destiny [we] see everybody as partners…when you have a savior mentality, [it] takes away the strengths of the young people that we work with, and the families that we work with, who bring so much of themselves to this work. She went on to emphasize how this differed from much of the history of youth development work in the United States. “We’re not trying to fix anybody, we’re not trying to serve anybody, we’re trying to work with people,” she said. “We are bringing the authenticity of ourselves, authenticity of young people and of families together and creating something new.” While Destiny is known for its arts education programming and powerful performances, those activities are in service of helping students further their abilities to learn, practice, and eventually embody interpersonal and social emotional skills. These lessons are built into the dance and martial arts curricula and are practiced and modeled by staff and teaching artists. Teaching artists and staff nurture welcoming and supportive relationships with the students as well as

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some of the most important people in students’ lives—their family members and caretakers as well as classroom teachers (for in-school programming). Archie said this “is why the staff are so critical. It’s not just about bringing services to young people, it’s about bringing the right mix of people together. [This is why] we’ve often talked about the Destiny family, the Destiny culture.” Archie adds that “[t]hrough art, we are in community, we’re building relationships, we are working through life with one another.…There is a power in community that makes it different than creating art as an individual.” In summer and fall of 2021, I interviewed a group of staff, teaching artists, family members, students and former students, and Board Members who are partners at Destiny. During these discussions, people often referred to the “magic of Destiny.” When asked to describe “the magic,” however, many people said it was ineffable. Archie explained that it is similar to how we talk about love, you have to feel it in order to know what that is. We use the same words about Destiny programs like: “You have to come to a show.” “You have to walk into the building.” “You have to feel it.” I experienced the “magic” and the “working through life with one another” firsthand in May 2022, when Destiny held its spring performance. Entitled “Letters to the Present,” the performance included readings and vignettes from some of the dancers’ real lives—touching on topics like body-image, sexual assault, COVID, and depression—as preludes to the dance pieces. The performances featured dancers from Destiny’s junior and youth companies (ages 9–18) and the Elders Project (ages 50+). Archie noted the particular power of featuring dancers from these age groups: “People often see young people as not contributing members of society. That’s how kids are thought of. Elders are also marginalized and pushed out of the community. So, [it’s powerful] having a space where their stories are important.” Archie and other at Destiny understand the importance of spending time and energy nurturing relationships and fostering understanding. As she put it, “I feel like the community at Destiny is collectively coming together and creating something new. And we can’t do the work we do without our community.…[I] t’s really done in partnership.”

How Did the System Come to Be This Way? In April of 2019, I accompanied 26 medical residents and faculty members on a five-day trip from Atlanta to Tuskegee to Montgomery to Selma to Birmingham and back to Atlanta. Along the way, we learned from and with historians, civil rights leaders, health policy experts, and medical professionals. We visited key sites in the history of anti-Black racism and the civil rights movement in the United States, hearing firsthand about the enduring legacy of mistrust of government and health institutions created by the US Public Health Service’s Untreated

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Syphilis Study (1932–1972); feeling overwhelmed by the memorial to over 4,000 known victims of racial terror lynching at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice; and seeing the connections between slavery, lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration as permutations of racism at the Legacy Museum. Along the way, there were daily reflection questions, one-on-one conversations, multiracial group discussions over meals, and race-based caucuses to process the experiences with people of shared identity. There were tears and anger. There was numbness, and the sense of being overwhelmed. And there was inspiration and laughter, hugs and singing, and delicious food. Throughout, there was a depth of honesty, vulnerability, and mutual support that individuals who are rigorously trained—like doctors—rarely get to experience. The trip was coordinated by the Pediatric Leadership for Health Equity program (PLUS) at the University of California–San Francisco. PLUS is rare among medical residency programs because residents not only gain experience practicing medicine; they also participate in an extensive leadership development curriculum focused on advancing the goal of health equity. The connection between health and structural racism is significant: Structural racism has a profound influence on the health of Black/African American, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). Health professionals should not only recognize structural racism as a core driver of health disparities but also actively confront and work to dismantle it. (Marbin et al. 2022) One part of PLUS’s curriculum that almost all participants in the trip had had some exposure to was critical consciousness, a framework through which “learners analyze how structural racism perpetuates injustice, consider their own capacity to change, and take action to confront injustice” (Marbin et al. 2022). Unfortunately, critical consciousness has been largely neglected in medical training due to competing demands on residents’ time and energy. Dr. Jyothi Marbin directed the PLUS program in the spring of 2019 and was responsible for adding both critical consciousness and the trip to the American South to the curriculum.4 She is an example of a systems changemaker committed to a third optimistic anthropology practice—committing significant time and energy to learning about the goals, history, processes, and impacts of systems. Taking over two dozen residents and medical faculty across the country for five days was a serious undertaking. When I talked to Jyothi in June 2022, she recognized the import of the trip, stating that structural racism isn’t the kind of thing that we can just talk about for an hour and then let go and then come back to a little bit later. So the immersion and the space that we created together to have conversations and to reflect felt really important.

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Following the trip, Jyothi found that physician, epidemiologist, and anti-racism activist Camara Phyllis Jones’s framing of racism as ahistorical resonated with her. Being ahistorical “constrains our understanding of how to make change happen,” Jones wrote. [I]f things were a certain way when we were born, we assume that they have always been that way and will always be that way. If we do not fully understand how things came to be the way they are or learn from the history of past movements for change, our current view of what is possible and how to get to a better future will be limited. (Jones 2020) Expanding on this point, Jyothi explained how perpetuating structures of racism is perpetuating this idea that we don’t pay attention to the past, and we can’t learn from the past, and we don’t honor the past.… In order to understand how to solve the problems that we’re grappling with we need to understand where those problems are rooted, which is why it felt so important to do that trip, and really try to uncover and unpack the historical underpinnings for the legacy of racism in the strategies that we’re seeing today. In developing the itinerary for the trip, Jyothi was also conscious of not just focusing on the brutality, but also how civil rights leaders had and have “such a deep capacity to love other people, and take risks for their community, which I think is so inspiring, and such a model.” Jyothi recognizes that history is not only about the past and that, ideally, “we bring that lens [of history] to everything…[because] if we’re denying our history, then we’re perpetuating racism.” This reality shows up in her work as a physician and influences her decisions every day. For example, she told me, “I can’t make a child protective services referral without being conscious of that [agency’s] history [of harm to families]. If I’m ignoring that, then I’m perpetuating and participating in this system that has certainly had racist outcomes.” Jyothi’s work and the trip she organized have offered quantitative and qualitative evidence for spending significant time and energy to learn about systems, their histories, and their impacts. Surveys taken one, six, and twelve months after the trip demonstrated that participants experienced increases in their understanding of systemic racism, motivation to act when witnessing interpersonal and structural racism, and cultural humility (Marbin et al. 2022). Medicine was built [by] white men who decided that this is the way that care should be given. If we just continue to do that blindly, without looking

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back and acknowledging [who created medicine], again we’re perpetuating the patriarchal, white man–centric system of healthcare which is not at all honoring the wisdom of our communities and honoring what our patients and partners feel like healing is. I think we [need to] live that every day…understanding where we’ve come from and using that to transform where we’re going.

Conclusion The work of systems changemakers is about shifting the conditions of the system to a healthier state. And the most powerful lever for systemic change is not policies, practices, or funding flows, but rather the goals of a system and the cultural models that shape them. Cultural models “are widely shared assumptions, expectations, and ways of reasoning about the world that people use to interpret information and engage with communications about systems” (Frameworks Institute 2020). As I wrote this chapter in conversation with systems changemakers I respect, additional examples of how optimistic anthropology infuses their work emerged. Kevin, Archie, and Jyothi all touched upon a fourth practice of optimistic anthropology employed by systems changemakers—the work of reimagining and bringing into being new system goals and cultural models. The work of reimagining system goals and cultural models is intrinsically influenced by who is involved in the work, the culture created by systems changemakers as they collaborate, and what they learn together about the system, its history, and its impacts. And, as they reimagine system goals and cultural models, systems changemakers model for others what a new reality can look and feel like through the ideas they share and actions they take. While I may be a proponent of optimistic anthropology, I am not a Pollyanna. As I sit here typing these words in the summer of 2022, I hold conflicting feelings of pessimism and optimism. My feelings of pessimism about the United States and its path forward in addressing the greatest social, economic, and environmental challenges we face are reflected in news media and research published every day. It is connected to many of the cultural models that shape the United States as a nation and to our collective consciousness as citizens and residents: Learning facts out of context of application; privileging short-term memory and urgency-based thinking; competition and manipulation; identity determining our quality of life; and that being human is not inherently valuable and worthy unless we can produce (brown 2017, 47–48). These cultural models—steeped in white supremacy culture (Okum 2022)—have enabled the United States to produce leading levels of gun violence and incarceration, tremendous economic and health inequities, distrust of government and active erosion of democracy, and apathy and inaction on the climate crisis. In contrast, my optimism stems from knowing and collaborating with systems changemakers in communities and institutions who are doing the work

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to change these realities. These changemakers spend every day engaging and collaborating with other actors in the systems they seek to transform. They are informed and led by the opinions and ideas of people closest to systems’ direct impacts. They are teaching others to think, speak, act, and embody the change they want to create in the world. They value and talk about the work they do using words like love, magic, art, and community. Kevin, Archie, and Jyothi have generously allowed me to share some of their stories. I have connected with and learned from other systems changemakers through my consulting practice and teaching, among my friends and colleagues, and in my local activism and neighborhood mutual aid efforts. The work these folks are doing does not grab headlines. It is slow, patient work, and the people doing it recognize that the world’s toughest social, economic, and environmental challenges are not problems that can be “solved,” but products of complex systems made up of many people, organizations, policies, practices, funding flows, mindsets, and behaviors. Moving any system to a healthier state with more positive and equitable results requires (1) the meaningful engagement of proximate leaders; (2) the cultivation of more interdependent relationships between the people, communities, and institutions that make up the system; (3) the development of a shared learning culture focused on understanding the history, processes, and impacts of the system; and (4) the ability to imagine and work to transform the goals and cultural models that hold the current system in place. People who commit their work and lives to systems changemaking, whether knowingly or not, integrate optimistic anthropology into their practices. They know that it will take years or decades to move systems to achieve their goals, yet they continue to do this unglamorous work because of their belief in the future— their optimism that systems can change for the better. Even on the hardest days, when the events in the news seem at their most grim, it is systems changemakers practicing optimistic anthropology who give me hope for the future.

Acknowledgments I’d like to express my profound appreciation to Kevin Wright and his colleagues the ASU Center for Correctional Solutions; Jyothi Marbin and her colleagues at the UCSF PLUS Program (as well as the faculty and residents who welcomed me on the trip in April 2019); and Archie Nagraj and her colleagues and partners at the Destiny Arts Center. This chapter would not exist without your tremendous leadership, intelligence, heart, and generosity. Thank you to Emir Pašanović and Joan Gold for their ongoing encouragement, editing, and love. And thank you to the many people who have been my mentors and teachers, partners and colleagues, clients and students: You inspire me and provide me with evidence that the world can be transformed to a healthier and more equitable state.

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Notes 1 Looking back at this language in 2022, I cringe at my use of the words “experiment” and “solutions.” The reason will become clear in the pages ahead. 2 Examples include James Jones (@NotoriousCree) https://www.instagram.com/ notoriouscree/; Ashly Michel (@4generationscreations) https://www.instagram. com/4generationscreations/; and James Vukelich Kaagegaabaaw (@Jamesvukelich) https://www.instagram.com/jamesvukelich/. 3 Notably, there are currently five members of Congress who were social workers, though none has practiced in the last 15 years. (https://www.socialworkers.org/ Advocacy/Political-Action-for-Candidate-Election-PACE/Social-Workers-inCongress, accessed June 6, 2022). 4 Since March 2021, Marbin has been the Director of the UC Berkeley UCSF Joint Medical Program.

References Barcelona, Robert J., and William Quinn. 2011. “Trends in Youth Development Topics: An Integrative Review of Positive Youth Development Research Published in Selected Journals Between 2001–2010.” Journal of Youth Development 6 (3): 18–37. Bourdain, Anthony. 2013–2018. Parts Unknown [Television Series], Seasons 1–13. New York: CNN/Zero Point Zero Production. brown, adrienne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press. Burkhard, Brian M., Kathleen M. Robinson, Elise D. Murray, and Richard M. Lerner. 2020. “Positive Youth Development: Theory and Perspective.” Encyclopedia of Child and Adolescent Development. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119171492.wecad310 (accessed July 18, 2022). Destiny Arts Center. n.d.. “About Destiny: Who We Are.” https://destinyarts.org/aboutdestiny/ (accessed July 18, 2022). Frameworks Institute. 2020. “Tapping into Productive Cultural Models.” July 7, 2020. https://www.frameworksinstitute.org/publication/emergingminds_tappinginto productivecms/ (accessed August 4, 2022). Gold, Alison. 2017. “How’d You Come Up With the Name Optimistic Anthropology?” Optimistic Anthropology Blog, June 27, 2017. https://www.optimisticanthro.com/ blog/2017/6/23/whats-optimistic-anthropology-jkhg9 (accessed May 22, 2022). Gold, Alison, and Derisa Grant. 2022. Destiny Arts Center Theory of Change. Unpublished document available upon request. Heifitz, Ronald, Marty Linksy, and Alexander Grashow. 2009. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press. Jackson, Angela, John Kania, and Tulaine Montgomery. 2020. “Effective Change Requires Proximate Leaders.” Stanford Social Innovation Review, October 2, 2020. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/effective_change_requires_proximate_leaders (accessed May 22, 2022). Jones, Camara Phyllis. 2020. “Seeing the Water: Seven Values Targets for Anti-Racism Action.” Harvard Medical School Primary Care Review, August 25, 2020. https://info. primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/review/seven-values-targets-anti-racism-action (accessed July 20, 2022). King, Berniece. 2022. Twitter. June 25, 2022, 4:09 am. https://twitter.com/BerniceKing/ status/1540517567835652100 (accessed July 20, 2022).

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Lerner, Richard M. 2005. “Promoting Positive Youth Development: Theoretical and Empirical Bases.” Paper prepared for the Workshop on the Science of Adolescent Health and Development, National Research Council, Washington, DC. September 9, 2005. National Research Council/Institute of Medicine. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. https://lifehouseduluth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ Positive-Youth-Development1.pdf (accessed July 18, 2022). Marbin, Jyothi, Leanna Lewis, Anda K. Kuo, Christine Schudel, and Juan Raul Gutierrez. 2022. “The Power of Place: Travel to Explore Structural Racism and Health Disparities.” Academic Medicine 96 (11): 1569–1573. Meadows, Donella. 1999. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. Academy for Systems Change. https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-tointervene-in-a-system/ (accessed July 11, 2022). Meadows, Donella. 2001. “Dancing with Systems.” Academy for Systems Change. https:// donellameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/ (accessed July 11, 2022). Mingle, Katie. 2020. According to Need [Podcast audio series], prologue and chapters 1–5. https://99percentinvisible.org/need/ (accessed December 1, 2020). Okum, Tema. 2022 “What Is White Supremacy Culture?” White Supremacy Culture. https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/what-is-it.html (accessed August 2, 2022). Petty, Sheryl, and Amy B. Dean. 2017. “Five Elements of a Thriving Justice Ecosystem: Pursuing Deep Equity.” Nonprofit Quarterly, April 13, 2017. https://nonprofitquarterly. org/five-elements-of-a-thriving-justice-ecosystem-pursuing-deep-equity/ (accessed July 8, 2022). Ricigliano, Rob. 2021. “The Complexity Spectrum.” Too Deep, September 27, 2021. https://blog.kumu.io/the-complexity-spectrum-e12efae133b0 (accessed August 3, 2022). Snowden, David J., and Mary E. Boone. 2007. “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making.” Harvard Business Review 85 (11): 68. https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leadersframework-for-decision-making (accessed July 18, 2022). Walker, Joyce A., Michelle Alberti Gambone, and Katherin C. Walker. 2011. “Reflections on a Century of Youth Development Research and Practice.” Journal of Youth Development 6 (3). https://jyd.pitt.edu/ojs/jyd/article/viewFile/172/158 (accessed July 18, 2022). Woods, Earlonne, and Nigel Poor. 2017–2022. Ear Hustle [Podcast Audio Series]. https:// www.earhustlesq.com/listen (accessed August 4, 2022). Zenger, Jack, and Joseph Folkman. 2019. “The 3 Elements of Trust.” Harvard Business Review, February 5, 2019. https://hbr.org/2019/02/the-3-elements-of-trust (accessed July 16, 2022).

10 CHINA 2060 Envisioning a Human-Centered Approach to Energy Transition Bryan Tilt

Introduction In 2015, the NGO Conservation International released a series of short public service films in China under the title Nature Is Speaking (Da Ziran Zai Shuohua). Each segment was voiced by a Chinese celebrity and narrated over strikingly beautiful cinematography: Spring tulips opening in slow motion; oxygen-rich ocean currents flowing over coral reefs teeming with marine life; craggy mountain peaks draped in clouds. One segment on “the sky” (tiankong) featured a clear blue firmament with white clouds and the whispered narration, “Look up—here I am. I am the sky. The heavens, seemingly without effort, distribute heat and protect everyone on earth.…I am every breath you take” (Gao 2016). The films, circulated widely on social media, were meant to inspire environmentally responsible behavior and policy by showing viewers the dire consequences of their country’s environmental record. The segment on “the sky” thus took an ominous turn away from the beautiful imagery, cutting to an aerial shot of Shanghai’s skyline shrouded in a yellow miasma of pollution. “But you’re killing me, destroying my equilibrium, filling me with pollution,” the narrator said over dark music, before going on to catalog the various ways in which humanity’s insatiable drive for economic growth threatens the atmosphere and climate. The segment ended with the narrator observing, “I don’t worry about me; I worry about you. Remember, fate is determined by heaven.” The narrator’s closing words come from a classical Chinese couplet penned by neo-Confucian scholar Yuan Huang several hundred years ago and cited in many historical sources. The full version of the couplet reads, “Fate is determined by heaven; actions are born of the individual (ming you tian ding, yun you ji sheng).”

DOI: 10.4324/b23231-11

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In modern usage, the Chinese word for “fate” (mingyun) is created by juxtaposing two characters from this couplet, each freighted with deep symbolism from classical Chinese: Ming, denoting the aspects of life controlled by heaven or providence and therefore beyond human control; and yun, denoting the things that prudent people should take responsibility for. I have been studying contemporary China’s environmental challenges since the late 1990s: The environmental and health consequences of rapid industrialization, the threats posed by air pollution to urban residents’ quality of life and well-being, and the push to develop hydropower dams and other renewable energy infrastructure. While most of my research is grounded in ethnographic methods, I have also delved into historical sources in an attempt to understand the long arc of China’s environmental transformation—from an ancient emphasis on harmony between people and nature, to decades of frenetic and environmentally disastrous industrialization, to what now appears to be a coordinated effort to transition away from fossil fuels. As I learned more about this poetic couplet and how its conception of fate resonated with China’s current energy transition, I was struck by the tension between these two kinds of fate—one beyond our control and one quite literally in our hands. If optimism is “belief in the human capacity to create positive change,” as Willow outlines in this volume’s Introduction, then such tension is a fruitful place to begin trying to understand the crucial role that China’s energy transition will play in mitigating global warming. Pulling it off will require a healthy dose of optimism and some creative future-making. The renewable energy transition is, of course, a global pursuit, one that will determine humanity’s ability to avoid the most severe effects of a warming planet, from drought and wildfire to sea-level rise, increased storm intensity, ocean acidification, and food insecurity. Yet nowhere is the link between economic development and global warming more stark than in China, where prosperity and energy consumption have grown exponentially over the past generation and where carbon emissions now account for 30% of the global total (Global Carbon Project 2021). A transition to renewable energy, in China and around the world, is essential to a livable future on our planet. As the International Energy Agency (2021a) has observed, “there is no plausible path to limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5°C without China.” There are already some reasons for optimism, signs that yun, that part of fate that is in human hands, is gaining momentum among policy makers and the public. In line with COP26 and other climate agreements, Chinese leaders have embraced the energy transition and have announced their intention to steer the nation’s economy toward carbon neutrality by 2060. This will require significant technological innovation in renewable energy, infrastructure, electric vehicles, and many other sectors. But such “techno-fixes” are only part of the story. As an anthropologist, I am eager to understand the human values, experiences, and consequences of the energy transition. I share the view, with many other social

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scientists, that “the enormous energy challenges facing us all are fundamentally cultural and political rather than technological” (Strauss et al. 2013, 10). What will China’s energy transition look like? What cultural norms and ethical values will guide it? How can anthropologists participate in the imagining and implementation of such a transition? This chapter explores how we might bring the best principles of our discipline—creativity, critique, theoretical engagement, and methodological rigor—to bear on this consequential topic. As I will show, China’s economic growth has also fueled a societal shift in values, and this shift has the potential to sustain and accelerate the energy transition, both in China and globally. Anthropologists have unique opportunities to help steer the transition in ways that put the wellbeing of people at the center, by explicitly linking our empirical work with ethical concerns, by advocating for justice in how climate change mitigation strategies are enacted, and by using our ethnographic insights to, as Willow puts it in this volume’s Introduction, “present compelling alternatives to the destructive and dissatisfying ways of life now widely normalized within industrial societies.”

China’s Energy Past and Present If we are going to understand China’s energy future, we need to grasp how its present came about. As the world’s most populous country and soon to be largest economy, China plays a crucial role in scientific and policy debates on energy and climate change. Decades of rapid economic growth have driven an integration into the world economy and the rise of a middle class that enjoys a level of prosperity unimaginable just a generation or two ago. Since the late 1990s, when I began my research on China’s environment, per capita GDP has grown five-fold, with living standards and consumption habits to match (World Bank 2022). Hundreds of millions of people have joined the ranks of the middle class, enjoying financial security, educational opportunities, vastly improved housing conditions, and access to a world of consumer goods beyond the wildest imaginings of earlier generations. Focused intently on growth, the Chinese government’s approach to environmental regulation was long one of “pollute first, clean up later” (xian wuran, hou zhili). Industrial growth, much of it fueled by global demand for everything from textiles to electronics, was emphasized above all other goals. Rural and urban areas alike have endured decades of unhealthy levels of air pollution that far exceed World Health Organization guidelines. The consequences for the global climate have been equally dire: China surpassed the United States in total greenhouse gas emissions in 2006, mostly a result of fueling its gigantic manufacturing sector with coal. It now emits twice as much as the United States, far and away the largest in the world (though not on a per capita basis, a distinction that still belongs to the United States) (Global Carbon Project 2021).

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Yet public opinion and environmental policy now appear to have reached an inflection point. In 2014, citing several prolonged periods of intolerable air pollution in Chinese cities, Premier Li Keqiang declared a “war against pollution” (Reuters 2014). Although the chief concern was human health, the war against pollution gave government regulators more tools to implement what they call “co-control,” enforcing emissions standards for both the pollutants linked to adverse health outcomes and the greenhouse gases causing climate change. Scientists and policy makers alike began promoting “low-carbon development” (ditan jingji fazhan) (Tambo et al. 2016), a strategy designed in part to position the country as a global leader in renewable energy. In the winter of 2018, readers of the South China Morning Post were greeted with an unusual but hopeful headline: “Beijing Meets National Air Pollution Standard for First Time” (Zhen 2018). The headline summed up the paradox confronting Chinese citizens on the topic of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. On the one hand was the absurd fact that the nation’s capital, a metropolitan area of more than 20 million people, had failed for decades to meet basic pollution standards. On the other hand was this encouraging news, greeted by residents with cautious optimism that the skies were finally beginning to clear. Successful pollution control now goes hand-in-hand with a massive effort to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. In 2020, President Xi Jinping announced plans for the Chinese economy to reach peak emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. Bolstered by a commitment to collaborate with the United States, despite political tensions in areas such as international trade and human rights, Chinese leaders approved the US-China Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s, which reaffirmed both countries’ commitment to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels in order to avoid the most dire human and ecological consequences (US Department of State 2021). These commitments are beginning to show tangible results. Graphs of China’s energy production over the last decade show carbon-based fuel sources flattening or falling and renewables rising rapidly. Between 2010 and 2020, coal fell from 77% of the country’s electricity-generation portfolio to 60%. Solar generation grew exponentially, from barely one terawatt hour annually to more than 132 terawatt hours. Wind power grew from 95 terawatt hours to 337 (BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2021, cited in Our World in Data).1 China has already built the largest solar and wind capacity of any country in the world, even though, in percentage terms, solar still accounts for less than 4% of all electricity produced, and wind accounts for just 6%. China is also the world’s largest producer of hydroelectricity, which plays a key load-balancing role for variable or intermittent renewable energy sources such as solar and wind (IEA 2021b). A public shift toward environmental consciousness has helped drive these positive developments in environmental policy and renewable energy. Despite

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the top-down and authoritarian nature of Chinese politics, citizen engagement has played a key role, particularly among the new and upwardly mobile middle class (Li and Tilt 2019a; 2019b). Air quality data used to be a closely guarded secret; now key pollutants like PM2.5 are monitored and published by the central government and tracked by domestic NGOs such as the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, which produces a “Blue Map App” with real-time monitoring data from thousands of industrial enterprises (Tilt 2019). In 2015, a documentary film called Under the Dome (Qiongding Zhi Xia) used powerful imagery and emotional storytelling to highlight the human costs of air pollution and its contributions to climate change. The film has been viewed hundreds of millions of times but has also come under government censorship for promoting grassroots environmental action.

The View from 2060: Envisioning China’s Energy Future What will the future hold? I approach the subject of China’s energy future with optimism, but also with a healthy dose of humility, knowing that such prognostications come with all kinds of pitfalls. (A case in point: Many China scholars predicted at the turn of the twenty-first century that China’s accession to the WTO and its integration into the global economy would lead to greater transparency and even democratization. Under the Xi Jinping government, however, we have instead seen nationalist retrenchment, increased censorship, digital surveillance, and heavy-handed authoritarianism.) In that spirit of humility, if we can suspend our skepticism for a moment, we can imagine China’s energy future as what grammarians might call a “future conditional.” Future conditional sentences often include two clauses separated by a comma: If this happens, then that will happen. The second clause is called a dependent clause because its very existence is tenuous and depends on satisfying the first. So, what might that first clause be? One of the best glimpses into China’s possible energy futures comes from the International Energy Agency’s 2021 report entitled An Energy Sector Roadmap to Carbon Neutrality in China. The IEA envisions an acceleration of many of the positive trends described above: Policy that promotes low-carbon development as a win-win for the environment and human health; technological innovation that pivots from fossil fuels to wind, solar, and other renewables; and robust citizen engagement born of public concern for future generations. If those conditions are in place, then what? What is the dependent clause in the future conditional? In China, the next two generations will experience technological and infrastructural transformation on a scale the world has never seen, boosting energy efficiency and weaning the country from fossil fuels. Wind and solar power will grow seven-fold, and together will account for around 80% of China’s electricity portfolio. The transportation sector, largely electrified, will be unrecognizable. The eastern province of Jiangsu alone will account for a massive

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share of global electric vehicle batteries. Emerging technologies that were previously hypothetical will be in place: Carbon capture and storage, bio-energy plants that convert waste to fuel, and hydrogen fuel cells. China will reach peak emissions in 2030, at an earlier stage of economic development per capita than any other industrialized country. By 2060, the renewable energy sector will not only drive down emissions; it will also generate a net gain of millions of jobs nationwide, even accounting for lost employment in fossil fuels (IEA 2021b: 218). The country will see policy innovations to match its technological ones. Co-control—simultaneously reducing pollutants linked to poor health and emissions that cause global warming—will remain a top priority, and reducing emissions will drive down pollution-related mortality, saving millions of lives by 2060 (Cheng et al. 2021). China’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which began on a trial basis in 2021, will provide market incentives to reduce climate-warming gases (Tan 2022). The scheme will rapidly become the world’s largest, led by government agencies that are emerging now, including the Leadership Group on Climate Change, Energy Conservation, and Emissions Reduction, which reports directly to the State Council. Emissions will fall so rapidly between 2030 and 2060 that the Emissions Trading Scheme will come to a close because there will be no emissions to trade. If all of this sounds less like imagining and more like fantasizing, consider this: The IEA report, based on the best available data and forecasting methods, concludes that every energy sector in China has a viable path to achieve these goals. In other words, this path is both technologically and economically feasible.

Anthropological Contributions: Linking the Empirical and the Ethical Feasibility, of course, is not destiny. Returning to the concept of yun, that aspect of fate at least partly within human control, I’d like to consider the role of anthropology and related disciplines in placing human wellbeing at the center of this unprecedented transition. Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight end their recent book The Anthropology of the Future with a chapter entitled “The Future as Method.” Their work emphasizes the creative ways in which anthropological theory and method can help us imagine, and then bring about, more hopeful and optimistic futures (Bryant and Knight 2019). Anthropologists will need to make both empirical and ethical contributions to the energy transition. Let me explain how I see the linkage between empirical work and ethical engagement, and then outline three specific contributions that our field can make. Ethical engagement has a somewhat tenuous and uncomfortable history in anthropology. Most of us are trained to consider the descriptive, comparative, and even causal dimensions of human life, while often failing to examine its normative dimensions. One place we might look for inspiration is

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the field of applied ethics, which is built around what philosophers call “mixed judgments,” statements containing both descriptive (empirical) and prescriptive (normative) propositions (Düwell 2012). If we think of these statements as premises in a logical argument, then the first premise (the empirical one), tells us how the world is, while the second premise (the ethical one), tells us how the world ought to be, based on individual and societal values. The transition to renewable energy is an obvious point of convergence for these two premises. Atmospheric scientists’ observations and models have shown that our planet is warming because of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Yet that empirical information, no matter how reliable or well communicated, is not enough to make us change course; for that, we need to embrace a sense of ethical responsibility and care for the planet and its future human inhabitants (Moore and Nelson 2011). We need to begin seeing our energy choices—about production, distribution, and consumption—as moral and ethical choices (Smith and High 2017). What might this linkage between the empirical and the ethical look like in the context of China’s energy transition? Our disciplinary training equips us to make at least three contributions. First, we have a broad and holistic understanding of the diversity of human experience, both past and present, and that positions us to help imagine creative futures. Margaret Mead, one of our most respected anthropological elders, engaged in all kinds of future-facing work as a public intellectual in the mid-twentieth century. Her writings on the future—on topics as disparate as urban planning, armed conflict, and the changing nature of the family—were collected and published posthumously in a volume called The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future (2005). Among her best pieces of advice was this: Don’t be afraid to look forward, to imagine “new designs for living” (Mead 2005, 271–276). How might we apply such an exhortation to our current energy transition? Energy production and consumption are not ends in themselves, but means to an end: Human flourishing. Many decades of ethnographic research, from Algeria to Zaire, have given anthropologists a rich and varied understanding of human beings’ material needs and the role of energy in satisfying them. Humanities and social science scholarship on energy development is not a new phenomenon. German Nobel Laureate Wilhelm Ostwald, in a book called The Energy Basis of the Humanities, published more than a century ago, suggested that the most important questions related to energy development were ones with people at the center: How have human beings met their energy needs over time? What ethical choices do we face about the distribution of energy and its waste products? How does energy facilitate the kinds of wellbeing that we desire for ourselves and others? (Ostwald 1909). These are all questions that lie squarely within anthropology’s purview. There is nothing inevitable about the cultural patterns and social institutions we have built. So much of our prosperity rests on the false hope of cheap and abundant hydrocarbons, but it doesn’t have to. If human choices got

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us here, then different choices, combined with collective imagination and effort, can take us somewhere else. Which brings us to anthropology’s second potential contribution: The energy transition will need to be undergirded by robust, culturally relevant ethical frameworks. The anthropologist and religion scholar Mayfair Yang, in a groundbreaking book on Chinese environmental ethics, has suggested that we can no longer apply techno-scientific knowledge “walled off from considerations of basic ontology, ethics, cosmology, emotions, rituals, lifestyles, and politics” (Yang 2021, 2). The rich body of scholarship on Chinese worldviews and values, by anthropologists and others, can help us analyze how diverse and culturally embedded ethical frameworks can support the energy transition. China’s traditional sources of environmental wisdom—from early folk religion, as well as from the major philosophical traditions of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism—tended to emphasize holism by insisting that human affairs were not separate from the natural world. Modernization and industrialization, from the Maoist period to the present, have wrought a kind of ethical amnesia in which nature became subservient to economic growth (Descola 2013). The energy transition will depend upon a revitalization and reimagining of ethical frameworks that emphasize the yun component of fate, encouraging people to take responsibility for their energy choices. Here again, there is reason for optimism. Central government policy in China over the past decade has emphasized a concept called “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming). Grounded in a broadly conceived Confucian ethics about the interlinkages between people and nature and the obligations of present generations to the future, ecological civilization puts economic development and environmental protection on equal footing and calls for a mobilization of government resources to address environmental challenges. In this sense, ecological civilization is both a popular discourse and a “socio-technical imaginary” about China’s environmental future (Jasanoff 2015, 4; see also Hansen et al. 2018). Given the scale of China’s domestic environmental challenges and the country’s ascendance in contemporary geopolitics, ecological civilization may just be the “most significant Chinese state-initiated imaginary of our global future” (Hansen et al. 2018, 196). Finally, anthropologists and other social scientists can advocate for energy justice, a “global energy system that fairly disseminates both the benefits and costs of energy services, and one that has representative and impartial energy decision-making” (Sovacool et al. 2016, 16024). The energy transition will raise crucial questions that go far beyond the scientific and technical. How will China’s energy transition affect energy security, access, and affordability? How will energy access differ across regions and communities? What kinds of support will historically marginalized populations require in order to benefit from the energy transition? What kinds of trade-offs—between different energy sources, different infrastructure locations, and different environmental effects—will policy makers need to make?

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All of these questions arise from processes of rapid social change, a subject with which anthropologists have long wrestled. Emerging research in China provides encouraging insights about the historical and cultural dimensions of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions (Liu and Hansen 2018), about how a concerned public can support more responsible policy (Li and Tilt 2019), and about how we can maximize the benefits and minimize the social harms of renewable energy infrastructures (Tilt 2015; Yan et al. 2018). Advocating for energy justice means emphasizing ten key principles: Availability, affordability, due process, transparency and accountability, sustainability, intragenerational equity, intergenerational equity, responsibility, resistance, and intersectionality (Sovacool et al. 2017). As we work to apply these principles, we will need to grapple with social and economic changes of greater scope and consequence than those of the industrial revolution. We will need to build much of our methodology as we go. The idea of energy justice is still relatively new and has not been widely applied in China, where social and legal norms are markedly different from the Western context, and where social justice advocates very often run afoul of the government.

Conclusion: On Fate and Optimism Envisioning a human-centered energy transition in China is an exercise in optimism. The IEA tells us that there is a “plausible path” to carbon neutrality by 2060, but the path leads uphill, and it will require work and vision to get there. Returning to the idea of the “future conditional,” there are innumerable sources of uncertainty in that initial clause about whether China can put the technological, economic, cultural, and political conditions in place to accelerate the transition to renewable energy. We don’t know how the geopolitical landscape will look decades from now, nor do we have any idea how a thousand other variables—the availability of rare-earth minerals for electric vehicle batteries, domestic political stability, international trade and cooperation, economic inequality—will shape China’s energy future. In this interconnected world, where China’s fate is intertwined with everyone’s else’s, optimism doesn’t come easily. Political scientist Scott Moore, in a new book envisioning where China’s geopolitical rise will take it next, predicts a future that is “shared but contested” between China, the United States, and other global powers (2022, 9). Mitigating climate change is a global public good; it is an imperative, even if accomplishing it involves some competitive tension. In the United States, at least, the specter of losing global dominance to China—in all aspects of renewable energy, from research and development to manufacturing and market share—is already delivering major legislative achievements. Congress passed the largest federal clean-energy investment in the country’s history in 2022, allocating hundreds of billions of dollars toward meeting the emissions reduction targets set in Paris and

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Glasgow (Romm 2022). This spirit of economic competition is likely to spur similar innovation and commitment in other parts of the world. I take courage in knowing that change often unfolds in non-linear ways. In environmental anthropology, we use the concept of resilience to understand how systems, both ecological and social, respond to change over time. Decades of research in this field have shown that systems often transition from one state to another by crossing over thresholds or tipping points, moments at which futures that once seemed impossible become not just conceivable, but inevitable (see, for example, Holling and Gunderson 2002; Berkes, et al. 2003). In the last several hundred years alone, human energy systems have crossed such thresholds multiple times. Indeed, much of civilizational history can be told as a story of discovering and exploiting ever denser sources of energy—switching from foraging to farming, burning coal instead of wood, then oil instead of coal (Smil 2017). Change will come in unexpected ways and from unexpected places. This is not a moment for despair, but it is most certainly a moment for urgency. In an analysis of energy transitions over the last few centuries, the environmental scientist Vaclav Smil concludes that it typically takes 50–75 years for a new resource to capture a large share of the global energy market (2017, 395–396). The pace has historically been slow because of the massive investments required in new infrastructures and because of the outsized political and economic power of entrenched corporate interests. To be frank, we don’t have that kind of time. The IPCC’s rosiest prediction of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming over pre-industrial levels will bring sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and other impacts that will stretch human ingenuity to the limit. Its worst predictions, of 3 degrees Celsius of warming and beyond, are unimaginable (IPCC 2022). Human beings seem universally inclined to discount the future, to act in ways that bring short-term benefit even if the long-term consequences are less than ideal. But the Chinese political system, for all its problems, has shown itself capable of coordinating rapid and widespread social change; the country’s transformation from an agrarian weakling to an industrial powerhouse in less than two generations is clear evidence. Moreover, in recent years the government has turned its attention to “state-led environmentalism,” controlling pollution and promoting renewable energy on a massive scale (Li and Shapiro 2020). It is a flawed, but hopeful, model of a better energy future. The centuries-old notion of fate from classical Chinese reminds us that “fate is determined by heaven; actions are born of the individual.” If fate is the coupling of providence (ming) and human volition (yun), our near-term goal should be obvious: The era of burning hydrocarbons on a planetary scale has to end. Margaret Mead’s collection of essays on the future ends with a thoughtful piece penned in 1977 entitled “Our Open-Ended Future,” in which she offers some advice that resonates with yun, the type of fate that is shaped through human imagination, effort, responsibility, and perseverance. “Our future,” she writes,

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“is  neither pre-determined nor predictable; it is, rather, something which lies within our hands, to be shaped and molded by the choices we make in the present time” (Mead 2005, 329). The energy transition is urgent, and it will bring technological, economic, and social changes on a scale the world has never seen. Our fate is a shared one: China’s efforts to decarbonize its economy will determine, to a large extent, humanity’s ability to mitigate the effects of climate change. Anthropologists can play an important role in China and beyond by linking our empirical insights to ethical concerns, using our rich ethnographic knowledge of humanity to help envision better futures, analyzing the effects of the energy transition on different regions and communities, and advocating for energy justice.

Note 1 One terawatt hour (TWh) is a large enough unit to express annual electricity generation, equal to one trillion watts of electrical output for one hour.

References BP. 2021. BP Statistical Review of World Energy. https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/ business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energy-economics/statistical-review/bpstats-review-2021-full-report.pdf (accessed August 12, 2022). Berkes, Fikred, Johan Colding, and Carl Folke. 2003. Navigating Social-ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bryant, Rebecca, and Daniel M. Knight. 2019. The Anthropology of the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press. Cheng, J., D. Tong, Q. Zhang, Y. Liu, Y. Lei, G. Yan, L. Yan, S. Yu, R.Y. Cui, L. Clarke, G.N. Geng, B. Zheng, X.Y. Zhang, S.J. Davis, and K.B. He. 2021. “Pathways of China’s PM2.5 Air Quality 2015–2060 in the Context of Carbon Neutrality.” National Science Review 8 (12): 1–11. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Düwell, Marcus. 2012. Bioethics: Methods, Theories, Domains. New York: Routledge. Gao, Fangfang. 2016. Huanjing Chuanbo: Meiti, Gongzhong he Shehui [Environmental Communication: Media, Public and Society.] Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press. Global Carbon Project. 2021. Supplemental Data of Global Carbon Project 2021. https:// doi.org/10.18160/gcp-2021 Hansen, Mette H., Hongtao Li, and Rune Svarverud. 2018. “Ecological Civilization: Interpreting the Chinese Past, Projecting the Global Future.” Global Environmental Change 53: 195–203. Holling, C.S., and Lance H. Gunderson. 2002. “Resilience and Adaptive Cycles.” In Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, edited by Lance H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling, 25–62. Washington, DC: Island Press. IPCC. 2022. Summary for Policymakers. In Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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International Energy Agency. 2021a. World Energy Outlook 2021. https://www.iea.org/ reports/world-energy-outlook-2021 (accessed August 12, 2022). International Energy Agency. 2021b. An Energy Sector Roadmap to Carbon Neutrality in China. https://www.iea.org/reports/an-energy-sector-roadmap-to-carbon-neutralityin-china (accessed August 12, 2022). Jasanoff, Sheila. 2015. “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity.” In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, edited by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, 1–34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Li, Xiaoyue, and Bryan Tilt. 2019a. “Perceptions of Quality of Life and Pollution among China’s Urban Middle Class: The Case of Smog in Tangshan.” The China Quarterly 234: 340–356. Li, Xiaoyue, and Bryan Tilt. 2019b. “Public Engagements with Smog in Urban China: Knowledge, Trust, and Action.” Environmental Science and Policy 92: 220–227. Li, Yifei, and Judith Shapiro. 2020. China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet. Cambridge: Polity Press. Liu, Zhaohui, and Mette H. Hansen, eds. 2018. A Window on the Sky: Chinese and Foreign Scholars Discuss the Atmospheric Environment and Its Governance. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press. (In Chinese). Ostwald, Wilhem. 1909. The Energy Basis of the Humanities. Leipzig: Klinkhardt. Mead, Margaret. 2005. The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future. Edited by Robert B. Textor. New York: Berghahn. Moore, Kathleen D., and Michael P. Nelson, eds. 2011. Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril. San Antonio: Trinity University Press. Moore, Scott. 2022. China’s Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China’s Rise and the World’s Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reuters. 2014. “China to ‘Declare War’ on Pollution, Premier Says.” March 4. http://www. reuters.com/article/us-china-parliament-pollution-idUSBREA2405W20140305 Romm, Tony. 2022. “Senate Approves Inflation Reduction Act, Clinging Long-Delayed Health and Climate Bill.” The Washington Post, August 7, 2022. https://www. washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/08/07/senate-inflation-reduction-act-climate/ (accessed August 7, 2022). Sovacool, Benjamin K., Raphael J. Heffron, Darren McCauley, and Andreas Goldthau. 2016. “Energy Decisions Reframed as Justice and Ethical Concerns.” Nature Energy 1 (5): 1–6. Sovacool, Benjamin K., Matthew Burke, Lucy Baker, Chaitanya Kumar Kotikalapudi, and Holle Wlokas. 2017. “New Frontiers and Conceptual Frameworks for Energy Justice.” Energy Policy 105: 677–691. Smil, Vaclav. 2017. Energy and Civilization: A History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, Jessica M., and Mette M. High. 2017. “Exploring the Anthropology of Energy: Ethnography, Energy and Ethics.” Energy Research and Social Science 30: 1–6. Strauss, Sarah, Stephanie Rupp, and Thomas Love. 2013. Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies. New York: Routledge. Tambo, E., D. Q. Wang, and X. N. Zhou. 2016. “Tackling Air Pollution and Extreme Climate Changes in China: Implementing the Paris Climate Change Agreement.” Environment International 95: 152–156. Tan, Luyue. 2022. “The First Year of China’s National Carbon Market, Reviewed.” China Dialogue, February 17, 2022. https://chinadialogue.net/en/climate/the-firstyear-of-chinas-national-carbon-market-reviewed/#:~:text=China’s%20national%20 emissions%20trading%20scheme,emissions%20in%202019%20and%202020 (accessed August 12, 2022).

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Tilt, Bryan. 2015. Dams and Development in China: The Moral Economy of Water and Power. New York: Columbia University Press. Tilt, Bryan. 2019. “China’s Air Pollution Crisis: Science and Policy Perspectives.” Environmental Science and Policy 92: 275–280. US Department of State. 2021. “US-China Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s.” https://www.state.gov/u-s-china-joint-glasgow-declarationon-enhancing-climate-action-in-the-2020s/ (accessed August 8, 2022). World Bank. 2022. World Development Indicators: https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/ search/dataset/0037712/World-Development-Indicators (accessed August 3 2022). Yan, Dengcai, Miao Wang, Haibao Wang, and Guoqing Shi. 2018. “Policy and Implementation of Land-Based Resettlement in China (1949–2014).” International Journal of Water Resources Development 34 (3): 453–471. Yang, Mayfair. 2021. “Introduction.” In Chinese Environmental Ethics: Religions, Ontologies, and Practices, edited by Mayfair Yang, 1032. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Zhen, Liu. 2018. “Beijing Meets National Air Pollution Standard for First Time.” South China Morning Post: Hong Kong, February 7, 2018. https://www.scmp.com/news/ china/society/article/2132406/beijing-meets-national-air-pollutant-standard-firsttime (accessed August 8, 2022).

11 DOING ANTHROPOLOGY FORWARD Emerging Technologies and Possible Futures Sarah Pink

Prologue The dominant engineering and business-focused vision for the future of the construction industry is one of progression through digital transformation toward automated systems and technologies, which will, when scaled up, render the industry more efficient and safer to work in and will require a retrained labor force. This techno-optimist vision predicts substantial changes to the technologies, materials, business models, and nature of work in the industry. However, the construction industry has been slow to take up digital and automated technologies, and people working on the ground in the industry do not necessarily believe that such a large-scale and widespread transformation process is imminent. Within a wider project about the future of automation and robotization in the construction industry, I discussed these questions with two people—David and Gerry—both of whom play safety-focused leadership roles in the industry and have had long careers that have included working on construction sites. I was interested in their views about the industry visions mentioned above, and in how they had encountered existing modes of automation. Both of our conversations turned to the question of QR codes and digital platforms used during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gerry’s and David’s on-the-ground stories show how responsible, ethical, and participatory modes of introducing QR codes in their everyday work practices have empowered workers and enabled safety benefits. Such examples invite more realistic visions than those mentioned above, of how (rather than just if and which) automated technologies might plausibly become part of a differently configured digital transformation of construction as it moves forward. Their ways forward are aligned with design anthropological understandings of how we might respectfully engage with people, their existing knowledge, and their environments. Such possible futures open up opportunities for modes of optimism that differ from those of dominant techno-optimist narratives regarding how

DOI: 10.4324/b23231-12

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we might make emerging technologies work within the processes through which people who understand their everyday social, material, and environmental circumstances forge their own safe and healthy futures.

Introduction What could go right? How could things go right? And what is the place of anthropologists as we seek to participate in an ethical, safe, peaceful, and healthy world in the present and going forward? Increasingly, anthropologists and sociologists are thinking theoretically and ethnographically about hopeful futures (Bloch 1995; Miyazaki 2004, 2006; Jansen 2016; Kleist and Stef Jansen 2016; Cook and Cuervo 2019; Haug 2020; DeNora 2021; Ingold 2021). In this chapter, I propose anthropology forward, which goes one step further to participate in imagining and constituting possible futures that we can feel optimistic about. I do so through the prism of emerging technologies. Emerging technologies are an ideal example, because the production, dissemination, and use of new technologies has become an inevitable part of contemporary innovation cultures. It is simply too late at this point to stand back and critique their very existence. The rise of automated-decision making (ADM) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems and technologies—as well as the many devices they make possible—has become inseparable from the ways futures are imagined and articulated in contemporary societies (albeit unevenly). My agenda is to engage critically with the forms of optimism and dystopianism they are frequently associated with, and to carve a realistic, ethical, and optimistic way forward (Pink 2022a). I believe we must seek optimism away from the most glamorous, most publicized technologies and issues and instead focus where other scholars are not looking; to encounter those mundane moments where possible hopeful futures can be imagined and experienced. The construction industry is precisely one of the places we should investigate; a site that is conspicuously unattended to by the many researchers seeking to right the digital wrongs they find in the world. Academically popular and more glam topics like fake news (e.g., Zimdars and McLeod 2020) and self-driving cars (e.g., Pink et al. 2018; Stilgoe 2020) remain relevant, but the construction industry is one of the most dangerous workplaces in the world. It is massive and is anticipated to continue to be. “The global construction industry needs to build 13,000 buildings each day between now and 2050 to support an expected population of 7 billion people living in cities” (Bertollini, n.d.). In Australia, the site of my fieldwork, employment in the industry is projected to reach 1,263,900 by 2025 (Australian Industry and Skills Committee 2022). In 2021, construction was the third most dangerous industry (after agriculture and transport) for workers in the country (Safework Australia 2021). Emergence is a core design anthropological concept through which to understand everyday life and design as unfolding through the shifting circumstances

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in which we find ourselves (Smith and Otto 2016). It focuses on how people improvise in the contingent situations that the uncertainty and possibilities afforded by a continuously emergent world entail (). The notion of hope as involving dynamic and changing feelings or sentiments can be mobilized to understand how we move forward into possible futures, always characterized by the uncertainty of what is inevitably always “life at the edge of the future” (Pink 2022a). This helps us consider how everyday futures are imagined and sensed and subsequently to better design for how realistic and plausible futures might feel (Pink et al. 2022a). Thus, life cannot stop, be still, be paused, or be impacted on as if it were a landing site for technologies. Rather, we might see life itself and human creativity as unstoppable. We must understand futures as coming about in forward movement, rather than being end points in a temporality yet to come. To be optimistic, then, is to ask how emerging technologies, if they are as inevitable as they appear to be, might be better caught up in the forward movement of life as an everyday site of design, creativity, and hope. Anthropology forward follows these feelings and imaginaries as they move beyond the present, and out of the sites and temporalities of traditional anthropology. Emerging Technologies is the term commonly used in industry to refer to novel technologies that are seen as poised to generate large markets and impact society. They are surrounded by narratives of hype and hope and generally pitched as being pivoted to bring about financial and societal benefits. The technologies centered in these narratives shift over the years, but include anything from new advances in AI, ADM, or machine learning (ML) systems, to self-driving cars, new digital health technologies, advances in machine vision, and more. In common, they tend to be hyped as finished technologies or features of technologies that will arrive in markets as discrete products (see Pink 2022a). Their status as emerging, in industry, tends to refer to the imminence of their being launched, rather than to their character as continuously emerging things. However, many emerging technologies do not emerge as predicted or hyped. Self-driving cars, set to be increasingly ubiquitous on the roads (at least amongst affluent people in well infrastructured areas of wealthy countries in the global north they were designed for) in 2020, were not here in 2022 and are not likely to be here soon. Similar questions apply to the ambitions for the digital transformation of the construction industry through automated technologies. I define emerging technologies as emergent in the design anthropological sense of their continuously coming about. However, this understanding of emergence is different than that of the neoliberal innovation narrative, according to which technologies emerge into markets as complete products that subsequently impact on society to change human behavior and bring financial rewards. Instead, emerging technologies are never finished or completed, and only come into being when they become part of the circumstances of human or planetary life; emerging technologies do not impact on society—rather they come about in everyday situations in which they participate. The smartphone is an excellent example of a technology that

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continues to emerge, differently engaged across a variety of everyday circumstances, including as a technology of safety and care (Pink et al. 2018; Hjorth et al. 2020; Pink 2022a). Likewise, I am not concerned with performing an anthropology of the future as something we can study, but with doing anthropology forward into possibilities. In this chapter, I approach these questions by drawing on research developed in the AUTOWORK project (https://autoworkproject.org/), in which my colleagues and I explore the future of the automation and robotization of work across three sectors: Construction, health, and sales and service. I have been developing scholarly and applied ethnographies in the construction industry since 2007, with colleagues across England and Australia (e.g., Pink et al. 2013; Pink et al. 2016, 2017). This chapter is: (1) rooted in a commitment to safety in the industry, emerging with this body of work; and (2) draws on an extensive review of industry, engineering, and business reports—an ethnography of ­materials—and conversational interviews undertaken in-person (where possible) and online since 2020.

Beyond the Bind of Techno-Optimism and Techno-Dystopianism Critical scholars have identified numerous reasons not to be optimistic about emerging technologies. A significant scholarly literature on emerging—­ automated, connected, and intelligent—technologies and systems has sought out and made visible the societal “wrongs” committed by and with technology, particularly as they have exacerbated social inequalities and are embedded in the destructive power relations of capitalism (Eubanks 2018; Benjamin 2019; Andrejevic 2020; Sadowski 2020). The dependence of automated technologies on the extraction of natural resources for their production, the energy needed for their transportation and running, and the storage and use of digital data associated with them similarly suggest caution in generating optimism regarding their ability to contribute to our planetary futures. Emerging technologies and the science and engineering fields within which they are developed are, moreover, participants in a colonizing agenda (Abdilla 2018) and are additionally extractive in seeking to capture and invest human ethics and trust in technologies (Pink 2022b). It is difficult to have an ethical agenda that argues that emerging technologies can be a good thing. This has led to suggestions that we are in a kind of techno-dystopian spiral, where the logics of automation will play out in such ways that, as media scholar Mark Andrejevic has expressed it, “automation performs a series of dialectical reversals, transforming processes into their opposite: sociality into hermetic isolation, politics into technics, autonomy into automatism” (Andrejevic 2020, 10). Automated and emerging technologies are indeed inevitable in our lives, and like life itself, they are hard to stop. However, what if we think about this differently? I propose understanding emerging technologies as impossible to

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extract from the trajectories of people and planetary futures, not because they are somehow driving our futures, but rather because they are part of and emergent in the social, material, and environmental world we inhabit. They are here with us, rather than something that is coming about as separate from life, being imposed onto it, and reversing the fundamental values that underpin our social worlds. In contrast to the work of critical media scholars, the dominant narratives about emerging technologies from industry, consultancy, and government are optimistic. They tend to represent a mode of “techno-optimism” and technosolutionism (Morozov 2013), which sees technology as a solution to societal problems. For instance: Self-driving cars are seen as solutions to road safety, traffic congestion, decarbonization, and the boredom of commuting; AI supported clinical diagnostics can provide accurate knowledge that might save lives. The construction industry is no exception. As elaborated elsewhere (Pink 2022a), the benefits of future automation and robotization of construction are often presented as “reducing injury rates, handling repetitive tasks, and helping to enable construction in settings not currently feasible” (Melenbrink et al. 2020, 1). Yet it is understood, in these business and engineering dominated narratives, that these benefits can be achieved through a top-down interdisciplinary research approach involving “architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, computer scientists and roboticists” (Melenbrink et al. 2020, 14–17). In this scenario, both academic opinion and the consultancy McKinsey and Co suggest that workers would need to be re-trained with new skills (McKinsey and Co 2019; Melenbrink et al. 2020) rather than also being consulted and engaged with as the industry was transformed. I have argued elsewhere that this technological promise fails to attend to “the social, ethical and regulatory questions involved, nor the possibility that construction workers would have relevant knowledge to contribute to design processes, through Union representation” (Pink 2022a). It also leaves no space for the role of anthropologists (or any social scientists or participatory designers) in such a research agenda. Therefore, we must be careful how we view such technological “solutions” and the promises they offer. Some existing examples pave the way. The delivery of solutions via AI and ADM in selfdriving cars is much more difficult because they have not, to date, been deployed within real everyday circumstances in which people can use them to create their own ways forward. In contrast, the benefits of using AI and ADM in clinical situations have already been demonstrated, and can be seen to work precisely where clinicians themselves select and work with automated systems and technologies in ways that support their practice (Bergquist and Rolandsson 2022). There is a lesson even in these brief examples: Designing how emerging technologies are used in the everyday—with and by the people who will use them—­supports the case for optimism because it creates realistic and tested ways forward. However, this is a very different mode of optimism than the techno-optimism that drives neo-liberal and capitalist industry and policy narratives, noted above, and we

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need to be careful not to endorse a paradigm that is fundamentally flawed and therefore incapable of bringing about either large-scale change or reducing inequalities. Examples of how people have worked with emerging technologies in everyday situations to ensure that things go right instead demonstrate the fundamental digital anthropology principle that the everyday is not a landing site that finished products are delivered to and have impact on, but rather it is a site of human creativity and improvisation with technologies. Thus, neither techno-optimism nor techno-dystopianism are likely to solve the problems they seek to address or reveal. Neither are very realistic and, ironically, they are complicit with each other. While they have very different visions of futures, they share in common a techno-determinist vision of how futures come about. Their starting points are detached from everyday life, and they assume that emerging technologies and the power relations that sustain the systems of which they are part will inevitably impact on people. In short, they fail to attend to the fundamental question of how technologies come about in and as part of everyday life circumstances and environments. Instead, I argue, we need to create optimistic, realistic, and plausible ways to move forward with emerging technologies, informed by a quite different vision of how they may emerge as part of human and planetary futures. However, there is one essential point to be learned from both engineering approaches to the future and the work of critical social science and humanities scholars: Both appear fearless when it comes to telling us what future possibilities lie ahead of us. What if anthropologists were equally fearless in our discussion of possible futures? I argue that anthropologists also need to engage equally confidently, as do engineers, in this futures space, because the ethnographic and theoretical integrity of anthropological practice provides us with a basis from which to contribute considered and realistic understandings of how possible futures may come about. Let’s consider what happens when we start to explore what we might be optimistic about ethnographically. In the next section, I focus on how knowledge and practice from the ground up offers new modes of optimism.

Technologies for Hope in the Construction Industry Both David and Gerry, mentioned above, had considerable experience working hands-on in the construction industry themselves before moving into their current roles. David has been involved with the industry for about 40 years, initially mainly in infrastructure projects around the world, over 30 of which have been in Australia. He is the CRO of CodeSafe Solutions, which he co-founded after a near-fatal incident in the industry drove him to act on the need to create new ways to communicate that were accessible to workers who struggled with literacy and with seeing value in an overly bureaucratic work design process. CodeSafe’s integrated service offering provides, where required, frontline interpersonal skills

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coaching, visual microlearning development, and improved work process design. These are delivered via a highly configurable and unique mobile digital platform that makes information, instruction, and training quickly and easily available at point-of-task. Access is initially through QR codes, which enable and empower workers to learn and share safety knowledge, created through participatory video and digital design methods with the ability to fully integrate on-the-job visual microlearning into the improved digital operational process. CodeSafe commenced this in 2011 and has continued to improve it through constant iteration in relation to market and client requirements and with the inclusion of more upstream psychosocial risk management solutions. Gerry began working in the industry as a builder’s laborer for eight years before becoming a shop steward, occupational health and safety (OSH) representative. He then went on to study at night school and ultimately complete a PhD through part-time study, during which time he also became the OHS manager for the Victorian Branch of the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining, and Energy Union (CFMEU). Gerry’s work is very much evidencebased and involves working on committees and on regulatory questions as well as advising reps (Union representatives) and investigating incidents. As he put it, “unfortunately we still have fatalities and that’s probably the worst part of our job.” Both David and Gerry have deep knowledge of the industry from the worker’s and organizational perspectives. Both are also astute analysts of the industry and of the politics and economics in which it operates. Here, I draw out three points that emerged from my discussions with them, which point to how automated and robotic systems and technologies might realistically and optimistically become part of the future of the industry: (1) How the industry’s economic and political context frames its technological possibilities; (2) How everyday knowing and collaboration enables new technology to become part of (safe) work practices; and (3) The importance of centering human relationships. Despite the substantial investment in automated and robotic “solutions” that promise to increase safety and productivity, these have tended to be proposed from a perspective that would require large-scale system change for them to be viable. Yet the industry is riddled with political and economic interests, which often cannot align with long-term planning, because they operate at different scales and temporalities. Gerry explained to me that a key question for the industry, in relation to introducing new technologies, was demand and cost. He drew on an earlier example he had examined during his PhD work (Ayers et al. 2013) to explain this, whereby “the economics and the benefits will drive whatever new technology is being demanded and will be implemented.” Gerry pointed out that “if it’s not economically viable, it won’t get a run in. Especially in the commercial sector where margins are so tight and money is everything.” Likewise, David told me, “I think it’s complex and I think for the majority of times it’s cost prohibitive.” He discussed how his company had created an

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alternative model. “Because of my background,” he said, “we made a deliberate decision that if a mum and dad operator can’t afford our solution, it’s too expensive.” They developed an ethical and responsible approach to ensuring that their technology is economically accessible to small companies, described by David in a way that appreciates their context, so that they can still support safety for “a mum and dad operator that’s still got a legal duty and still wants to do a good job to keep his house and his kids at school and all the rest of it” as well as “a large Tier 1 who’s got a multibillion dollar infrastructure project to build.” By creating tailored digital solutions rather than using a pay-per-view or user model, they were able to ensure that their technology service was accessible, rather than determining who might participate by cost. Indeed, for both David and Gerry, the question of how to introduce technology into the industry was contextual. When we met, David was just about to go to a meeting with someone who had developed an automated technology that had been applied in another industry to discuss its potential in construction. When I asked him if he thought that this particular technology could work in the construction industry, he explained that it delivered some key features that were aligned with his work, but the key thing to think about was the market. In his experience, good technology providers sometimes made the mistake of focusing on getting marketing professionals involved in helping them to scale up their business through marketing, but “don’t understand why they possibly built the technology in the first place.” David’s explained how in his company: [We have] people coming to us all the time to say, “David will you collaborate with us on a project?” I say, “What have you developed?” and some of it is hardware. So what was the intent of developing that? I think when you’ve been around the game long enough and you understand the psychology of the end user, sometimes I’ve had to be really gentle with people to say, “Look I think it’s really great what you’ve done, but I really can’t see that being adopted.” It was also part of Gerry’s role to evaluate and recommend new technologies coming into the industry—particularly from the safety perspective. He thought it was likely inevitable that robotic and automated tech would be introduced into the industry eventually but was reluctant to put a timeline on it. He emphasized that “[n]o one’s come to us and said, ‘Look, we want to introduce this new robotic system or process.’” While he noted that his team did have input when people came to them with new products, these tended to involve machines that needed to be operated by humans, such as new cranes or scaffolding, rather than robotic technologies. He thought that new automated technology would need to be introduced on a case-by-case basis, which would need to work for employers. The kinds of technology he envisioned being useful would be to help with manual tasks like “dragging pallets around” which could cause injuries. This would “save a lot of people getting injuries and that sort of thing without

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too much of an impact in terms of people’s livelihoods and their economics and sustainability.” Gerry also commented on the possibility of robots for monitoring airborne dangers such as “for example monitoring your gases or asbestos or whatever.” He speculated that: Removing asbestos is a very dangerous job. There may be a case for technology to do some of that work. I mean, a lot of that especially in the power industry, you have to scrape it off of these awkward positions. Whether there is a robot that can do that, I mean we’re still getting people who are dying from mesothelioma that have worked in the industry. Stonemasons, for example, have the silicosis process.…I think given what we’re going through now, if there was some sort of technology which could pick up COVID virus in the air or something, that something which I mean everyone would sort of think is a great idea. If that were possible. From the ground up, using robotic or automated technology makes sense; it enables people to stay safe from threats that they may not be aware of and that are invisible to the eye. Indeed, another reason why we might be optimistic about a future where such technologies are available can be drawn from the example of what did go right in the context of COVID-19. During the pandemic, the Union (the Victorian CFMEU), in agreement with the industry and state government, made QR codes mandatory on construction sites. While for many Australians, the pandemic was the first context in which QR code became an everyday technology, in the construction industry it was already established, specifically through the work of David and his colleagues. Knowing David’s work with QR code from previous projects undertaken with him and my colleagues (Pink et al. 2016; Pink et al. 2017), I asked him how their existing work with QR code had translated into the pandemic context. David described how in the first year of the pandemic, “We have three pillars to our business, frontline leadership, coaching, and media went down. Technology went off the charts because people needed the technology platform for all these sign-in/sign-out contact tracing, all that sort of stuff.” The second year of the pandemic saw them even busier. CodeSafe assisted organizations in addressing their cyber-security challenges, due to many organizations adopting unsecure QR code platforms and providers, as new and inexperienced users of QR code technology. His company had been developing contactless access to visual and digital solutions via their platform for 11 years by the time the pandemic created new needs for on-site contact tracing. David told me: I think what we’ve got now is one of the most dynamic and advanced mobility platforms in the world—and with ISO 27001 certification across our platform and application, we’re primed now. Now that people know what they need and how versatile the QR code is.

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He emphasized that in their work, It’s looking at what the value-add, where is the real value and is that solution—can everybody see value in that solution as a single, cost efficient, easy to use “One stop shop” delivery mechanism? If they can, it’ll get adopted. For instance, Gerry had also been on the ground with workers during the process of installing QR Code tracing on construction sites. He emphasized the importance of talking with workers first and described how “[workers were] very suspicious at the start and I think they thought the technology was trying to track where they move and what they did and if they left early or had more lunch.” This made the Union role central in meeting members on sites and saying, “Hey listen, this is not what it’s about and these other reasons.” Gerry said that “probably 95% of the time people would go, ‘Oh, okay, great. We don’t mind that then.’” David emphasized, throughout our talk, that the industry needs to move away from its emphasis on the transactional nature of work in construction and building and to focus on the relational. In my interviews with Gerry and David, I learned how both have developed a deep understanding of how learning happens in the industry and how and when it’s relevant to take technology into that process. This, I propose, suggests a new and important mode of optimism. Here the optimism isn’t about what tech can do, but about how people can learn and how they can be empowered. In David’s words, it’s not about technology. It’s about well there is going to be an interface between a person and the technology, at some point. How do we ensure that that is a positive experience for the individual because it is, that will get adopted and it will be adopted in a sustainable way. These on-the-ground accounts reveal the flaws in both techno-optimism and techno-dystopianism, precisely because they give very clear practical examples of what could go right and what could go wrong. It is also evident that both Gerry and David have become evaluators of techno-optimism. Earlier I outlined how they both described their roles in this respect—in Gerry’s case to formally evaluate a technology for its safety, and in David’s case to determine if he would collaborate with a technology company. Using their on-the-ground expertise, they are both able to identify when and how proposals to introduce new technologies in the industry are misguided, either because they are not safe or because they will not get taken up. There are many elements that might go into their decisions which do not fall into the scope of the example explained in this chapter, but which are inseparable from the questions prioritized here—including the future of training and the responsibilities this entails.

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Thus, even within this complex, dangerous, and fragmented industry that has been slow to embark on its digital transformation, there are key sites and strands of activity in which questions of technology uptake and use are “going right” and where visions for the future of technology in the industry and for construction workers themselves are realistic and plausible. There are people like David and Gerry playing important gatekeeping roles, which effectively ensure that things do go right. These examples stress the need to go beyond critiques of techno-optimism; the logics of automation do not necessarily play out into dystopian futures because real people, human creativity, and sensibilities toward how people learn, know, and move forward are part of society.

Emerging Technologies for Ethical Optimism If, as argued above, the techno-optimism associated with emerging technologies is misguided in its approach to people, how might we envisage an optimistic future of which emerging technologies are part? How might a new anthropology forward constitute such a field theoretically and practically? In many fields of practice, there are people who have honed a sensibility to the ways in which new technologies can become part of people’s possible futures in ways that are beneficial, realistic, and plausible. They coincide with design anthropological and futures anthropology approaches, because anthropologists similarly engage with and attend to what matters to people, how people stay safe, what their anxieties are, and how, where, and what they trust. In my research concerning emerging technologies in the construction industry, I have been fortunate to meet these people who have expertise on the ground and are stakeholders in the future of the industry—not only Gerry and David, but also others whose experiences and insights will be discussed in future publications. Anthropology is well positioned to put the scholarly promotion of technodystopianism in its place—as a warning and as a wake-up call for what has gone wrong and what can go wrong. There are two prominent examples of how ADM can devastate lives and possible futures when misused by government, which I and others have discussed elsewhere (Pink 2022a; Pink et al. 2022b): The Australian RobotDebt disaster put many already vulnerable people in extremely precarious situations; and algorithmic bias in the UK school leaver exam grading system temporarily robbed many already disadvantaged teenagers of hoped-for futures. Such uses of automated systems and technologies are unacceptable and irresponsible. But this does not mean that automation is at fault; rather, the core of the problem is neoliberal government, capitalism, and the prevalence of techno-solutionism in the dominant narratives of contemporary society. This is, of course, not something to be optimistic about. But things do not have to go wrong: Using QR codes on construction sites does not have to descend into the ills of a surveillance society, if it is instilled with values of care, safety, and responsibility.

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If—as Gerry suggested—robots were charged with collecting samples of asbestos and removing it from buildings, they could potentially save people from the inevitability of death from incurable pleural mesothelioma. Many of the risks of working on construction sites highlight how uncertainty is part of everyday living. Mesothelioma does so in a particular embodied way. My own dad, and other relatives, died from mesothelioma, which is very painful “due to [its] tumors pressing on nerves and vital organs” (Selby 2022). For those who, like my dad, had no known exposure, the risk of their children following their fate is low (Kharazmi et al. 2018). But still I can’t take a deep breath without wondering or remembering the day he told me of the diagnosis that I already suspected, having recognized the symptoms. Was I with him the day he unknowingly inhaled the tiny asbestos fibers that led to his death years later? Mesothelioma is emblematic of the nature of the uncertainty that characterizes the unfolding of our lives into unknown futures. However, it could realistically be further minimized for the future for both workers in the construction industry and people who inhabit or move through spaces where they could be exposed, through the focused design and development of effective uses of automated and robotic systems and technologies, appropriately engaged in tasks too dangerous for human life. This would mean focusing on the human and health costs of not carefully thinking through why and how automated and robotic technologies could support industry, rather than simply following the economic and political drivers. Such technologies are not necessarily economically viable propositions. For instance, a European Union funded “Robots to Re-Construction” project, which developed two prototypes for the robotic removal of asbestos from homes (Corves and Haschke 2021, 1–2) concluded that “A ‘service provider’ startup company could not afford…the investment to put in place a working and validated system in [the] asbestos removal market” (Haschke and Becchi 2021, 428). It is increasingly evident that when investors, developers, and industries of robotic and automated technologies do not attend to knowing from the ground up, they fail people by not attending to human values, and they also fail the industry. Anthropologists need to not simply study how futures are anticipated or imagined. Rather, we need to do anthropology forward; we also need to engage our own analytical and imaginative capabilities to envision, with participants in research, the ethics of following particular paths into possible futures rather than others, the meanings of these futures, how plausible and realistic they are, how to seek to enable the meanings, and the values and sensations that would characterize them. That is, not to make futures, since that is impossible to plan for and achieve in an ultimately uncertain world, but to make possible the qualities of life and experience that possible ethical and responsible futures could hold. This might initially sound like an abstract task. However, the next stage in the AUTOWORK project that David and Gerry participated in will be to draw on the interviews my colleagues and I are carrying out, to develop futures workshops, where we will

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work together with diverse stakeholders to ask precisely these kinds of questions, with optimism toward futures that could “go right.” This is what anthropology forward involves. I invite readers to join this journey to participate in an expanded anthropology and in making hopeful futures.

Acknowledgments My first thanks are to David and Gerry for sharing their experience and knowledge with me, for reading and correcting the first draft of this chapter, and for inspiring me through their work. The project “Workers in transition through automation, digitalization and robotization of work” (AUTOWORK) is an international research project between the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway, and Monash University, Australia, funded by a grant from the Norwegian Research Council’s Welfare, Work, and Migration program, Project no. 301088. I thank my AUTOWORK colleagues, particularly Ben Lyall at Monash University, who collaborates with me in the construction industry stream of the project, and the wider team for our shared discussions and interest in the future of work.

References Abdilla, Angie. 2018. “Beyond Imperial Tools: Future-Proofing Technology through Indigenous Governance and Traditional Knowledge Systems.” In Technology as Cultural Practice, edited by Josh Harle, Angie Abdilla, and Andrew Newman, 67–81. Sydney: Tactical Space Lab. Akama, Y., S. Pink, and S. Sumartojo (2018) Uncertainty and Possibility: New Approaches to Future Making. London: Bloomsbury. Australian Industry and Skills Committee. 2022. Construction. Last modified 18 January 2022. https://nationalindustryinsights.aisc.net.au/industries/construction. Ayers, Gerard Francis, John F. Culvenor, Jim Sillitoe, and Dennis Else. 2013. “Meaningful and Effective Consultation and the Construction Industry of Victoria, Australia.” Construction Management and Economics 31 (6): 542–567. Andrejevic, Mark. 2020. Automated Media. Oxford: Routledge. Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology. Cambridge: Polity. Bergquist, Magnus, and Bertil Rolandsson. 2022. “Exploring ADM in Clinical DecisionMaking: Healthcare Experts Encountering Digital Automation.” In Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies, edited by Sarah Pink, Martin Berg, Deborah Lupton, and Minna Ruckenstein, 140–153. London: Routledge. Bertollini, V. n.d.. This Is What Trillions in Global-Infrastructure Investment Look Like. Redshift. Autodesk. Accessed 17 June 2022. https://redshift.autodesk.com/ infographics/global-infrastructure Bloch, Ernst. 1995. The Principle of Hope. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cook, Julia, and Hernán Cuervo. 2019. “Agency, Futurity and Representation: Conceptualising Hope in Recent Sociological Work.” The Sociological Review 67 (5): 1102–1117.

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Corves, Burkhard, and Tobias Haschke. 2021. “Introduction and Motivation.” In Robots to Re-Construction—The Roadmap to Robotized Asbestos Removal, edited by Burkhard Corves, Tobias Haschke, and Mathias Hüsing, 1–2. Boston: Now Publishers. DeNora, Tia. 2021. Hope: The Dream We Carry. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Eubanks, Virginia. 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Haschke, Tobias, and Francesco Becchi. 2021. “Results and Performances of Automated Asbestos Removal.” In Robots to Re-Construction—The Roadmap to Robotized Asbestos Removal, edited by Burkhard Corves, Tobias Haschke, and Mathias Hüsing, 422–451. Boston: Now Publishers. Haug, Michaela. 2020. “Framing the Future through the Lens of Hope: Environmental Change, Diverse Hopes and the Challenge of Engagement”. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie— Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology Berlin 145 (1): 71–91. Hjorth, Larissa, Kana Ohashi, Jolynna Sinanan, Heather Horst, Sarah Pink, Fumitoshi Kato, and Baohua Zhou. 2020. Digital Media Practices in Households: Kinship Through Data. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Ingold, Tim. 2021. Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence. Oxford: Routledge. Jansen, Stef. 2016. “For a Relational, Historical Ethnography of Hope: Indeterminacy and Determination in the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Meantime.” History and Anthropology 27 (4): 447–464. Kharazmi, Elham, Tianhui Chen, Mahdi Fallah, Kristina Sundquist, Jan Sundquist, Maria Albin, Elisabete Weiderpass, and Kari Hemminki. 2018. “Familial Risk of Pleural Mesothelioma Increased Drastically in Certain Occupations: A Nationwide Prospective Cohort Study.” European Journal of Cancer 103: 1–6. Kleist, Nauja, and Stef Jansen, S. 2016. “Introduction: Hope over Time—Crisis, Immobility and Future-Making.” History and Anthropology, 27 (4): 373–392. McKinsey and Co. 2019, December 1. “Voices on Infrastructure. “The impact  and opportunities of automation in construction.”” McKinsey and Co. https://www.mckinsey. com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/the-impact-and-opportunities-ofautomation-in-construction Melenbrink, Nathan, Justin Werfel, and Achim Menges. 2020. “On-site Autonomous Construction Robots: Towards Unsupervised Building.” Automation in Construction 119: 103312. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2004. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Miyazaki, Hirozaku. 2006. “Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and Its Critiques.” Cultural Anthropology 21 (2): 147–172. Morozov, Evgeny. 2013. To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist. London: Penguin Books. Pink, Sarah. 2022a. Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future. Oxford: Routledge. Pink, Sarah. 2022b. “Trust, Ethics and Automation: Anticipatory Imaginaries in Everyday Life.” In Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies, edited by Sarah Pink, Martin Berg, Deborah Lupton, and Minna Ruckenstein, 44–58. London: Routledge. Pink, Sarah, Vaike Fors, Debora Lanzeni, Melisa Duque, Shanti Sumartojo, and Yolande Strengers. 2022a. Design Ethnography: Research, Responsibilities, and Futures. Oxford: Routledge.

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Pink, Sarah, Vaike Fors, and Mareike Glöss. 2018. “The Contingent Futures of the Mobile Present: Beyond Automation as Innovation.” Mobilities 13 (5): 615–631. Pink, Sarah, Helen Lingard, and James Harley. 2016. “Digital Pedagogy for Safety: The Construction Site as a Collaborative Learning Environment.” Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy 1 (1): 1–15. Pink, Sarah, Helen Lingard, and James Harley. 2017. “Refiguring Creativity in Virtual Work: The Digital-Material Construction Site.” New Technology, Work and Employment, 32 (1): 12–27. Pink, Sarah, Minna Ruckenstien, Martin Berg, and Deborah Lupton. 2022b. “Introduction: Everyday Automation: Setting a Research Agenda.” In Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies, edited by Sarah Pink, Martin Berg, Deborah Lupton, and Minna Ruckenstein, 1–19. London: Routledge. Pink, Sarah, Dylan Tutt, and Andrew Dainty, eds. 2013. Ethnographic Research in the Construction Industry. Oxford: Routledge. Sadowski, Jathan. 2020. Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Safework Australia. 2021. Key Work Health and Safety Statistics, Australia 2021. https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/resources-and-publications/statistical-reports/ key-work-health-and-safety-statistics-australia-2021 Selby, Karen. 2022. “Mesothelioma Pain.” The Mesothelioma Centre. Last mofified April 8 2022. https://www.asbestos.com/mesothelioma/symptoms/chest-abdominal-pain/ Stilgoe, Jack. 2020. Who’s Driving Innovation? New Technologies and the Collaborative State. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Rachel Charlotte, and Ton Otto. 2016. “Cultures of the Future: Emergence and Intervention in Design Anthropology.” In Design Anthropological Futures, edited by Rachel Charlotte Smith, Kasper Tang Vangkilde, Ton Otto, Mette Gislev Kjaersgaard, Joachim Halse, and Thomas Binder, 19–36. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Zimdars, Melissa, and Kembrew McLeod, eds. 2020. Fake News: Understanding Media and Misinformation in the Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

AFTERWORD Optimism as Capacity Rebecca Bryant

What people reproach us with is not, after all, our pessimism, but the sternness of our optimism. — Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism”

This volume has made me optimistic about optimism. Admittedly, I’ve always viewed most anthropologists as optimists in pessimists’ clothing. The idea that anthropological knowledge can do something in the world seems ingrained in the discipline. Margaret Mead thought that she could use it to change Americans’ ideas about sex. Even earlier anthropologists thought that they were salvaging the record of cultures that would inevitably be washed away by the flood of modernity. Modernization theory, development or applied anthropology, and even so-called dark anthropology all rest on the idea that anthropology has something to contribute to the alleviation of human suffering. This, in itself, is highly optimistic. Still, a global pandemic, the climate emergency, the return of fascism, warinduced food shortages, and impending economic depression make even the most activist of anthropologists despair. What can anthropology offer in such times? Why even bother? This volume shows us why we should bother, and it gives us resources for thinking about how we can do that. The authors and their contributions are diverse, but one thing that they all show us is people acting. They show us optimism not only as a characteristic or an attitude toward life but as a capacity nurtured with others. Almost all authors offer reflections on how they, as anthropologists and humans, came to view optimism as a capacity to be cultivated. DOI: 10.4324/b23231-13

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For some, it was a reaction to paralyzing despair; for all, it grew out of work with people who should have despaired and yet chose to do the opposite. Arising as it did out of theology, the concept of optimism has often been ridiculed as naive and even fatalistic. The earliest and most famous jab at the theodicists’ optimistic response to evil was Voltaire’s Candide, but Terry Eagleton recently took on the topic again in his Hope without Optimism, declaring the latter a matter of belief and personal characteristics. “It is not a disposition one attains through deep reflection or disciplined study. It is simply a quirk of temperament,” he declares (2015, 2). This volume begs to differ. While it may be the case that the metaphysical optimism proposed by Leibniz and the theodicists requires such a temperament, the chapters in this volume instead lead us toward what I’m going to call existential optimism, or a conscious choice and form of self-cultivation at the edge of the abyss. Metaphysical optimism proposes that everything is leading toward the better, or that things will work out in the end. This is not exactly Leibniz’s own argument, a tour de force of logical absurdity in which he concludes that however bad our world is, it must still be better than any other world, since an omniscient God put us in it. However, the interpretation that “the best of all possible worlds” meant that everything in our world is for the best was one popularized by other theodicists and impaled on the sharp end of Voltaire’s satire in Candide. In that well-known tale, Candide learns from his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, a type of optimistic fatalism, accepting that every lash he receives and every thief who robs him are still for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Throughout that tale, Candide constantly refers back to Dr. Pangloss’s teachings and adopts a “glass half full” attitude. It is only as his own misery and that of those around him begins to pile up that he starts to doubt. Candide undergoes a change, eventually eschewing philosophical talk altogether and concentrating on action, on creating something in the world. He begins to farm, to be productive, and thereby to be happy. Interestingly, then, even this tale intended to explode the doctrine of optimism ends on what can only be described as an optimistic note. Indeed, I would say that it ends on an existential note. Jean-Paul Sartre, in a popular article intended to reply to some of existentialism’s critics, remarked that contrary to what those critics averred, existentialism is far from fatalistic. “Quietism is the attitude of people who say, ‘let others do what I cannot do.’ The doctrine I am presenting before you is precisely the opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality except in action” (1975 [1956], 346). It is in this context that Sartre declares that “no doctrine is more optimistic” than existentialism, because it is only action in the world that makes us who we are, and existentialism is “an ethic of action and self-commitment” (1975 [1956], 346). The anthropologist may have difficulties with Sartre’s creed of authenticity and radical freedom, which says that in the end we are all individuals who make

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our own choices given certain conditions and that we should make those choices in accordance with our true selves. We may, however, understand existentialism in its broader sense, as a meaning-making response to the anxiety and dread that used to be known as angst and that today permeates our societies and our approaches to the future. While angst may have been used originally and primarily to refer to the dizzying anxiety produced by knowing that we have to find our own meaning in a godless world, it may also apply to the terror of a futureless future that news reports and our own research keep telling us permeates the world today. Even the most optimistic among us have to grapple with the anticipated end of the world as we know it. We are surrounded by dystopian scenarios that are also terrifyingly real. Climate anxiety, political hopelessness, and economic despair have us all in their grips and produce a type of vertigo (Knight 2021; Knight, this volume), the sense that events are churning us in some hurricane of history that will destroy all in its path. While one certainly understands Daniel Knight’s call in this volume to study “crisis as condition,” it is also equally true, as Anna Willow observes in the Introduction, that “exceedingly few anthropologists now feel comfortable passively observing and documenting while their research communities face unrelenting waves of (un)natural disasters.” We want to know how to use our knowledge to act. And it is precisely action that is at the center of this book, as it is at the center of what I’m terming existential optimism. Whether it is Cherokee Nations Medicine Keepers developing land-based educational practices in the wake of centuries of disaster (Myhal and Carroll) or Transition communities trying to reshape our modes of consumption (Willow) or Japanese farmers planting sunflowers in the radiated remains of their fields (Tam), people in these chapters are acting. Moreover, it is through acting, and acting together, that optimism emerges. In their chapter, Widener and Choate remark, “Contrary to the passive notion that ‘hope springs eternal’ from within, we find that hope arises from a variety of collective actions.” Or as Sartre observed, “Feeling is formed by the deeds that one does” (Sartre 1975, 361). I earlier referred to this “ethic of action and self-commitment” (Widener and Choate) as a form of self-cultivation, developing optimism as a capacity. Like aspiration, we may see optimism as a navigational capacity that is also unevenly distributed (Appadurai 2013, 188). If, as Anna Willow argues in the Introduction and others note throughout the volume, optimism is “belief in the human capacity to create positive change,” this volume shows that such belief is itself cultivated through actions with others. Like Saba Mahmood’s interlocutors in Cairo, who cultivate patience, docility, and particular ethical dispositions through repeated practice in communities (Mahmood 2001; see also Bryant 2001), optimism is cultivated in communities of action. In her chapter, Sarah Pink uses the term “anthropology forward,” which implies going “one step further to participate in imagining and constituting possible futures that we can feel

Afterword  195

optimistic about.” Similarly, Widener and Choate note that optimism requires that “individuals and collectives suspend their cynicism and skepticism” in what appears a leap of faith. One takes the first step, and does so with others, in actions that become what Hilary King calls “forms of community level iterative self-making.” It is through such actions with others that the capacity for optimism begins to grow. Contrary, then, to the metaphysical optimism that Eagleton scorns and that most of the rest of us since Voltaire have viewed as a fondness for seeing the harsh world in rosy colors, existential optimism is based on a decision, a choice to act. If feeling is formed by the deeds that one does, the choice to suspend cynicism and act with others enables us to cultivate optimism on the edge of the abyss. As Alison Gold remarks, “In centering what makes us human and cultivating interdependent relationships, as well as deep belief that systems transformation is possible, this work is rich in hope and confidence in the future.” Elsewhere, I discuss the concept of confidence in relation to speculation, where a “state of confidence” leads us to “assume that a state of affairs will continue, even though our experience tells us that it probably won’t” (Bryant and Knight 2019, 91). I suggest that optimism, even more than belief, requires confidence in the capacity of human beings to produce positive change. It is from this existential optimism and the confidence that underpins it that we can engage in what Willow calls “optimistic futuring,” or “a positive, purposive, and active relationship with the future as a temporal frame” (Willow, Chapter 6). It is the purposiveness and activeness of that optimism that Sartre appears to have meant by a “stern optimism,” one with purpose and direction. Man is all the time outside of himself, it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able to exist, Sartre notes (1975 [1956], 377). It is, Sartre avers, by projecting ourselves into actions with others that we create something that we might call humanity. And it is by having such aims that we find our own purpose as persons. At the end of Candide, Voltaire shows Dr. Pangloss again pausing work to discourse at length about why all that has befallen them is for the best. It is especially here that Voltaire reveals his distaste of empty rhetoric. Apparently an avid horticulturalist himself, Pangloss, at the end of the short tale, shows his hero Candide rejecting metaphysical optimism and doing instead what so many of these chapters describe people doing all over the world: Turning to action in the world for the existential optimism that enables futuring to take place. The final line of the tale, then, seems a fitting place to end: “All that is very well,” Candide remarks to his former tutor, “but let us cultivate our garden” (Voltaire 2015, 118).

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References Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso. Bryant, Rebecca. 2001. “An Aesthetics of Self: Moral Remaking and Cypriot Education.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (3): 583–614. Bryant, Rebecca, and Daniel M. Knight. 2019. The Anthropology of the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 2015. Hope Without Optimism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Knight, Daniel M. 2021. Vertiginous Lives: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology 16 (2): 202–236. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1975 [1956]. “Existentialism is a Humanism.” In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, edited by Walter Kaufman (revised and expanded edition), 345–369. New York: Plume Books. Voltaire. 2015 [1759] Candide. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publishing Group.

INDEX

Note: Pages followed by italics refer figures and pages followed by n refer note. abolitionist anthropology 30 action anthropology 15 active forgetting 58 active hope 4, 131 activism 106–107, 118, 143–144; and anthropology 14–17, 135; anti-­nuclear 71–72, 75, 81–85; climate 89, 104, 133; environmental 73, 75, 168, 173; and hope 85, 136; and social justice 136–138 advocacy 14, 48–49, 69 agency 6, 9, 63, 67–68, 84–85, 133–135 allyships 132, 140–143 alternatives see options, possibility American Anthropological Association 20, 30, 10 American Indian Studies 90–91, 101n2 And Keep Your Power Dry 38 Anderson, Mark 37 Andrejevic, Mark 180 Angola 133 angst 194; see also anxiety Anishinaabe 96–100 Anthropocene 41, 73, 89 anthropological optimism 2–5, 23, 30–31, 47, 127–128; see also optimism Anthropologies and Futures 12 anthropology 39, 42–44, 61, 128, 148; of the future 10–14, 107, 170, 182, 187; of the good xv–xvi, 7–10, 48, 52–53;

and inequality 30; roles of xiii–xiv, xvii, 6, 13–19, 23, 61, 63, 68–69, 91, 114, 118, 127, 166, 169–171, 174, 178, 181, 187, 192, 194–195; teaching 30, 40, 140–141 Anthropology as Cultural Critique 41 anthropology forward 178–180, 187–189, 194 Anthropology News 12 Anthropology of the Future 12, 47, 169 anti-­racism 31, 159; see also racism Anusas, Mike 18 anxiety 5, 12, 50, 56, 194; see also emotions apocalypse 10, 89–90, 106, 110 Appadurai, Arjun 9, 12 applied anthropology see engaged scholarship applied optimism 105 Arizona: Department of Corrections 153; State University Center for Correctional Solutions 152–155; Transformation Project 153 arts 65–66, 113, 153, 156–157 artificial intelligence 178–179, 181 asbestos 185, 188 aspiration 9, 135, 194 Atlanta, GA 117–123, 157 austerity xvi, 46–47, 53 Australia 178–188; RobotDebt disaster 187

198  Index

automated-­decision making 178–179, 181, 187 automation 177, 179–181, 184–185, 187–188 AUTOWORK Project 180, 188 backcasting 18, 110 Baker, Carolyn 112–113 Baldwin, James 38–39 Baldy, Cutcha Risling 89 Bateson, Gregory 40 Battaglia, Debbora 49, 58 Beijing 167 Benedict, Ruth 29, 32–34, 36–38, 41, 43 Bergsonism 42 Berlant, Lauren xiv, 53 bicycling see cycling bio-­legitimacy 68 Black farmers 124 Black Lives Matter 29 Bloch, Ernst 31, 43 Blue Map App 168 boars 78–79 Boas, Franz 14, 37–38 Bock, Jan 49, 52 Bourdain, Anthony 148 Bowens, Natasha 124 Brand, Steward 40 breaktime 49, 54, 58–59 bright spot ethnography 135 Brooks, Rayshard 123 brown, adrienne marie 149–150 Brown, Michael 32, 34 Bryant, Rebecca 4, 12, 42–43, 47, 169 business owners see small business Cabot, Heath 48 Caillois, Roger 49, 54–56, 58 Candide 193, 195 capacity to aspire 9 capitalism 108, 180, 187 carbon: capture 169; emissions 165–167, 169, 170–172; neutrality 165, 167–168, 172; peak 169 change 6, 39, 69, 105, 151, 173; difficulty of 150, 159; as inevitable 108–109, 110–113; see also future, influencing the Checker, Melissa 15 Chernobyl 71 Cherokee Environmental Leadership Program 92, 95

Cherokee Nation 90, 92–96, 100, 194; Medicine Keepers Preserve 96–96 child welfare 149 children see youth China 165–174; worldview 171 Christianity xiv, xvi, 38 Chrysanthemum and the Sword, The 29, 36–38 Cite Black Women 30 citizen science 138–139 civil rights 14, 117, 133, 157–160 climate change 1–2, 39, 88, 100, 104, 108, 141, 165–169, 173–174; and anxiety 5, 194 coal 166–167, 173 CodeSafe Solutions 182, 185 cognitive liberation 133 collaboration 123, 139, 148, 151–157, 161, 183; see also networks collapse 1–2, 5, 10, 106, 108; see also apocalypse; crisis; dystopianism Collins, Samuel Gerald xiii, 13 Colonialcene 89 colonialism 5, 10, 40–41, 88–89, 92, 95, 99–100, 180; settler 30, 38, 43, 88 Color of Food, The 124 Coming of Age at the End of Nature 140 Coming of Age in Samoa 34–36 Common Market 122 community building 112–113, 128, 157 Community Farmers Markets 120, 122 community supported agriculture 112, 117 complex problems 150–151, 161; see also systems composting 111–112 Congress (US) 137, 149, 162, 172 Conservation International 164 construction industry 177–189 Cooke, Maeve xv Cooper, Davina 52–53 coral reefs 138–139 Corntassel, Jeff 91 cosmos see kosumosu counterculture 14, 39 COVID-­19 2, 5, 20, 58, 104, 107, 117–118, 122–127, 157, 177, 185; and Indigenous peoples 89, 95, 98 Crapanzano, Vincent 8 Crate, Susan 15 criminal justice 152–155 crisis 19–20, 47–49, 50, 55–56, 59, 109, 123, 133, 135, 139, 160, 194 critical consciousness 158 critique 2–3, 7, 16, 31–36, 40–44, 62, 166

Index  199

cultural models 151–152, 155, 160–161 cultural relativism see relativism cybernetics 39–40 cycling 57 damage-­centered vs desire-­centered research 10, 91 dams 97; see also hydroelectricity dance see arts dark anthropology xv, 5, 7, 8, 48–49, 52–53, 192 David, Heather 89 Davis, Allison 31 Death Without Weeping 15 deep equity 148 design anthropology 17–19, 177–179, 187 desire 8, 10 despair 1, 4–5, 9–10, 42, 105, 136, 139, 192–194 Destiny Arts Center 156–157 difference 29, 32, 35, 43 digital anthropology 182 disease 66, 89; see also COVID-­19; health; mesothelioma disoñar 19 diversification 52 dosimetry 71–72, 79, 82, 85n2, 86n8 dreams 110–111, 114 DuBois, W.E.B 31, 41 dwelling perspective 77 dynamism see change dystopianism 2, 89–90, 110, 178, 194 Eagleton, Terry xiv, 193–195 Ear Hustle (podcast) 148 early adopters 110; see also role modeling Earthship communities 18 ecological civilization 171 ecology of optimism 73 economic growth 1, 132, 164, 166, 171 Ecuador 133 education 35, 92, 94–95, 100, 140, 156 elders 92–95, 157 Elders Project 157 emergence 178–179 emic perspective 69 Emissions Trading Schemes 169 emotional fusions 134 emotions 63, 131–144 endangered species 138–139 energy 170, 173; see also renewable energy energy justice 171–172, 174

energy transition 164–174 engaged scholarship 2–3, 5–6, 14, 17, 63, 66–68, 88, 90–91, 106–107, 119–120, 132, 135, 194; barriers to 15–16; forms of 16; see also anthropology, role of engineering 177, 181–182 enjoyment 95, 99 environmental anthropology 15, 88, 91, 106, 173 Environmental Futures 12 environmental justice 15 environmentalism 71, 83, 105, 173; see also activism Escobar, Arturo 17, 19, 105, 109 essentialism 29, 36–37 ethics 3, 5, 13–17, 52, 59, 90, 134, 166, 169–171, 180–181, 184, 188 Ethnographic Futures Research 11 ethnographies of the possible 18 ethnography 12, 49, 75, 114, 135; see also methodology etic perspective 67, 69 European Union 46, 51, 188 evacuation 76, 78–79, 82, 85, 86n7 everyday activism 105–106, 110–112, 118–119, 121, 123, 125, 127–128 everyday life 58, 77, 83, 94, 105, 111, 118, 137, 182; see also everyday activism excluded ancestors 31 exhaustion-­elation 138–140 existentialism 193–194 expertise 148–149, 151–152, 186–187 extinction 1, 108 extractivism 1, 105, 180

Families Belong Together 136 Farmer Fund 122 Farmer, Paul 15 farmers 75–76, 117–128, 133 farmers markets 117–127 Fassin, Didier 68 fate 164–165, 169, 171, 173–174 Fields, Ed 94 financial crisis 46–51 Firth, Simon xv Fischer, Edward F. 7, 9 Fischer, Michael M.J. 33, 41 fish see nmé (lake sturgeon) Florida 136–142 flowers 57, 72–73, 75–83

200  Index

Floyd, George 123 food banks 117 Food Box Program 122 food systems 117–128 fossil fuels 104, 165, 168–169, 173 Fresh Harvest 124 Fukushima 71, 73, 74, 78, 83–84, 86n5; see also nuclear power; radiation funding 15, 48, 40, 67, 69, 122–123, 147, 150, 160–161 fundraising 122 Future as Cultural Fact, The 9 future conditional 168, 172 futures 47, 69, 114; different versions of 4, 12–13, 63, 125, 182; erasure of 50; everyday 179, 181; and hope 42–43, 77, 131, 161; influencing 6, 11–14, 17–19, 104–106, 109–114, 121, 128, 178; neglect of 10–11, 173; open 11, 39, 173; see also anthropology, of the future Garden of Iitate 77 gardens 72–73, 77, 79, 111–112, 126, 195; during WWII 126 Geertz, Clifford 72 gender 63, 66, 140, 149 Generation Z 140 generative hope 90; see also hope; optimism Georgia Department of Agriculture 122 Georgia Organics 122 Glasgow Declaration 167, 173 gleaning 117 Global Growers Network 124–125 global warming see climate change Global Youth Strike 141, 142 Gods of the Upper Air 30 González, Emma 140 good anthropology see anthropology, of the good Good Life, The 7 good, different versions of xv–xvi, 4, 12–13, 52 Great Recession see financial crisis Great Transition 105, 109 Greece xvi, 46–59 greenhouse gas emissions 112, 166–167, 170, 172; see also carbon, emissions grief-­courage 136–138 Gross, Lawrence 89 Grosz, Elizabeth 42 Guatemala 133 guest soil see kyakudo gun violence 132, 137

Halse, Joachim 18 Handler, Richard 31 happiness 8, 48, 135 Harkness, Rachel 18 harmony 92, 165 Harrison, Faye 31 Harrison, Ira 31 Haugerud, Angelique 60n5 health 15, 63, 68–69, 76, 125, 153, 157–160, 165, 167–169, 185, 188; see also wellbeing Henig, David 48 Herrington, Gaya 1–2 Heyman, Josiah 135 hikikomori 76 himawari (sunflower) 77–79 Hiroshima 75 history 55, 151, 158–159, 165 History and Anthropology 9 HIV/AIDS 64, 68, 133 Holmes, Seth 15 Hope Without Optimism 193 hope xiv, 3–4, 8–9, 31, 41–43, 59n1, 67, 73, 78–79, 84–85, 91, 99, 108, 131, 179 Hopkins, Rob 104–106, 111 humanitarianism 63, 65–66, 69, 120 humanity 107, 155, 164, 195 Hurston, Zora Neale 31 hydroelectricity 167 Hymes, Dell 14 identity 29, 76–77, 121, 149, 158 Iitate, Japan 71–85 incarceration 152–155 Indian boarding schools 92 Indigenous: environmental studies 91–92; futurities 90–91, 94–96, 100–101; methodologies 90–91, 95; optimism 88–89, 91, 96, 100–101; peoples 88–90, 148; scholarship 9–10, 88–92, 100–101; relationships to the environment 88; TikTok 148, 162n2 inequality 1, 4, 15, 20, 38, 41, 43, 62, 64, 158, 172; and anthropology 30 infrastructure 76, 85, 165, 171–173, 179, 182, 184 Ingold, Tim 72, 77, 84 injustice see inequality Inkarcerated Program 153 Inside-­Out Prison Exchange 153 Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs 168

Index  201

International Energy Agency 168–169, 172 interspecies relationships see non-­human relationships, relationality Irwin, Terry 109 Italy 52, 73 iterative self-­making 118–119, 125–128, 195 Jansen, Stef 9 Japan 36–37, 71–85 Jasper, James 133 Jobson, Ryan Cecil 42 Johnstone, Chris 4, 131 Jones, Camara Phyllis 159 joy 49, 55, 79, 95, 99, 133–134, 139; see also emotions; enjoyment; happiness judgement xvi–xvii Juris, Jeffrey 16 kariokiba 72, 77–78, 80–81, 83, 85 Kavedžija, Iza 8 Kenichi, Hasegawa 86n6 Khasnabish, Alex 16 Kierkegaard, Søren 49, 54–56 kikyō (Turkish bellflower) 81–83 King, Charles 30 Kirsch, Stewart 15 Kleinman, Arthur 66 Kleist, Nauja 9 Kleres, Jochen 133 Knight, Daniel M. xv–xvi, 4, 12, 42–43, 169 kosumosu (cosmos) 79–81 kyakudo 78 lake sturgeon see nmé land-­based education 92–96 language: Cherokee 93–95; and understanding of world 90 laws 132, 149 Lear, Jonathan 108 Legacy Museum 158 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 3, 193 Lempert, William 42, 90 Levi-­Strauss, Claude 32 Li, Keqiang 167 Lie, John 37 Limits to Growth 1 Little River Band of Ottawa Indians 90, 96–100

Living Together with Fukushima (LiFu) 75, 79–82 logging 97 machine learning 179 Macy, Joanna 4, 131 Mahmood, Saba 194 Make America Great Again (MAGA) 136 Malinowski, Bronislaw 33 Mansbridge, Jane 110, 118 Marbin, Jyothi 158–159 March for Our Lives 132, 136–137, 142 Marcus, George 33, 41 Martino, Ernesto de 54 Mathews, Andrew 73 McAdam, Doug 133 McCarthy era 14 McCoy, Kate 95 McKenzie, Marcia 95 McKinsey and Co 181 Mead, Margaret 6, 11, 13–14, 34–41, 43, 170, 173, 192 Meadows, Donella 1, 152 medical anthropology 15, 63 medical profession 157–160 Medicine Keepers 93–96; see also Cherokee Nation melting pot 38 Mesothelioma 188 methodology 14, 18, 61, 67–68, 75, 106–107, 120, 135, 141, 153, 180 Michigan 96–100 micro-­utopias 49, 52–54, 57–59, 60n4 migration 65–66, 139, 189 Millennials 140 Miller, Christine 18 Mingle, Kate 148 mixed judgements 170 Miyazaki, Hirokazu 8, 41 modernity 47, 192 Monty Python 46 Moore, Scott 172 moral batteries 133 Moreton-­Robinson, Aileen 92 Mozambique 65 mutual aid networks 118 Nacirema 32 Nagraj, Archana 156–157 narcissus see suisen Nation Rifle Association 137, 142; see also gun violence

202  Index

national character studies 36 National Memorial for Peace 158 National Science Foundation 92 Nature is Speaking (film) 164 neoliberalism 6–7, 48–49, 51–52, 56, 58–59, 108, 179, 187; see also capitalism networks 112, 117, 121–122, 127; see also collaboration Nevertheless, They Persisted 136 nmé (lake sturgeon) 90, 96–100 non-­human relationships 78, 81, 84, 89, 91–93, 98–99 normality 81–85 nuclear: disaster 71, 73, 76, 81; energy 83–84, 86n5; war 39; see also activism, anti-­nuclear; radiation Oakland, CA 155–157 objectivity xv, 6, 16, 121, 134 Ohio 106, 108–113 oil 133, 173; spills 138 Oklahoma 93–96 Optimistic Anthropology 147–148, 153, 160–161 optimism: in action 193–195; as capacity 192, 194–195; critique of xiv, 193, 195; cruel xiv, 5, 53; definitions of xiv, 3–5, 59n1, 131, 147, 165, 194–195; existential 193–195; metaphysical 193, 195; as orientation 53, 55, 59; plurality of 58; as resistance 5, 136, 138; right kind of 48–49, 51, 52–53, 55; roles of 2–3, 63–64, 66–69, 104; ways to increase 123, 127, 131, 139, 143; see also anthropological optimism optimistic futuring 106–114, 126, 195 options xiii, 2–3, 6, 13, 23, 33, 41, 43–44, 52–53, 56, 63–64, 106, 166, 170; see also possibility Orange Order of Scotland xvi orientalism 37 Ortner, Sherry xiv, xv, 7, 19, 48 Osterhoudt, Sarah 135 Ostwald, Wilhelm 170 Otto, Ton 17 Pandian, Anand 41 parenthood 63, 75, 143 Paris Climate Agreement 172 Parkland (Florida) shooting 137, 140–141 Patterns of Culture 32–34, 36 Pederson, Morton 8

Pediatric Leadership for Health Equity 158 perspective 10, 41, 47, 58, 62–63, 147, 152, 184 pessimism 46–47, 59, 104, 160, 192 philosophy 3, 193–195 photovoice 141 Pink, Sarah 14, 18, 114 pipe ceremony 98 Plenty Coups 108 pluralism 35–36 pluriverse 105 poems 164–165 political ecology 13 pollution 2, 15, 164–169, 172–173 Positive Youth Development 155 possibility 9, 31, 36, 38–39, 40–41, 55–56, 83–84, 90, 95, 105,110, 135–137, 188; see also options Possible Anthropology, A 41 postmodernism 39, 41 Power of Just Doing Stuff, The 111 practicing anthropology 62–63, 147–148; see also engaged scholarship prefiguration 39–40 Price, David 38 Principles of Hope 43 prison see incarceration problem-­solving 148–151, 161 progress 3, 5, 42 prosperity 46; see also economic growth protest 14, 48, 105, 123, 133, 136–137; see also activism Proust, Marcel 54 proximate leaders 151, 161 psychology 3 QR codes 177, 183, 185–187 “Rap on Race” 37–38 Race: Science and Politics 37 racial justice 123–124, 136; see also civil rights; inequality; racism racism 14, 31, 37–38, 40–41, 43, 156–159; see also colonialism radiation 71–81, 83–85, 184; and food 76, 81–82; see also nuclear Radical Hope 108 rage 133 Raskin, Paul 6 reflexivity 3–4, 6, 13, 19, 39–40, 42, 106, 128

Index  203

refugees 124–125 Reger, Jo 136 Reinventing Anthropology 14 relational accountability 91 relationality 92–96, 100–101 relationships see collaboration, networks, non-­human relationships, relationality relativism xvi, 3, 12, 14, 31–34, 37–38, 40–41, 43–44 renewable energy 51, 81, 84, 110, 165, 167–170, 172 resilience 3–4, 88, 104, 109, 112, 114, 173 resistance xv, 5, 7, 15, 47–49, 63, 85, 135–136, 138, 142, 172 rice 76, 80 risk 67, 72, 79, 82–84, 159, 183, 188 Robbin, Joel 7, 48–49, 52 role modeling 114, 160 Runia, Eelco 49, 54 Ryang, Sonia 37

safety 177, 179, 181–184 Salazar, Juan Francisco 14, 114 Samoa 34–36 San Quentin State Prison 148 Sartre, Jean-­Paul 54, 192–195 Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians 90 scale 118, 121, 127 Scheper-­Hughes, Nancy 15 scientists 72, 79, 82, 98, 170, 181 sea turtles 138–139 self-­driving cars 179, 181 self-­making see iterative self-­making senses 56–59 Serres, Michel 49, 54–56 settler colonialism see colonialism, settler sexuality 34–35, 149; see also gender Shanghai 164 situated usefulness 62, 67 Sixkiller, Anna 94 Slow City movement 109 small business 51, 126, 128, 184 Smich, Rachel Charlotte 17 Smil, Vaclav 173 Smith, Crosslin 94 social media 107, 111, 148, 162, 164 Society for Applied Anthropology 20 soil 72, 76, 78 solar energy 51, 81, 128, 167; see also renewable energy spirituality 94, 98; see also Christianity

story 13, 83, 100, 105–106, 113, 161 Strhan, Anna 48 structural violence 15 success 5, 16, 121, 133–134, 137, 139 suffering 48–49, 62–66, 68–69, 133, 192 suffering subjects 7, 48, 64 suisen (narcissus) 75–77 sunflower see himawari survival 62, 89, 99, 107, 149 Sustainable Delaware Ohio 107, 111 sustainable self-­determination 91 sweat 82; equity 138 symbiosis 56, 73, 83–84 syphilis study 157–158 systems 150–152, 173; see also complex problems; food systems systems changemakers 151–160 tar sands 13 Tax, Sol 15 teaching 30, 93–94, 132, 141, 143, 156, 161; see also education techno-­dystopianism 180–182, 186–187 technology 1–2, 106, 110, 148, 165–166, 168–169, 177, 185–186; emerging 178–182, 187; as solution 181, 184 techno-­optimism 177, 180–182, 186–187 technostruggle 86n8 temporal disorientation 50 Textor, Robert B. 11 tipping points 2, 173 Tito’s Vodka 122 Todd, Zoe 89 Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) 73, 78 traditional Indigenous knowledge 98, 100; see also Indigenous Transition Design 109 Transition movement 104–114, 123, 194 Transition Studies 105 transportation 110, 125, 168, 180 travel 51, 120 Tribal Historical Preservation 98 Tuck, Eve 10, 91, 95 Turkish bellflower see kikyō 2016 election 136 Tylor, E.B. xiii Ukraine 1 uncertainty 4, 19, 71–72, 75–79, 81, 83–84, 108, 131, 135, 172, 179, 188 Under the Dome (film) 168 unions 181, 186

204  Index

Unite the Right 136 United against Hate 136 United Kingdom 104 USDA (US Department of Agriculture) 122 utopia 43, 52, 60n3 Uvalde (Texas) shooting 137 values 1–2, 6, 13, 19, 40, 94, 108, 123, 127–128, 147, 152, 165–166, 170–171, 181, 187–188; see also ethics Vann, Gary 93 vegetarianism 110, 112 vertiginous: life 50; optimism 49, 54 vertigo 47, 49–50, 53–56, 58 Vietnam Conflict 14 Virginia 136 visioning 110 visual microlearning 183 Voltaire 193, 195 volunteerism 138–140 Walker, Harry 8 walking 84 waste: and energy 169–170; nuclear 72, 80, 83; reduction 18, 106, 110–111 Webster, Joseph xvi wellbeing 3–4, 7–9, 112, 166, 169–170 Westman, Clinton 12

Weston, Kath 86n8 Wettergren, Asa 133 white supremacy 5, 31, 160; see also colonialism; racism; Unite the Right Whyte, Kyle 89 Wiindigo 99–100; see also colonialism wildlife protection 132, 138–140 Wilkinson, Iain 66 wind energy 51, 167–168; see also renewable energy Women’s March 136 World Ahead, The 170 worry-­enthusiasm 140–143 Wright, Kevin 152–155 Xi, Jinping 167–168 Yang, Mayfair 171 Yazzie, Melanie 100–101 youth 5, 63,92, 137, 139–141, 155–157 Youth Climate Summit 141 Yuan, Huang 164 Yūko, Tsushima 84 yun see fate Zigon, Jarrett 8 Zimbabwe xvi Zoom 120