Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

Alexa Färber (Wien)

As a basically relational concept the promise articulates a mode of futurity that is surprisingly loose (Abram/Weszkalnys 2013): Not only that promises made in the present are often not kept; the attention given to them is anything but permanently intense. In this talk I will first unfold this looseness of promisses and its respective analytical value for studying the future made present. My thoughts are mainly based on empirical work in and about „cities“ and conceptual work derived from it that grasps the different (temporal) modes of how promises order the social, such as promissory assemblage (Färber 2019, 2020) and standby (Kemmer/Kühn/Otto/Weber 2021). From there I will discuss the promises articulated by Public and Engaged Anthropology and the expectations attached to it. The notion of compromise may become of some analytical value here.

Anmeldung unter https://www.euroethno.hu-berlin.de/de/veranstaltungen/institutskolloquium/sommersemester-2021/futures-in-of-anthropology