1In the face of looming uncertainty and crises that characterize our collective human future, anthropologists have begun to contemplate the contributions their discipline can make to the study of the future and how they can participate or intervene in the major future-making activities of our time. Shaping a better future for humanity, particularly in the face of urgent threats like climate change, which is already impacting millions of people worldwide, is increasingly viewed by ethnographers as an ethical imperative. Anthropology has long moved away from an untenable stance of neutral observation and embraced various forms of intervention and activism, where researchers emphatically take sides with their research participants (Ortner 2016). However, only recently have they started to go beyond describing and denouncing current and historical global inequalities and injustices and have begun to explore the future as a contested terrain. While anthropology's methods (participant observation and qualitative interviews) and its emphasis on long-term fieldwork are primarily oriented toward understanding the present and the past, as critically pointed out by Arjun Appadurai (2013), a recent wave of scholarship advocates for incorporating artistic, improvisational, speculative, and participatory techniques into the ethnographic toolkit (Culhane and Elliott 2017, Salazar et al. 2017). This special issue is the outcome of a panel at the 2020 EASA conference that addressed these developments with a special focus on multimodal and audiovisual practice. It brings together an exciting group of ethnographic filmmakers and media practitioners who reflect on how their work addresses the future, and how the future focus has shaped their audiovisual practice.
2Anthropology has demonstrated its capacity to reveal how participants' imagination, hopes, and aspirations shape their individual life trajectories in various contexts (Janeja and Bandak 2018, Cook 2018), such as migration (Vigh 2009, Lucht 2011), economics, or religion (Miyzazaki 2004). However, as contemporary anthropological work increasingly engages with "cultures of expertise" (Boyer and Marcus 2020), such as design firms, science labs, activist/artist/cultural contexts, or public institutions, anthropologists find themselves closer to the places where societal futures are being anticipated, planned, created, and decided. For instance, they study processes like urban planning, climate modeling, biotechnology, or global finance. These encounters have led many anthropologists to reject the idea of leaving the active shaping of the future solely to disciplines like engineering, economics, or the life sciences. The emerging subdiscipline of design anthropology (Gunn et al. 2013, Pink et al. 2022) employs methods that involve various forms of intervention to both generate contextual knowledge and develop specific solutions in active collaboration with stakeholders who are co-creating social futures. These approaches foster collaboration between different disciplines and actors, including producers, researchers, and users, with the aim of generating concepts and prototypes that extend beyond traditional scholarly outputs like peer-reviewed articles and monographs. Consequently, these "ethnographies of the possible'' are significantly more focused on intervention and changing social reality than classical anthropology has ever been. But futures are not only envisioned and made in laboratories of the global north; they are situated across the scale, within the lifeworlds of our research participants, and inherent to their doings.
3This special issue seeks to explore the contributions of audiovisual and multimodal approaches and methodologies to anthropology as a future-oriented, anticipatory research practice. Contributors draw upon their own practices to discuss how they engage with different futures alongside their interlocutors, utilizing various storytelling methods such as multimedia installations, Cli(mate) Fi(ction), photo elicitation, 360-degree VR film, or collaborative (ethno)fiction. They demonstrate how film and other multimodal practices offer privileged spaces for rendering future worlds and imaginaries tangible, whether on a personal, societal, global, or intermediate scale. The projects discussed in this issue provide insights into how participants in ethnographic research envision their personal futures within the context of power arrangements and societal structures that shape their broader social worlds (Gruber, Schillaci), or how they create spaces for expressing truths about the past to pursue justice in the future (Dietrich). Audiovisual methods serve as a platform where participants can collaborate to imagine, perform, and document their futures through inventive practices like projective improvisation (Sjöberg 2017). These imagined narratives of the future emerge in the tension between participants' personal imagination and their acute awareness of the power structures that impact their lives in the present and the past. Thus, following Appadurai's (2013) framework, they begin with an ethics of probability, which is reflected in the "modern regimes of diagnosis, counting, and accounting," and move towards an ethics of possibility that expands the field of imagination and fosters hope (2013: 295).
4Demonstrations of future worlds made tangible through audiovisual methodologies also have the potential to critically challenge the narratives of the future propagated by the capitalist order and counter the pervasive "shadow of inevitability" (Tsing 2005: 269) of neoliberal globalization. Collaborative multimodal anthropological projects can enact Afro-, Indigenous, queer-feminist, or multispecies futurisms, presenting alternatives to speculative future scenarios solely derived from the unquestioned ideology of global capitalism (Kendall, Borioli). Moreover, these projects have the potential to decolonize our Eurocentric notion of the future as a linear path of "progress" and "development," encouraging us to consider temporalities in pluralistic terms.
5In the pursuit of making the future tangible by cinematically enacting the personal dreams and imaginations of our research participants, it becomes essential to render the future plural, non-linear, and indeterminate. This approach opens up spaces of possibility for activism, hope, and potentially even healing. However, such practices also come with ethical and political demands, as they challenge the existing order of things and require us to take responsibility for our anthropological interventions. They prompt us to question the hegemonic legacies of knowledge production within our discipline and to engage in anthropology differently. This process of "otherwise world building" (McTighe and Raschig 2019) that challenges and contests controversial futures may even drive us to commit ourselves to liberatory projects.
6One crucial task in this endeavor is to challenge the assumption that the future is inherently positioned chronologically. Avoiding the "trap of trajectorism," which assumes a cumulative journey through time (Appadurai 2013: 223), means defying the logic of linear temporality. As Nielsen (2011: 398) reminds us, we must consider how "anticipatory action" propels the future into the present. Cook (2018: 2) adds that while the present is connected to the future through actions, it is also disconnected from it due to the uncertainties it entails. When contemplating temporalities, we must also acknowledge the distinction between societal futures and individual futures, even though, as Kendall's piece in this issue demonstrates, they are inherently intertwined. Further, temporalities also have spatial effects, as displacement can lead to temporal dispossession (Ramsay 2019: 12), as evident in the contributions by Schillaci and Neto in this issue.
7We are interested in exploring the intersection between anthropological approaches to the future and methodologies of visual anthropology, with a particular emphasis on works that experiment with future-oriented speculative thinking. However, we find that the potential of speculative fiction in our discipline is still not fully realized, as ethnographic cinema often remains confined within the realist aspirations of academic and documentary filmmaking.
8While the poststructuralist debate on realism in the 1980s opened up avenues for literary experiments to address issues of representation and authorship in ethnographic texts (Clifford and Marcus 1986), there seems to be a reluctance among ethnographers and ethnographic filmmakers to fully embrace speculative fiction. Ethnographic realism as a literary genre employs rhetorical devices to produce texts that claim transparency of representation and immediacy of experience, aiming for accuracy in depicting real events and presenting things as they ‘truly’ exist (Williams 1976, 259). Experimental approaches to ethnographic film such as Jean Rouch's experiments with "ethnofiction" or Ernesto De Martino’s reenactments, however, not only predate this debate by several decades, its contemporary practitioners also continue to advance their own experiments in audiovisual narrative, including co-authored projects that often intersect with indigenous cinema. These films often prioritize the specific and unique relationship between anthropologists and research participants, engaging in co-creative practices that challenge hierarchical modes of knowledge production.
9While ethnographic film work has largely moved away from the goal of producing representations within the framework of "ethnographic realism" (Clifford 1983; Webster 1986), film and video as media still seem to evoke in public discourse a strong desire for perceptual accuracy associated with the concept of mechanical objectivity (Daston and Galison 1992, 2007). Films, much like photographs, are commonly considered reliable, perceptually realistic forms that represent reality (Cohen and Meskin 2004). As a result, spectators are inclined to take films and photographs at face value, viewing them as an indexical rendering of reality "out there," which blurs the distinction between the document and the documentary film (Plantinga 2008).
10As a response, experimental audiovisual ethnographies are often concerned with the process of filmmaking itself. Scholars in visual anthropology have extensively discussed how the camera influences the relationships between the filmmaker and the participants (Henley 2004, Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009, Carta 2015, Postma 2021). These reflections reveal the transformative power of audiovisual production, demonstrating that filmmaking is not solely representational but can be an open performative experiment.
11While reflecting on the relationship between the filmic apparatus, filmmaker, and participants remains an important aspect in the creation of any ethnographic film, we want to explore the speculative potentials of this configuration. The audiovisual projects discussed in this collection utilize the camera as a tool for participants to dramatically experience alternative ways of living through embodied performances inherently oriented towards the future. In doing so, the focus is shifted away from the spectator and the associated goal of providing an authentic or representative account of the researched lifeworlds. Instead, the camera's purpose is to engage in a collaborative, prospective transformation of these worlds.
12The presence of cameras in today's society, driven by social media and the proliferation of images, has amplified the awareness of being constantly observed and the desire to control one's image. This phenomenon, known as auto-mise-en-scène (Comolli 2008) or "the camera effect," (Xavier 2014, 2013) holds theatrical power and extends beyond ethnographic filmmaking. However, only a few anthropologists have consciously harnessed this performative aspect as a methodological tool or a means of social justice activism alongside research participants. The approach is mostly found in experiments with ethno-fiction, for example by Jean Rouch who employed a technique later coined as "projective improvisation" (Loizos 1993). This approach involved the simultaneous enactment of the protagonists' own lives and their performance as fictional characters. Building upon Rouch's experiments, Johannes Sjöberg integrated drama and fiction into his ethnographic fieldwork to study the experiences of transgender individuals in São Paulo. Through a combination of improvisation, fictional narratives, and reflexivity, Sjöberg aims to surpass clichés and create films that resonate with audiences while capturing relevant experiences (Sjöberg 2017).
13The camera effect has the ability to stimulate a dramatic performance that serves as an experimental process of concrete utopia (Bloch 1986). Within a world characterized by constant transformation, the protagonists engage with the latent possibilities of life, simultaneously envisioning and shaping the future. But the contributions in this volume also go beyond this improvised, self-referring approach and dig into possibilities of scripted and directed, even fantasized and dramatized future scenarios, including a range of techniques that transcend the boundary between documentary and fiction.
14The concept of the future is inherently elusive and difficult to define, encompassing a range of interpretations. This issue brings together various perspectives on the future:
15Martin Gruber employs "ethnofictional" filmmaking as a means to complement traditional ethnographic methods and delve into speculatively thinking about the future that is present in the fictional narratives constructed by his research participants. Through his films shot in Namibia, South Africa, and Angola, the protagonists and workshop participants navigate the space between fiction and realist documentary storytelling to negotiate their relationship with the ethnographer and envision better futures.
16Martha-Cecilia Dietrich examines the use of fiction filmmaking as a form of political expression to convey truths about the past and strive for justice and reconciliation in the future. Her analysis centers around a group of Andean filmmakers who create films about the armed conflict in Peru (1980-2000). These self-taught filmmakers employ fictional narratives to challenge dominant memory regimes and create a space for envisioning alternative futures.
17Rosella Schillaci's project revolves around sentenced mothers who raise their children in prison. The immersive 360° VR film Affiorare (Emergence), co-produced with these mothers and their children, invites viewers into a surreal fairy tale narrative that reflects their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. The project intertwines memories and imaginings of their future "home" in a surreal manner. Here, the future transcends its temporal dimension and transforms into a place—an "elsewhere" composed of elements of memory and projections of the unknown.
18Pedro Neto's piece focuses on the subject of displacement as a present future, which he explores in his film essay, Withering Refuge (2020). He delves into the juxtaposition of uncertainty, often associated with instability, and the temporal, spatial, and social stillness experienced in a refugee camp in Zambia. Neto employs the audiovisual trope of the still life to explore ways of addressing a future that appears frozen in time, with intermittent "peaks of the present" in a world of constant change.
19Aladin Borioli's article looks into the digitized and machine-dependent future of agriculture, specifically focusing on smart hives as the latest development in the relationship between humans and bees, which has always relied on technology. Borioli and his collaborators have created a digital archive aimed at fostering more egalitarian encounters between humans and bees, countering the potential pitfalls of capitalist data extractivism associated with globally networked hives.
20Blake Kendall's activist research project tackles the deforestation of lowland rainforests in Sarawak, Malaysia. Kendall discusses the production of a collaborative climate fiction film as a discursive intervention that proposes new images, new understandings of temporality, and, most importantly, new alliances to address the urgent planetary emergency caused by environmental degradation.
21Stuart Mclean's contribution takes the form of a "speculative memoir" recounting his experience as a performer in the Papay Gyro Nights Art Festival on the island of Papa Westray in the Orkneys. The festival revives the island's seasonal masquerade traditions associated with the end of winter, which are shared across the North Atlantic region. Drawing from Tylor's concept of Survivals (Tylor 1958), Mclean argues that the festival is not merely a remembrance of an old Nordic festival but a space where multiple temporalities and worlds can converge, offering opportunities for transformation and displacement that project the past into the future.
22Hugo Montero's contribution examines the concept of "distance" and explores multiple temporalities through a video installation experiment using virtual reality (VR). Participants engage with a disruption in the "Umwelt" and revisit memories that are inexorably reshaped by the present moment. Montero's approach intertwines time and space, creating an experiential journey that defies linear perspectives.
23The use of speculative fiction in anthropology serves two main purposes. First, it shifts the focus from the end result of the research to the production process. This approach is less about providing a reflexive account of the research outcome and more about getting closer to the experiences of the participants.
24The use of speculative fiction in anthropology not only encourages collaboration, but also provides an opportunity to incorporate different perspectives into the practical aspects of filmmaking. By engaging with concrete utopias and collaborative processes, participants can design and create alternative ways of living that offer hope and opportunities for activism and healing.
25Second, speculative fiction offers a ‘contralinear’ approach that challenges a strictly chronological understanding of the future. Rather than viewing the future as a linear progression, it places visions and experiments of the future in the context of our present and past. In this way, it encourages a more nuanced exploration of possible futures.
26The contributions in this issue offer numerous approaches to engaging with the future through audiovisual means. Each of these methods in its own way represents an active, interventionist, and inventive gesture. They provide a space for interpretation, speculation, and interaction for research partners and beyond. The camera as a world-building instrument actively brings together different temporalities and weaves a complex tapestry of possibilities.
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