Polytopographier les temporalités, ethnographier les avenirs

Abstract

In a global world marked by high-speed and violence, the futures are an object for social anthropologists of the contemporary: to try see this world with more intelligibility. For the futures are socially situated, plural, conflictive – and are fully a part of what composes this world as well as being the stuff of which we craft it. The frame here is a pragmatic political anthropology of spaces: it looks at how people make or contest spaces – to do things together or make war. But in order to craft spaces, people mobilize temporalities, which happen to be also spatially anchored. To make an urban district, a country, to annex a region, people mobilize pasts, not past, which are fully available in the present and/or which mobilize spatialized futures – all frequently echoing one another. The ways we anchor temporalities in spaces are enclosed in power relationships, and are ways of taking political positions.Thus this article aims to propose ways of describing the politics of spatializing temporalities with which people make or contest spaces in the Russian context: how can one draw the plural and conflicting topography of the temporalities mobilized in the making of spaces? Its politics is to not draw analytical or conceptual frontiers, and to not remain content with the-always-probable-worst – but to give all their place to descriptions intentionally left open, as well as to counter-hegemonic practices of spatializations of the future: to other possibles.

Keywords

• future
• subjectivation
• Moscow
• contemporary
• political anthropology
• post-soviet