The article originates in a response to discuss ‘How Is Anthropology Going?’. Perceiving a new pattern in the almost 90 years looking backward and forward from my own undergraduate training, I concentrate on the recurrent concept of human ‘possibility’. Its changing referents are traced over four 20-year cycles, starting with Malinowski and Benedict (1920s and 1930s), moving to Gellner’s Thought and Change (1965), Marcus and Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986), Graeber’s Possibilities (2008) and Rabinow’s Marking Time (2008). Particular attention is paid to the temporal horizons implied in the term and the forms of ethical, political and aesthetic agency one can infer from the orientations, tensions and attractions that horizons of possibility have inspired.
Ascher, Marcia ( 1991) Ethnomathematics: A Multicultural View of Mathematical Ideas. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole .
2.
Benedict, Ruth ( 1934) Patterns of Culture. Boston : Houghton Mifflin.
3.
Boellstorff, Tom ( 2008) Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
4.
Carrier, James G. and Daniel Miller ( 1998) Virtualism: A New Political Economy. Oxford: Berg.
5.
Carrithers, Michael ( 2005) ‘Anthropology as a Moral Science of Possibilities’ , Current Anthropology46(3): 433-46.
6.
Firth, Raymond ( 1967) The Work of the Gods in Tikopia. London : Athlone Press.
7.
Gellner, Ernest ( 1965) Thought and Change. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
8.
Gladwin, Thomas ( 1970) East is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
9.
Graeber, David ( 2008) Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire . Oakland, CA: AK Press .
10.
Guyer, Jane I. ( 2007) ‘Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomic, Evangelical and Punctuated Time’, American Ethnologist34(3): 409-21.
11.
Heidegren, Carl-Göran ( 2005) ‘Comment [on Carrithers]’, Current Anthropology46(3): 449-50.
12.
Ho, Karen ( 2008) Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
13.
Jackson, Michael ( 1996) ‘Introduction: Phenomenology, Radical Empiricism, and Anthropology as Critique’, pp. 1-50 in Michael Jackson (ed.) Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
14.
Kopytoff, Igor ( 1971) ‘Elders as Ancestors in Africa’, Africa41(2): 129-42.
15.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude ( 1981 [1971]) The Naked Man. Mythologiques, Volume 4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
16.
Malinowski, Bronislaw ( 1984[1922]) Argonauts of the Western Pacific . Prospects Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
17.
Marcus, Geroge E. and Michael M.J. Fischer ( 1999[1986]) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
18.
Maurer, Bill ( 2009) ‘Moral Economies, Economic Moralities: Consider the Possibilities!’, pp. 257-69 in Katherine E. Brown and B. Lynne Milgram (eds) Economics and Morality: Anthropological Approaches. New York: Alta Mira Press.
19.
Maurer, Bill and Gabriele Schwab ( 2005) ‘Introduction: The Political and Psychic Economies of Accelerating Possession’, pp. 1-17 in Global Futures of Property and Personhood. New York: Columbia University Press.
20.
Murray, Colin ( 1979) ‘The Work of Men, Women and the Ancestors in South Africa’, in Sandra Wallman (ed.) The Social Anthropology of Work. New York: Academic Press.
21.
Rabinow, Paul ( 2008) Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
22.
Rich, Adrienne ( 2000) Arts of the Possible. New York : W.W. Norton.
23.
Rothstein, Edward ( 2009) ‘Claude Lévi-Strauss, 100, Dies; Altered Western Views of the "Primitive"’, The New York Times , 4 November.
24.
Strathern, Marilyn ( 2005) ‘Comment [on Carrithers]’, Current Anthropology46(3): 452-3.
25.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt ( 2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
26.
Zaloom, Caitlin ( 2006) Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
