new crises have, indeed, forced many people to face a reality in which the (better) future seems to be lost to the realm of fantasy (Guyer refers to this as fantasy futurism). However, the idea of the modernist future, of ongoing economic growth as well as urban and other development has been overthrown in Hoyerswerda and in many other parts of the former socialist bloc much more suddenly than elsewhere in the postindustrial world. In less than a decade, the city had changed from a booming and lively mining settlement to a drastically shrinking city without a future. In 2008, this loss of the future constituted the city’s most important problem.
In what follows, I ethnographically explore Hoyerswerda’s future. My central thesis is that the future as an ethnographic object should be an integral part of anthropological analysis – regardless of whether it seems lost or not in a specific fieldsite. Anthropologists as much as other social scientists tend to think that our present lives are the results of complex historical processes of causation. Accordingly, when analysing peoples’ presents, their pasts are frequently discussed to the exclusion of their futures (see Persoon and van Est 2000). Against this, I argue that the different ways in which people relate to the future is as, if not more, crucial for understanding their presents. This book explores the postindustrial condition and its social, cultural and epistemic repercussions in one social setting by mapping the loss, and reappropriation, of the future by a particular urban community. Hoyerswerda is an ideal place to study this. No longer a vanguard socialist industrial city, it can be understood as a vanguard city of a different kind: a herald of the postindustrial future in Europe and beyond, to which, as I claim in the book’s title, we should return more consciously. Although it is a most drastic example, Hoyerswerda is only one of the many shrinking cities produced in the postindustrial era of finance capitalism. Outside of the former Eastern Bloc, particularly cities in the United States (for Chicago, see Walley 2013; for Flint, Michigan, see Young 2013) and broader cultural changes in countries such as Japan (for example, Allison 2013) caught scientific attention. However, it is no coincidence that the comparative literature on shrinking cities first emerged in East Germany (Hannemann 2003; Oswalt 2005, 2006; Oswalt and Rieniets 2006, see also Bude et al. 2011; Willisch 2012; Cliver and Smith-Prei 2014), and cities such as Hoyerswerda might as well provide a unique perspective on the postindustrial future.
To explore how Hoyerswerda’s inhabitants have overcome their postindustrial representational paralysis with regard to the future and how social scientists can follow suit analytically, I argue for a particular way of studying the future. I claim that anthropology, with its inherently presentist methodology of ethnographic fieldwork, allows us to come to a better understanding of the role the future plays in human life than other social science disciplines. Once this new conceptualization of the future is established, it will also change our understanding of the past. To assist in the elucidation of these two related arguments, I will briefly discuss the philosophical theory of presentism. Like Alfred Gell (1992), I take inspiration from the metaphysics of time in order to draw from this renewed transdisciplinary conversation a link to our own concerns (compare Bear 2014; Hodges 2008).
Anthropology and Presentism: Past, Present and Future Reconsidered
In the metaphysics of time, presentism is the account of time that holds that only the present exists, while the past and future are in some way unreal; it is contrasted with eternalism, which holds that the past, present and future are equally real. Metaphysical presentism resembles the approach of those anthropologists who hold that both the past and the future do not exist other than in their not necessarily accurate representations in the present (for example, Gell 1992; Munn 1992). Kirsten Hastrup’s 1990 definition of ethnographic presentism argues that in the discipline of anthropology this form of presentism is not just a literary device; it is the essentially presentist methodological approach to ethnographic material, which shapes anthropology’s ‘necessary construction of time’ (Hastrup 1990: 45). Pushed to the extreme, as Alfred Gell so convincingly showed in his discussion of the temporal quality of the Magna Carta, it does not matter from an anthropological point of view whether a document held in a British library or cathedral dates from 1215 or not. What matters is how people attach meaning to it, that is, whatever ‘temporality’ or ‘historicity’ they construct in their respective presents (see Ringel 2016b). To focus on the ethnographic present therefore does not detemporalize anthropological analysis (de Pina-Cabral 2000), but helps us to put invocations of pasts that potentially never were and of futures that potentially never will be on their proper metaphysical footing.
However, historically minded scholars can easily counter the idea of ethnographic presentism. In their view, although any future might be open, the present came to be the way it is through a long and complex process of historical causation. Hence, for them, it would be important to read Hoyerswerda’s postsocialist present through the lens of the socialist or an even earlier past. This seriously downplays the influence the representations of the future might have in and on the present, and it severely restricts human agency or, more specifically, human temporal agency (Ringel 2016a). In their conceptual framework, the present is reduced to a momentary pause in an ever-continuous process of causation. Only the past gains a proper ontological quality. To undermine the view that the present is determined by the past, I turn to a recent discussion of presentism in the metaphysics of time.
In 2006, the philosopher Craig Bourne published a defence of metaphysical presentism – entitled The Future of Presentism – and the work contains a piece of reasoning that is relevant to my concerns. Bourne seeks to identify and invalidate deterministic fallacies, using an argument that I simplify here.
The first premise is that, given a certain degree of contingency and indeterminacy, at any moment in time, we face the probable emergence of a variety of possible futures. In other words, Bourne claims that our future is not predetermined, as at any point in time many possible futures may come to pass. I suspect that most anthropologists would accept this premise (although many philosophers would not). Otherwise, meaningful action is hard to envision: most people at least seem to presume that their decisions have an impact on the future. The second premise is that if our future is not predetermined, then our actual pasts – events, which were once one of these possible futures, but have actually become a present and then a past – were at no point predetermined to become an actual present either. Given both premises, the conclusion follows that neither our future nor our past is or was predetermined.
Bourne’s understanding of metaphysical presentism does not entail that there is no causal relationship between past and present. Rather, it puts the past and the future on an equal ontological footing: neither past nor future exists in the present, and neither is predetermined. For a presentist, only the present exists. This framework suggests a new way of understanding anthropological presentism, both theoretically and methodologically: we should treat the past and future symmetrically in anthropological analysis, paying in-depth attention to all the temporal relations and experiences – pertaining to the past, present and future – found in our fieldsites’ many successive presents. Building on this, I attempt to reconceptualize the anthropology of time with an increased and explicit attention to the future.
This approach helps me to avoid two traps: first, explaining postsocialist change solely through the perspective of the socialist past (Ringel 2013a); and second, projecting my own hopes and wishes for a better future, as much as my fears and worries, onto my informants’ lives and struggles (Ringel 2012). As the experiences of my informants prove, any future might hold various surprises, as past futures have already done. For instance, had my informants been told twenty years ago that their city’s population would decrease by half in 2008, the dystopian imaginaries to capture such an allegation would have had their own self-fulfilling prophetic effects. However, now that people live in the deindustrialized future, the new present suddenly allows otherwise unforeseen spaces for hope and different, if still tentative, ideas of other futures. What counts for the future also has to count for the past: from a presentist point of view, neither of these temporal dimensions exists ontologically outside the present, in which they are presented and negotiated (see Adam 1990: 38). These temporal representations
