all kinds of temporal politics (for example, Antze and Lambek 1996; Kaneff 2003).
For their analysis, this book follows Jane Guyer’s aim ‘to develop an ethnography of the near future of the 21st century’ (Guyer 2007: 410) and thus empirically explores the (epistemic) repercussions of a much broader collapse of formerly powerful modern and postmodern narratives of the future. Therefore, it is not about memory, nostalgia or other representations of the past (see Gilbert 2006); rather, it approaches change through the perspective of alterations in temporal knowledge in relations to the future. Following its presentist inclinations, it proposes that these temporal relations are primarily of an epistemic kind, which in turn entails our own practices of knowledge production (compare Fabian 1983; Wolf 1982).
This analytical decision has major repercussions for the study of change and transformation. Primarily, I have to reconsider the role of knowledge in times of change, exploring its adaptability and flexibility, without repeating the anthropology of postsocialism’s initial tendency of depicting the former socialist ‘other’ (in Fabian’s terms) as surprisingly adaptable to new socioeconomic environments (see Buyandelgeriyn 2008). By that I distance myself from the implicit idea of a postsocialist ontology, fully predetermined by – and mostly directed to – the past, which took hold in many academic and nonacademic circles, particularly in the field of transitology. As other accounts from the vast and diverse body of literature in the field of postsocialist anthropology (for example, Pelkmans 2003; Boyer 2006; Gilbert 2006; Pedersen 2012; Jansen 2014; Knudsen and Frederikson 2015), my case study depicts one example in which this paradigm ultimately fails. Instead of memories of – and concerns with – the past, I encountered an abundant variety of local knowledges, imaginaries and affects pertaining to the future, which, for a presentist, remain not (fully) predetermined by the past.4
Under the heading of postindustrial shrinkage, I foreground the future in all its openness, indeterminacy and malleability, rather than depict the past as powerfully predetermining the present and the future. This is particularly important because, as Nancy Munn observed, in the discipline of anthropology, ‘futurity is poorly tended as a temporal problem … in contrast to the close attention given to “the past in the present”’ (Munn 1992: 116). It also challenges academic hopes that postsocialist persons because of their socialist past can articulate a fundamental critique of Western capitalism and actively partake in some form of ‘co-determination’ (Dunn 2004). Such new solutions, ideas, concepts and practices were also locally awaited, but never really occurred; rather, a new present demanded altogether new solutions for novel, problematic futures. By inspecting the diverse modes of temporal agency of Hoyerswerda’s inhabitants in relation to the future, my ethnographic material contributes to the overall discipline what the subdiscipline of postsocialist anthropology has always been concerned with: the issue of time.
Gilbert et al. (2008: 11) already put it rather felicitously regarding the potential theoretical contributions of postsocialism: ‘If anthropology is the social science of the present, it ought to offer insight into the future in the present.’ They aspire to assemble a ‘social historiography of the future – a futuricity to complement historicity’ (ibid.). However, my approach also substantially differs from such culturally exclusive prescriptions. For instance, in contrast to Hirsch and Stewart’s 2005 take on historicity, I doubt that we can convincingly account for the historical predetermination of relations to the past (and by extension to the future), that is, what Hirsch and Stewart refer to as the historically specific and thereby determined ‘relevant ways in which (social) pasts and futures are implicated in current circumstances’ (see Ringel 2016b). Futuricity, as a coherent, homogeneous and collectively shared way of relating to the future, does not account for how my informants relate to the future (see again Ringel 2016b). Instead, as the overall postsocialist experience (Yurchak 2006) captures: things seem rather less determined and homogenous; they might radically change from one day to the other, and we should not be surprised by how (comparatively) easily humans adapt to this. As I claim throughout this book, for a presentist, both change and continuity are in some way subject to people’s temporal agency: in each present, different relations to different pasts and futures are possible.
Faced with the contemporary epistemic changes, the inhabitants of Hoyerswerda deploy their knowledge and experience to problems that are ‘conceptual’ and ‘new’. They refer to them as problems of ‘shrinkage’ (Schrumpfung), thus establishing a postpostsocialist epistemic arena. Superficially, the term ‘shrinkage’ might be understood to describe the merging of three different processes of transformation: postsocialist transition, (neoliberally orchestrated) globalization and (post-Fordist) deindustrialization. I propose to study the concurrence of these processes not through a political economy perspective, but by regarding their epistemic impact on the life of the inhabitants of this shrinking city. My ethnographic material maps the final establishment and acceptance of the trope of shrinkage, and then tracks how this temporal regime too has been challenged. The emergence of the possibility of asking a new, rather simple question regarding the future depicts this challenge. ‘What happens after shrinkage?’, however, incorporates a local revolution in epistemic terms; it gives Hoyerswerda a new future by epistemically reclaiming it. The fact that futures can be lost and exchanged for other futures is an essential part of Hoyerswerda’s story, and I show how its citizens overcame their particular forms of enforced presentism and dystopian fantasy futurism, and established a new present from which to relate to yet other futures.
As Dominic Boyer (2006, 2010) suggested, this strategy has further political implications: such local concerns about the future might provide a position that finally allows East Germans – or anybody else, for that matter – to take their future in their own hands. Since the postindustrial decline hit East Germany faster and harder than their West German countrymen, the latter are less interested in what is officially seen as a specifically East German problem. In turn, knowledge in and about this shrinking city is locally specific, practical, malleable and adaptable – not just postsocialist or East German in kind. This reconsideration of presumably postsocialist knowledge practices entails the reconceptualization of the notion of ‘East Germanness’. Accordingly, this ethnography is not a study of East German culture. Beyond the construction of alterity between East and West Germany, which was the core object of study in the anthropology of East Germany (compare Borneman 1992; Glaeser 2000, 2001; Boyer 2001a), I leave the comparative reference to ‘the West’ out of my analysis. Hoyerswerdians, like many other East Germans, face problems of their own, and it is their responses to these concrete epistemic problems that I analyse here.
Still, I also refrain from celebrating the many attempts of Hoyerswerda’s inhabitants involved in the endless endeavour to regain or uphold a sense of a personal and the city’s future. By that, I do not follow the future solely via uncovering the epistemic logic of the ‘method of hope’, as Hirokazu Miyazaki (2004) so admirably did for his Fijian fieldsite. Rather, I attempt to approach the future as an ethnographic object that is – in many different ways – not only an epistemic problem for my informants in their presents, whose solution needs the constant ‘redirection of knowledge’, but is also a social, ethical and political concern. Importantly, the local production of knowledge is linked to the future not by myself as the analyst, but explicitly by my friends and informants in the field. My informants establish these links foremost because they face a situation in which their hometown’s future is rendered fundamentally problematic. The next section answers Jane Guyer’s question, which follows from this observation: ‘What kind of “stories” does imagination create when the reference points lie in the future?’ (Guyer 2007: 417).
The Future in the Present
In Hoyerswerda, the overwhelming omnipresence of the future in daily life entails mundane long-term and short-term decisions; official planning practices; business development plans; strategy papers of local social clubs, organizations and associations; private and public investment plans; and the conceptualization and organization of potential future projects. It also comprises more intimate aspects: personal future prospects; expectations
