English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

In this chapter, we take up Arjun Appadurai’s (2013) call for a better anthropological understanding of the construction of the future as a ‘cultural fact’ and the implications of this for what he calls people’s ‘capacity to aspire’ (ibid.: 290) – their ability to mobilise resources in order to make strategic decisions about their future. Appadurai argues that debate and discussion around ‘futures’ is often dominated by ‘plans, goals and targets’ – language that is associated with development. Culture, on the other hand, is too readily associated with ‘habit, custom, heritage and tradition’, and therefore dismissed as grounded in the past. Yet the future cannot be other than ‘cultural’ because it is ‘in culture that ideas of the future, as much as the past, are embedded and nurtured’ (ibid.: 179–180). It is within ‘culture’, understood broadly as local systems of value, meaning and communication, that people are enabled or constrained in their ‘capacity to aspire’.

Expressions of the ‘good life’ and visions of the future: Reflections from Dili and Uatolari