In "Anthropological Futures," Michael M. J. Fischer explores the
uses of anthropology as a mode of philosophical inquiry, an
evolving academic discipline, and a means for explicating the
complex and shifting interweaving of human bonds and social
interactions on a global level. Through linked essays, which are
both speculative and experimental, Fischer seeks to break new
ground for anthropology by illuminating the field's broad
analytical capacity and its attentiveness to emergent cultural
systems.
Fischer is particularly concerned with cultural anthropology's
interactions with science studies, and throughout the book he
investigates how emerging knowledge formations in molecular
biology, environmental studies, computer science, and
bioengineering are transforming some of anthropology's key concepts
including nature, culture, personhood, and the body. In an essay on
culture, he uses the science studies paradigm of "experimental
systems" to consider how the social scientific notion of culture
has evolved as an analytical tool since the nineteenth century.
Charting anthropology's role in understanding and analyzing the
production of knowledge within the sciences since the 1990s, he
highlights anthropology's aptitude for tracing the transnational
collaborations and multisited networks that constitute contemporary
scientific practice. Fischer investigates changing ideas about
cultural inscription on the human body in a world where genetic
engineering, robotics, and cybernetics are constantly redefining
our understanding of biology. In the final essay, Fischer turns to
Kant's philosophical anthropology to reassess the object of study
for contemporary anthropology and to reassert the field's primacy
for answering the largest questions about human beings, societies,
culture, and our interactions with the world around us. In
"Anthropological Futures," Fischer continues to advance what
Clifford Geertz, in reviewing Fischer's earlier book "Emergent
Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice," called "a broad new
agenda for cultural description and political critique."
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