Daniel M. Knight - Böcker

Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of 'orientations' as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope, and destiny - which represent different ways in which the future may affect our present. While orientations entail planning towards and imagining the future, they also often involve the collapse or exhaustion of those efforts: moments where hope may turn to apathy, frustrated planning to disillusion, and imagination to fatigue. By examining these orientations at different points, the authors argue for an anthropology that takes fuller account of the teleologies of action.

Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of 'orientations' as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope, and destiny - which represent different ways in which the future may affect our present. While orientations entail planning towards and imagining the future, they also often involve the collapse or exhaustion of those efforts: moments where hope may turn to apathy, frustrated planning to disillusion, and imagination to fatigue. By examining these orientations at different points, the authors argue for an anthropology that takes fuller account of the teleologies of action.

One of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1930–2019) broke free from disciplinary dogmas. His reflections on science, culture, technology, art, and religion have proved foundational to scholars across the humanities. The contributors to Porous Becomings bring the inspirational and enigmatic world of Serres to the attention of anthropology. Through ethnographic encounters as diverse as angels and religious conversion in Ethiopia, the percolation of war in Bosnia, and incarcerated bodies crossing the Atlantic, the contributors showcase how Serres’s interrogation of the fundamentals of human existence opens new pathways for anthropological knowledge. Proposing the notion of "porosity" to characterize permeability across boundaries of time, space, literary genre, and academic discipline, they draw on Serres to map the constellations that connect humans, time, technology, and planet Earth. The volume concludes with a conversation between the editors and Vibrant Matter author Jane Bennett.Contributors. Andreas Bandak, Jane Bennett, Tom Boylston, Steven D. Brown, Matei Candea, Alberto CorsÍn JimÉnez, David Henig, Michael Jackson, Daniel M. Knight, Celia Lowe, Morten Nielsen, Stavroula Pipyrou, Elizabeth Povinelli, Andrew Shryock, Arpad Szakolczai

One of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1930–2019) broke free from disciplinary dogmas. His reflections on science, culture, technology, art, and religion have proved foundational to scholars across the humanities. The contributors to Porous Becomings bring the inspirational and enigmatic world of Serres to the attention of anthropology. Through ethnographic encounters as diverse as angels and religious conversion in Ethiopia, the percolation of war in Bosnia, and incarcerated bodies crossing the Atlantic, the contributors showcase how Serres’s interrogation of the fundamentals of human existence opens new pathways for anthropological knowledge. Proposing the notion of "porosity" to characterize permeability across boundaries of time, space, literary genre, and academic discipline, they draw on Serres to map the constellations that connect humans, time, technology, and planet Earth. The volume concludes with a conversation between the editors and Vibrant Matter author Jane Bennett.Contributors. Andreas Bandak, Jane Bennett, Tom Boylston, Steven D. Brown, Matei Candea, Alberto CorsÍn JimÉnez, David Henig, Michael Jackson, Daniel M. Knight, Celia Lowe, Morten Nielsen, Stavroula Pipyrou, Elizabeth Povinelli, Andrew Shryock, Arpad Szakolczai

Energy Talk disrupts the claims of institutionalized categories such as sustainability, green economy, climate change, and net zero that promote a shared consensus on energy transition. These concepts often conceal the intricate details of how people engage with rapidly shifting sociotechnical environments. On the plains of Thessaly, Greece, interactions with the emerging energy landscape, particularly the expanding photovoltaic (solar) program, lead people to critique long-standing assumptions about nationalism and belonging, their experience of time and modernity, the morality of entrepreneurial opportunism, and historically grounded notions of neo-colonialism and foreign occupation.Daniel M. Knight showcases how obscured 'adelo-knowledge' is exposed during epochs of intense upheaval. Since 2009 Greece has been a hot spot of interrelated crises around which new socio-techno-natural contracts have emerged. Energy is a pivot for comprehending a decade where conventional information has been upended, traditions challenged, and assumptions fractured. Energy Talk offers an ethnographically and theoretically rich rereading of established categories usually associated with the green transition, from their local particularity to the potential implications for planetary relations.

Energy Talk disrupts the claims of institutionalized categories such as sustainability, green economy, climate change, and net zero that promote a shared consensus on energy transition. These concepts often conceal the intricate details of how people engage with rapidly shifting sociotechnical environments. On the plains of Thessaly, Greece, interactions with the emerging energy landscape, particularly the expanding photovoltaic (solar) program, lead people to critique long-standing assumptions about nationalism and belonging, their experience of time and modernity, the morality of entrepreneurial opportunism, and historically grounded notions of neo-colonialism and foreign occupation.Daniel M. Knight showcases how obscured 'adelo-knowledge' is exposed during epochs of intense upheaval. Since 2009 Greece has been a hot spot of interrelated crises around which new socio-techno-natural contracts have emerged. Energy is a pivot for comprehending a decade where conventional information has been upended, traditions challenged, and assumptions fractured. Energy Talk offers an ethnographically and theoretically rich rereading of established categories usually associated with the green transition, from their local particularity to the potential implications for planetary relations.

We seem to be living in an unprecedented polycrisis. Multiple crises – mass forced migration, imminent climate doom, pandemics, and the rise of the far right, to name a few – intersect and amplify each other to a degree never seen before. But the fact that voices from journalists to academics can so easily label this moment unprecedented, argues anthropologist Daniel M. Knight, is a problem. With this book, Knight builds a case against the polycrisis framework as an example of toxic presentism, in which our analytical gaze is blurred by deeply engrained assumptions about historical progression and linear time.Against Polycrisis employs diverse lines of thought from anthropology, history, philosophy, and popular culture to unpack recent fascinations with the unprecedented polycrisis trope. Knight critically examines previous historical eras of overlapping crises – from Greece's recent economic collapse to the 1600s General Crisis to the fall of the Ottoman Empire – in conversation with philosophers, historians, and the next generation of humanistic thinkers, all enriched by reflections on science fiction and popular culture. Knight concludes that the toxic presentism perpetuated in politics, academia, and the media only serves to obscure how the world could be otherwise.

Vertiginous Life provides a theory of the intense temporal disorientation brought about by life in crisis. In the whirlpool of unforeseen social change, people experience confusion as to where and when they belong on timelines of previously unquestioned pasts and futures. Through individual stories from crisis Greece, this book explores the everyday affects of vertigo: nausea, dizziness, breathlessness, the sense of falling, and unknowingness of Self. Being lost in time, caught in the spin-cycle of crisis, people reflect on belonging to modern Europe, neoliberal promises of accumulation, defeated futures, and the existential dilemmas of life held captive in the uncanny elsewhen.