It is a week before the second spate of massive rains will flood Chennai city, causing the worst flooding the city has seen in 100 years. We are at Home Center on TTK Road in Alwarpet, one of the new home and lifestyle chains which feel much like a localized version of Bed, Bath, and Beyond—down to lighting and layout. We are with my parents and elderly uncle, who is fond of remarking on each instance he finds of facilities and services being “just like in a foreign country.” These days, there appear to be many such.

Back home in Pondicherry, a tiny little “modular kitchen” furnishing, appliance, and homeware showroom has recently opened up, directly across from a housing block, built thanks to the Integrated Housing and Slum Development project sanctioned under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JnNURM) scheme. Neighborhoods like this one, off-center from the old heritage “white town,” are very mixed, with more expensive apartments and private homes tucked into unlikely nooks, adjoining slums, ‘low income’ government-built tenements, cow sheds, dhobi ghats (washing areas for laundry), and un-walled private plots by default used as open dumps. I’m walking past with a woman, Selvi, who works as a maid in a house nearby, and lives in the government quarters, as they’re known. We remark on the presence of the new kitchen store. “Do you think of going there to buy things?” I ask, somewhat disingenuously. She laughs. “Us? It’s only people like you who can go into shops like that.” I don’t bother to clarify that it’s not the kind of shop I would really think of visiting.

It’s an insignificant little exchange which pinpoints something more than just class difference, something the marketers have always known: differentiated levels of access to consumer goods also create scales of aspiration and desire. Even the poor are rhetorically always future consumers. The little kitchenware shop situated across from a low income housing block is in its way a “narrative machine” (I borrow the term from Charles Piot); whether the fantastic possibilities it holds out are ever realizable or not, they are there, they frame us both, and we both know it. I can no more tell Selvi where to shop or what to buy than the developed world can insist that countries like India should control greenhouse gas emissions. In the overarching narratives of our combined futures, whether we are hypersubjects or hyposubjects or unwittingly stranded in between is entirely unclear.

In Selvi’s own home is a modest-sized recently purchased flatscreen TV and a brand new top-loading washing machine, which she needs my help to understand how to use. We meet here as equals: host, guest, and fellow washing machine users. The salesman has told her the machine dries clothes out. I need to clarify that they always mean “90% drying,” so clothes come out wrung but not dry. Her friend Sudha lives next door, in a single room apartment that was once part of an old government office block. So long had it been unused and locked up, local residents stormed and claimed it for their own, even though they now communally must share common toilets—it was their only means to secure housing. Sudha tells me of wanting to live someday in a big house with a room for each family member, and cutlery “of the sort that only foreigners have.”

For these women, the future is in some sense all around, in its uneven distribution, in the lives other people are already leading, in the shops that are already there selling sheet sets and drawer-organizers, in the promises of a not-quite-accessible lifestyle based in consumption. Their husbands are carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians, masons; they are by no means the “destitute” of the National Council of Applied Economic Research’s profiling of consumer households, nor certainly the “very rich,” but the actual builders of the new economy, poised somewhere in between just-sufficient and not-quite-enough. In this world, political arrangements—of the sort one makes when the Congress election worker comes with a new pressure cooker two months before impending elections—are vital, for these carry other promises, moral obligations, and the possibilities of leveraging forms of agency, identity, and difference that are typical of patron-client relationships in ultimately securing rights. If the capacity to aspire defined as the capacity to consume cancels out social differences—it is “impossible to tell a person’s caste from a person’s brand buying behaviour or his or her home,” as market research consultant Rama Bijapurkar asserts—the pragmatic political arrangements of daily life and work strongly re-assert social differences. Like it or no, the two democratic registers co-exist.

So it is that the future can only be a near-term prospect. Everything else is an abstraction in the same way that navigating roads by names was an abstraction that Google maps India had to rectify via the use of landmarks: concrete, identifiable, recognizable, and above all stable positions. I want to talk about toxicity and post-carbon futures. The women I meet tell me instead about the efficiency of garbage workers, and how all anyone needs to do is petition the municipal office (“you know the one office that at the next cross-roads?”) to have them come clear the piles of plastic accumulated in a nearby plot, torn to shreds by roaming livestock. I want to talk about risk and speculation. The woman who runs a chit-fund scheme assures me there is none, because she deals only with people she knows—and asks me then to play broker at the local NGO at which I have a role: she needs help with her son’s higher education. I want to talk about preparedness for impending instabilities, about the Chennai floods and the cyclone that devastated Pondicherry in late 2011. Sudha is unmoved. “Our parents faced much more of all that. Our lives are better now. Our children’s lives will get better still. Floods and cyclones like that are rare—what did they say? Once in a hundred years, once in 30.” I don’t dare ask about the futures cancelled by rapidly wasting planetary support for all our many commodity forms. I listen quietly instead to affirmations of faith in conventional narratives about education and its promise of finding work. Or about how people watch the price of gold, not because they are speculators but because they are buying some certainties for their daughters’ futures.

But I’m also struck by the denial of the gamble—not because my horizons are set farther on, but because for every story that tells of kinship and marriage as economic futures, of how a mother’s brother should present his niece with gold at certain key moments in a girl’s life, there are ten which recount how the uncle is a drunk, and has no means. There is an undeniable fragility to all these narratives of the future, best not acknowledged.

I started out wondering both what to do with future scenarios that seemed so alien in this part of the world, and what the future might look like, imagined from here. As if in answer to both questions, a Republic Day float appears on the beachfront promenade, announcing the SMART city designation conferred on Oulgaret Municipality (Oulgaret adjoins Pondicherry, and just happens to be the present Chief Minister’s constituency). The “Smart city concept,” it announces, converting the SMART acronym into a word, is “To develop the entire urban eco-system and to fulfil the aspirations and needs of the citizens with smartness…” The float offers a concretization of this idea, complete with recognizable and stable landmarks: wide roads, green spaces, and tall glass buildings with helipads atop, some apparent solar powering. These are clichés to me, perhaps, and the promise of smartness uselessly indefinite, but they confer the same pride of ownership and prestige that the chit fund lady finds in her new Panasonic smartphone: “That, I had to have,” she says, clutching the device to her chest and tucking it safely into a purse though she claims she barely knows to use it, “I just had to have it.”

When we conducted “playshops” with children from local schools a few years ago in a project that wanted to capture how school-going kids visualized the future, it was striking how the daughters and sons of masons and carpenters found it hard to think beyond homes made of concrete and wood, no matter the fantastic prompts given to them. We think with what we have, and with the futures already there. And what we have is the hope of consumption, SMART tech being only the latest manifestation of material progress and empowerment so-defined—powerful, driving vectors which cannot be simply dismissed as unsustainable just because our horizons are different or our critiques have gone farther.

As John Rundell puts it, “We all wait for futures—yet not for the same ones, nor in the same way, nor at the same tempo. Modernity, because of its multiple worlds and their temporal horizons, entails that waiting for the future has multiple, clashing and even overlapping effects, affects and modalities…” To some extent, it’s the contrast between the democracy of the queue in the bank or the public hospital waiting room, and waiting in the thick of social relationships and political arrangements that order values and lives in separate queues. Rundell continues: “We can wait anxiously, impatiently, resentfully, with frustration, or perhaps with patience. This indeterminacy, finitude and uneasiness is what both increases and decreases the suffering and torment, the horizons and possibilities of those who wait.”

For a few years now, I’ve been working in the space of future imagining—seeking out trends and rationales by which to extrapolate them or use them as jumping-off points as provocations to business, taking inspiration from start-up tech’s drive to search out uncommon solutions to common problems, setting sights on far-off horizons, and generally learning to ask “what if” and wish “if I could..” with impunity.

At first, I found all this quite strange. Wasn’t it more important to be grounded in the present, and to tease out the histories that had produced our presents—and, at most, could produce our foreseeable futures? This is what I had trained myself to do all these years anyway, and what I seemed still to be training my students to do. Contextualizing, explaining cultural forms or dynamics, tracking the social lives of things—this was work much more rooted in the present, with a strong sense of the past that informed and birthed it, than in any future-oriented approach. Of course, such approaches weren’t by themselves anything new. In some form or other, they have been mainstays of disciplines like economics, finance, design and planning, or the environmental sciences, not to speak of political, literary, and religious imaginings—but, far as I could tell, not anthropology. We might have looked to such imaginings as great research material, but only insofar as it led us right back into the configurations of the present. I thought back to the responses of a good many of my colleagues to the Future Studies program we’d once had at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, the first of its kind at the time: the future isn’t here, so how on earth could you study it? (For that and other reasons, the program folded eventually and moved in a fashion to UH’s main campus under the charge of Peter Bishop. It exists still as a graduate program in “Foresight”).

Past-ness mattered and was core to the sort of analysis we routinely undertook. It was, it still is, as Appadurai has said, in the closing essay to a collection of already-published papers entitled The future as cultural fact, that “[i]n one way or another, anthropology remains preoccupied with the logic of reproduction, the force of custom, the dynamics of memory, the persistence of habitus, the glacial movement of the everyday, and the cunning of tradition in the social life of even the most modern movements and communities, such as those of scientists, refugees, migrants, evangelists, and movie icons” (285).

And yet, here was “the future” all around me, a veritable font of inspiration and a very real cultural horizon: in trend reports, in business forecasts, in strategic planning, in improbable prototypes, in design thinking, in the new-found faith in what Evgeny Morozov has disparagingly called “technological solutionism,” and in the apparently widespread conviction that science fiction will become science fact.

Although I didn’t read Appadurai’s essay until somewhat later, two sets of questions emerged. The first grappled with perplexity: what was I doing, an anthropologist amongst future-seekers? (Not everyone was a trained futurist, but many had some conception of the future on their horizons, and some compulsion to drive towards it). Okay, we could go ahead and treat futurisms as modernist ideologies, yet more objects subject to routine analytical assessments. But that struck me as insufficient–and already done aplenty. What would it do to my own disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological practice, did I even want to work with (toward?) a techno-modern future populated by humanoid bots and pixelated humans? Or did what Jane Guyer dubs “fantasy futurisms” just not matter as much as closer horizons? [Cultural Anthropology‘s recent Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen offers inspiration for addressing such questions—but that’s a story for later.]

The second set of questions were more reflective of conventional anthropological critique, but no less important: whose futures were these? All I had to do was look out of my window or walk down a Pondicherry street—posh apartments lining one side and a market and government tenements lining the other—to wonder what connections the diverse groups with whom I share this little city would have, if any, with conceptions of trans-humanism or hyperloops or blockchains. Autonomous driving cars when we could barely speak of dignity and human autonomy? How did any of that matter to any of us? Or: how are futures that aren’t ours in any near-term or straightforward sense still making us?

I don’t mean to posit Pondicherry as some little backwater town that exists so far behind, on a developmental continuum, cities like Hong Kong or Frankfurt or our old home base, Houston. But, if the future is already here and only unevenly distributed, as William Gibson so famously observed, then here I was in a place and within a disciplinary framework that made its presences just that much harder to discern. I was quite sure that only a small percentage of my fellow Pondicherry residents would ever have been asked where their future horizons lay or of what they were made. [Although a futurism of a very different sort is core to the Auroville project, and has been transformative.] What would it mean to think of them, of us, as future-makers? How far could our gazes travel?

Appadurai provides something of a roadmap: “We need to construct an understanding of the future by examining the interactions between three notable human preoccupations that shape the future as a cultural fact[:] … imagination, anticipation, and aspiration.” (286). His earlier work, Modernity at Large, dealt with imagination as constitutive of modern subjectivity. An earlier chapter argues that one way to converge with the future-oriented logics of development would be to strengthen the “capacity to aspire,” so that the poor could find their own routes to contest and alter the conditions of their own poverty. Risk, speculation, or what he covers with the term “anticipation,” has received much more attention in the literature on neoliberal capital, market processes, and monetary forms. But what we lack still are ways to triangulate the three, particularly amongst populations which “may be said to function in the condition of ‘bare life'” (298). We need to get much more into the rich cultural spaces at the intersection what he calls the ethics of probability (counting, accounting, quantitative, and measured approaches to risk taking and risk management) and the ethics of possibility: “those ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that increase the horizons of hope, that expand the field of the imagination, that produce greater equity in what I have called the capacity to aspire…” (295).

This is a quick and cursory summary, and I cannot claim to take on so large a project as Appadurai formulates in a few short blogging bursts. What I can ask, however, is this: on what pegs might, say, the fishing communities living across from us hang their aspirations or their conceptions of “the good life”? For a culture always so busy differentiating itself from itself, where would I find overlaps and divergences? Perhaps then it would be possible to push through to emergent forms of “indigenous futurism whose temporality lies in the (non)endurant hereish.”  I’m looking for nothing more or less than pinhole vistas—be these bits and pieces of technology or the idea of “SMARTness” or the organization of work itself—everyday practices that open out to future-scapes, however unexpected or mundane. Part of the argument I wish to feel my way through is obliquely a response to Jane Guyer’s argument on macroeconomic and religious discourses having “evacuated” the near future and replaced it with far more ultimate imaginaries. I want to say that, at least for the urban poor, the temporal frame of the near future is anything but evacuated—the percolation of economic ideas and the preponderance of religious discourses notwithstanding. Rather, it is often the only future that really exists.

My next posts focus largely on work, which would appear a sure-fire mechanism to think the future among poorer communities. I’ll examine the case of the Nokia phone manufacturing plant based in Sriperumbudur, not far from me though closer to Chennai, a place known alternatingly for its SEZ (Special Economic Zone) and ‘hi-tec’ hub, and for its memorial to former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, assassinated there in 1991. I’ll be using that context to consider how configurations of work via consumption and politics establish parameters for the capacity to aspire.

After that, who can say what the future holds?