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This volume is an experiment: an enquiry into the possibilities and potentialities of a prospective anthropology of utopia. With different ethnographic contributions studying «empirical utopias» across the world (from ecotopias to religious havens, transnational policies, retirement homes and community agriculture), it looks beyond the commonsense understanding of utopia as a desire, an expectation, a form of imagination stemming from Western political thought. In the process, the volume explores the dynamic dialectic between human imagination and concrete action.
List of contents
CONTENTS: Maïté Maskens/Ruy Llera Blanes: Introduction: Utopian Encounters: Anthropologies of Empirical Utopias - Alicia Sliwinski: Valuing an Old-Age Trope for an Old-Age Home: Ethnographic Encounters with Utopian Configurations -Ruy Llera Blanes: Past Utopias: Religious and Political Temporalities in Contemporary Angola - Andrew Russell: «Imagine a World Without Tobacco»: Utopian Visions and Collaborative Research in Public Health - Madeleine Sallustio: Neo-Rural Communities as Heterotopias - Olga Orlic: «Could This Be the End of the World as We Know It?» Community-Supported Agriculture in Croatia and the Building of Ecotopia - Christoph Brumann: The Dominance of One and Its Perils: Charismatic Leadership and Branch Structures in Utopian Communes.
About the author
Maïté Maskens is a lecturer in anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, affects, bureaucracy and mobility. She is currently working on love and its boundaries, focusing on the treatment of binational marriages by public authorities in Brussels.
Ruy Blanes is a Ramon y Cajal fellow at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and as of 2018 Senior Lecturer at the School of Global Studies of the University of Gothenburg. His research interests include the anthropology of religion, identity, politics, mobility and temporality. His current research site is Angola, where he explores ongoing activisms and revolutionary processes. He is the author of A Prophetic Trajectory (2014). He is also co-editor of the journal Advances in Research: Religion and Society.
Report
«Where is the utopos? Imagining potentially new worlds has been part and parcel of what being human is about along history and across cultures. With a fresh and robust theoretical framework based on ethnography, encounters and configurations, laid out in its introduction, the ethnographic cases discussed in this book manage to root utopia in anthropological theory and to propose original ways for social scientists to consider utopia, paradoxical as this may sound, as a very concrete place from where to think about agency, morality, politics, religion and expectations. The combination of new theoretical propositions and rich ethnographic analysis will make this book a must read in the scholarship of utopia and imagination» (Ramon Sarró Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford)
«This is a fascinating collection of essays. It not only shows why anthropologists should care about utopias - in all their forms - but also ably demonstrates the great contribution that anthropologists can make to the broader field of utopian studies. The collection is imaginative, thought provoking and provocative, bringing together case studies and analysis from around the world in order to offer new insights into just why the utopian impulse is so important and significant.» (Professor Tobias Kelly, Professor of Political and Legal Anthropology, School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh)
