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Introduction: Hope over Time: crisis, immobility and
future-making
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10.1080/02757206.2016.1207636
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Kleist, N., & Jansen, S. (2016). Introduction: Hope over Time: crisis, immobility and future-making. History and
Anthropology, 27(4), 373-392. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2016.1207636
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Kleist N. & Jansen S. 2016 'Introduction. Hope over time: crisis, immobility and future-making'
History and Anthropology 27:4, 373-392.
1
Introduction: Hope over Time: crisis, immobility and future-making
Nauja Kleist and Stef Jansen
Abstract. This introduction discusses the hope boom in anthropological studies, suggesting that it reflects
two converging developments: a sense of increasing unpredictability and crisis, and a sense of lack of
political and ideological direction in this situation. We further identify two overall trends in the
anthropological literature gathered under the rubric of hope: an emphasis on hopefulness against all odds
and one on specific formations of hope and temporal reasoning.
Keywords. Crisis, future, hope, (im)mobility, temporality, uncertainty
Acknowledgements. The articles in this Special Issue were first presented at the international workshop
Precarious Futures? Hoping, moving and waiting in uncertain times, 16–19 September, 2015, Tisvildeleje,
Denmark. The workshop was organized as part of the research programme "New Geographies of Hope and
Despair: The social effects of migration management for West African migrants", coordinated by Nauja
Kleist and supported by a grant from the Danish Council of Independent Research – Humanities. We thank
all participants for their insightful papers, comments and discussions. Likewise we are grateful to David
Hening and two anonymous reviewers for useful and constructive suggestions to the previous versions of
the articles.
Since the turn of the Millennium there has been a veritable explosion of writings on hope in the social
sciences and the humanities. In the process, questions of temporality, anticipation and the place of the
future in the present have occupied a central place. Much work focuses on such questions in
epistemological terms (for example, Appadurai 2013; Browne 2005; Miyazaki 2004, 2006; Thompson
and Žižek 2013) or as windows on epochal shifts and a late capitalist Zeitgeist (for example, Berlant
2011; Guyer 2007; Zournazi 2002). Others provide empirical studies of the production and negotiation
of specific formations of hope and anticipation in particular settings and under specific socio-historical
conditions, with much emphasis on situations of uncertainty. Here we find studies of hope in political
and economic crisis, during or after protracted conflict, in times of rising inequality and stratified
globalization, and so on (for example, Cooper and Pratten 2015a; Hage 2003; Jansen 2013, 2015; Jansen
and Löfving 2009; Johnson-Hanks 2005; Kleist and Thorsen forthcoming; Mar 2005; Narotzky and
Besnier 2014b; Vigh 2009b).
In this Special Issue, we aim to bring these two perspectives together in a critical exploration of
hope as engagement with the future in contexts characterized by crisis, conflict and its effects,
uncertainty and immobility. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine, El
Salvador, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, four articles examine social settings in the wake of catastrophe,
whether of the human-made kind or not, with de facto circumscriptions of physical mobility and severe
limits on how livelihoods can be secured. The authors carefully analyse how different notions and
modes of hope and future-making are produced, negotiated and evolve in such settings. Challenging a
current tendency in anthropology and beyond to speak unquestioningly positively of hope and
indeterminacy as vibrant, if ill-defined, sources of potential for the future, the Special Issue presents
critical analyses of the actual work of hope as it occurs in concrete social settings and (geo)political
moments. In particular, we seek to trace the social life of particular hopes over time. Thus linking
studies of temporality with those of conflict and crisis, the Special Issue aims to contribute to the
burgeoning anthropological literature on hope through a revalorisation of hope as an ethnographic
category in critical analysis rather than a normative banner in manifestos of optimism.
Kleist N. & Jansen S. 2016 'Introduction. Hope over time: crisis, immobility and future-making'
History and Anthropology 27:4, 373-392.
2
In this introduction, we situate the theme of the Special Issue through a discussion of the re-
emerging of interest in hope in this period of time, suggesting that attention to the framing of
(perceived) societal and historical changes is useful in when exploring how very different events and
phenomena are articulated as characterized by growing uncertainty. We then turn to how
anthropologists have addressed hope and uncertainty in this constellation, identifying two overall
trends: one that locates hopefulness against all odds and one that studies specific formations of hope
and temporal reasoning.
Why Hope, Why Now? A sense of crisis and of lack of direction
Hope is not a new topic. In Greek mythology, Pandora, the first human woman created by the gods,
opened a jar of human evils which dispersed all over the world, except for hope which stayed inside the
jar. Hope is central in Christianity, as expressed in Paul's emphasis on faith, hope and love and in
Aquinas' identification of hope as one of the theological virtues (Dalferth and Block 2016). Hope has
been the object of artistic, philosophical and religious explorations and reflections through the
centuries. Thinking about the upsurge of writings on hope today thus calls for attention to why now,
why again. Is the renewed interest in hope a reflection of a world that is more hopeful or more
hopeless than it used to be? While we do not think it is useful or possible to measure if there is more or
less hope or hopelessness today than, say, twenty years ago, we do propose that the proliferation of
writings on hope reflects overall societal changes and, especially, the ways in which these are framed in
the public and political debates. In the following we suggest two overall dimensions of why hope has
recently gained such resonance in academic debates: a widespread sense of crisis and a heightened
sense of lack of political and ideological direction in this situation. These two dimensions do not
constitute unified and unequivocal phenomena but rather interrelated and converging tendencies, as
we elaborate below.
In focusing on a sense of crisis – or, more precisely perhaps, on senses of crises – we wish to
highlight how societal changes are framed in public debate. Frame analysis was originally developed by
Goffman (1974) to refer to the principles of organization which allows us to identify and make sense of
events as specific types of phenomena, for instance a theatre performance or an academic lecture. We
use the term frames here in a broader way to refer to "ideas that fashion a shared understanding […]
by rendering events and conditions meaningful and enable a common framework of interpretation and
representation” (Sökefeld 2006, 269-270). While frames do not determine conditions of appearance or
of understanding, they guide it. In the process, events, phenomena and subjects become recognizable
(or unrecognizable) as something or as a consequence of something – for instance of uncertainty or
unpredictability, rather than of, say, political decisions or modes of production. Frames are thus
productive, shaping interpretations of reality, and they are politically saturated, as noted by Butler in
her work on the frames of war (2009, 1). Like the notion of "epoch", frames help make sense of "fluid
presents and uncertain futures" (Knight and Stewart 2016, 5), channelling the ways in which we come
to understand certain phenomena and events as meaningful.
Employing this perspective, a range of different phenomena and events can be perceived as
producing and being characterized by uncertainty in recent years: The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade
Centre in New York and on the Pentagon, the growth of terrorist movements like Al-Shabaab, Boko
Haram and ISIS, as well as the effects of the war on terrorism: military interventions, widespread
securitization and intensified surveillance. Violent natural disasters like earthquakes hitting El Salvador
in 2001 and Haiti in 2010, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, Hurricane Katrina, and the flooding of New
Orleans in 2005. Possible pandemics like Ebola creating close to global panic. The 2007 US recession
which developed into the 2008-2009 global financial crisis with harsh repercussions for national and
local economies, including economic cut-backs, unemployment and evictions, affecting millions of
people. Most recently, the so-called global refugee crisis where especially (but not only) European
Kleist N. & Jansen S. 2016 'Introduction. Hope over time: crisis, immobility and future-making'
History and Anthropology 27:4, 373-392.
3
politicians have claimed that the arrival of 1.3 million asylum seekers in 2015 is a threat to the future of
the EU, often characterizing the refugee situation as an uncontrollable (national) disaster.
Admittedly, these phenomena are extremely different in scale and nature. In experiential ways,
the degree to which, and the ways in which, they affect different people's lives are divergent and
ultimately incommensurable. What they hold in common is that they have been widely televised,
circulated and debated, and that they may have, among other things, added to a widespread sense of
crisis and unpredictability, to a sense of not knowing where the world is or could be going. Images of
crises and (actual or potential) catastrophes and threats constitute a highly mobile phenomenon
through their circulation in media and social networks and may thus engender anxiety on larger scales.
Since the source of such anxiety is often attributed to "outside" factors, one possible effect is the
creation of transnational communities based on fear (and even hatred) of particular groups – be they
immigrants, Muslims or Westerners. This may again produce and reinforce a sense of uncertainty. The
production of anxiety through circulating images of crisis and uncertainty might thus be a self-fuelling
process.
Much of the rhetoric about the events mentioned above, and about their destabilizing effects,
can be criticized for being grounded in unreflective Western perspectives, ignoring that a sense of
protracted uncertainty and precarious life conditions have long been widespread in big parts of the
world (Johnson-Hanks 2005; Narotzky and Besnier 2014a; Sassen 2014; Vigh 2008). Rather than a sign
of crisis as a "divergence from temporally 'normal life'" (Bryant 2016, 20), a sense of uncertainty may
then be an unexceptional, even common experience in many contexts. Nevertheless terrorism- and
conflict-related events, particularly "9/11", have been identified by homeland security apparatuses as
reflecting a fundamentally changed world, justifying increased security and military expenditure,
intervention and surveillance (Joseph 2013; O'Malley 2010). And even if violence, natural disasters,
pandemics, economic crisis and conflicts are not exactly new phenomena, contemporary globalization
with its (stratified) intensification of the speed, mobility and (potential) connectedness of
communication, finance and people across the globe may add to a sense of uncontrollable dynamics
where distant events have unforeseen local consequences. We can thus detect an increased awareness
of, and sensitivity to living with risks (Adam and Groves 2007; Bauman 1998; Beck 1992). It is for this
reason that we would argue that, rather than truly novel processes, what is at play is a framing of the
present as characterized by intensified uncertainty and unpredictability.
Uncertainty, of course, is not necessarily met with despair. A century and a half ago, Marx and
Engels evoked a strong sense of uncertainty in the Communist Manifesto, famously stating that, with
the development of modern industrial society, "all that is solid melts into air" (quoted in Adam and
Groves 2007, 12). For Marx and Engels this was a reason for hope: they predicted that the rapid change
and extreme uncertainty would eventually drive men (sic) to face the real conditions of their lives "with
sober senses" (ibid.). In contrast, today, instead of such clarity on the direction of political action, the
overall perception of crisis contains a heightened sense of a lack of political-ideological direction. It is
not only that we do not know where we are going and where we could be going, but we are also in the
dark about where we should be going. Here we suggest that shattered hopes of a peaceful post-Cold
War world constitute one of the backdrops of the contemporary sense of crisis. We witness the
emergence of perplexity, of a concern that the currently available political alternatives are inadequate
in the face of the upsurge of "new" types of conflict, violence, domination and inequality. Contrary to
the euphoric expectations of a new era of peace, democracy and prosperity, the end of the Cold War
did not signify "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western
liberal democracy as the final form of human government", as Fukuyama (1989) declared in his famous
essay. Rather one of its effects was the dissolution of the democracy versus totalitarianism distinction
that had stabilized notions of political friends and foes through most of the twentieth century (Mouffe
2005). The upsurge of particularist political movements and the wars in the former Yugoslavia, in
Somalia, in Rwanda, and many other places, often framed largely in ethno-nationalist terms, further
Kleist N. & Jansen S. 2016 'Introduction. Hope over time: crisis, immobility and future-making'
History and Anthropology 27:4, 373-392.
4
blurred notions of states or regimes as clearly identifiable enemies and marked the 1990s as "a decade
of superviolence" (Appadurai 2006, 1). They also exposed the inadequacy of the responses from the so-
called international community to these conflicts, often consisting of ad-hoc or (what were meant to
be) short-term humanitarian interventions. After that, should anybody have held their breath for a
peaceful start of the new Millennium, such hopes were quickly shattered by the attacks on 11
September 2001 and the ensuing war on terrorism. Though (Islamic) terrorists did serve as a new and
(at least partly) unifying enemy, identified primarily by the US government, military interventions
clearly have not eradicated terrorism. Yet securitization, militarization and intensified surveillance still
dominate the political repositories of response to (what are seen as) security crises. The dominance of
these "solutions" has led to scholarly critique of the lack of political alternatives (for example, Butler
2009; Hage 2003; Lorber 2002; Mouffe 2005), sometimes explicitly linked to "a decline in interest in
hope" (Zournazi 2002, 14) or even "the end of hope" (Mouffe in Zournazi 2002, 123-124).
It was striking, therefore, that a sense of hope seemed to return to politics in the later part of
the 2000s and in the beginning of the 2010s, in political slogans and as horizons of political alternatives.
Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and victory explicitly revolved around hope for change, as in the
famous campaign posters, the "Yes, we can" slogan, and not least in the fact that he became the first
black president of the US. The upsurge in protest movements following the financial crisis, such as the
"pots and pans revolution" in Iceland in 2009, the so-called Arab Spring unfolding from the end of
2010
1
, and Occupy Wall Street in 2011, can be seen as another sign that a desire for political change
and a sense of direction re-emerged in some ways. In austerity-crippled Greece, a 2015 campaign with
slogans like "Hope is on its way"
2
and "Hope begins today"
3
brought the radical left-wing Syriza party to
power. To a degree, a certain utopian spirit ran through these different political movements, seeking to
establish "a qualitatively different organization of society and a new way of being" (Webb 2007, 79).
Such promises of rapid and radical change are notoriously disappointable and many of them have been
rather short-lived, giving way to new waves of disillusion. Still, the importance of the trope of hope in
contemporary political movements, including and grassroots initiatives, evinced in the widespread
embrace of the term, can be seen as reflecting a thirst for change as much as projections of a better
future.
Importantly, such surges and wanings of the register of hope should also be cast against the
diminishing resonance of modernist metanarratives of progress that provided models for political
intervention and social change for much of the twentieth century. Many governments expounded
ideologies according to which people were supposed to know where they were going and where they
should be going: the path into the future was set out in fairly regimented ways. During most of the
second half of the twentieth century in particular, different varieties of such modernist metanarratives
across the globe shared a basic state-led developmentalist approach – with different degrees of
capitalism, socialism, nationalism, and other "-isms" thrown into the mix. Likewise, many oppositional
movements coalesced around ideologies that articulated alternatives around the same modernist
motifs. This, of course, is not to say that we can detect some underlying evolutionary logic in social
configurations across the globe, but rather that a developmentalist metanarrative achieved a certain
degree of hegemony in many different places. It set the terms of debate and provided a dominant
framework within which to argue for or against certain political options. At least since the 1970s,
however, the persuasive power of such metanarratives has diminished. Amongst the many reasons for
this we find increased awareness of the catastrophic potentials of political projects legitimised in that
manner and of their cynical deployment as justification for deeply oppressive and exclusive policies.
Moreover, we now have a decades-long tradition of sustained critical engagement with the premises of
developmentalist ideologies of progress from a variety of sometimes opposed angles (ecological,
feminist, postcolonial, neoliberal, Islamist, etc.). For better or for worse, then, modernist
metanarratives cannot be said to sit on the pedestal where they were once enthroned. Yet,
importantly, even alongside an awareness of their dark side, such ideologies have also shaped the