In industrial societies imagining the future is a serious business; our assumptions about the future govern the present management of domestic, national and global resources, and are projected, some would say inflicted, on societies whose visions are different. Contemporary Futures focuses not so much on whether the future can be known, but on interpreting the way we and others picture it. The contributors, all social anthropologists, explore the effects that this picture has on the present, on group identity and belief in the self and its survival, on our relationships with other cultures, and on the future itself. They provide a cross-cultural perspective on a range of futures visualised at this time and discusses the implications of

Preface Introduction: Contemporary Futures ( Sandra Wallman) Part One: Perspectives on Industrial Society 1. The Death of the Future David Lowenthal 2. Trapped in the Present: the past, present and future of a group of old people in East London. Guro Huby 3. Posterity and Paradox: some uses of time capsules Brian Durrans 4. On Predicting the Future: parish rituals and patronage in Malta Jeremy Boessevain Part Two: Perspectives on Non-Industrial Society 5. Lines, Cycles, and Transformations: temporal perspectives on Inuit action Jean L. Briggs 6. Going There and Getting There: the future as a legitimating charter for life in the present C. Bawa Yamba 7. Time past, Time Present, Time Future: contrasting temporal values in two southeast Asian societies Signe Howell 8. Saving the Rain Forest? contested futures in conservation Paul Richards Part Three: Perspectives on the Future of Anthropology 9. Sustainable Anthropology: ecology and anthropology in the future Peter Harries-Jones 10. Reproducing Anthropology Marilyn Strathern 11. The Marabar Caves, 1920-2020 Robert Paine 12. A Future for Social Anthropology? Raymond Firth Index Notes on contributors.