ABSTRACT In these difficult days what use is anthropology? Why bother with it when the world is going up in flames, flooded by rising seas, facing another turn to fascism, and witness to genocides? Faced with these challenges, can anthropology save the world? Probably not, especially by itself. But anthropology’s methods and theoretical approach can be politically potent. Anthropology can make unique contributions to radical political movements that attempt to deal with the ‘dark times’ and generate hopeful imaginings of a more just future. Drawing on interviews with 10 contemporary British anthropologists and a year’s fieldwork in a British anthropology department as a masters student, I extend Bourdieu’s concept of sociology as a martial art to anthropology. Doing so highlights the political dimensions and affordances of anthropologists’ actions and outlines a theory of critical anthropological practice. Three autochthonal parts of the anthropological method enable critical practice. The first is anthropology’s commitment to long-term, place-based, closely embedded, assumption-challenging participant observation. The second is anthropology’s particular approach to critical analysis. The third is how anthropologists move between worlds or, in Bourdieu’s terms, ‘fields’. Together these three stances can guide anthropologists to challenge injustice in an aim to make the world more just.

ABSTRACT It is increasingly supposed that the world is experiencing a polycrisis (where multiple crises converge). As international organisations (e.g. the World Economic Forum, International Science Council and United Nations Environment Programme) and governments increasingly adopt the polycrisis concept, its use makes problems of uncertainty accessible to foresight-informed solutions. Yet foresight toolkits often foreclose the status of futures knowledge delivered, inadequately address the scalar relations of polycrisis, and sustain a futures industry led by business consultants. Conversely anthropological approaches to polycrisis contest its ontology, the problem–solution narrative it facilitates, and the scales at which it operates. Yet traditional anthropology is constrained as an interventional practice. However, in accordance with the call for a post-conventional anthropology that informs this special issue, I argue further steps are required; futures anthropological foresight, delivered through incisive scholarship, ethnographic knowing creative practice and collaboration with non-academic research partners, invokes diverse futures knowledges. In this article, I unpack this context. I urge colleagues to join me in considering the engaged scholarship of futures anthropology – a non-traditional anthropological practice emerging from academia, but applicable outside – as a key participant in shaping decision-making for possible futures.

ABSTRACT On makeshift stages across London, students from a Tamil Saturday school reenact myths and stories from Sri Lanka. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research across the city, I show how these school plays move difficult and painful cultural memories from the edge of visibility into the public realm. Performed at the Museum of London, Trafalgar Square, temples and the Houses of Parliament, they expand where Tamil cultural heritage belongs. The plays reveal how memories suppressed in Sri Lanka find new public articulations in the UK. The article considers the difficulties of sharing memories of violence with children as an aesthetic and pedagogical problem (Daniel 1996, Jeganathan 2020). As expressions of postmemory in migration, school plays offer oblique forms of remembering violent pasts remotely. Through carefully worded scripts devised by their parents, the plays provide a reflective and embodied process by which children become custodians of their cultural heritage, transforming intergenerational memories of collective trauma into meaningful lessons that enable young people to act in this world.

ABSTRACT This article engages recent calls to bring human-centred historical time into conversation with more-than-human ‘natural time’. It relates the Marxist-cum-market-Leninist Lao state’s longstanding pursuit of revolution in agriculture to (memories of) change in rice seed selection and cultivation among ‘indigenous’ Khmu peasants in the country’s north. Drawing on ethnography, ethnographic history and ethnography of history, I document and analyse how the decidedly anthropocentric and acceleration-focused Lao revolutionary project has been shaping – and, I argue, severing – Khmu-rice entanglements. Identifying acceleration at the locus of ambivalent local experiences of be(com)ing ‘modern’, I offer a grounded counterbalance to the comparative neglect of the salience of modernist metanarratives among indigenous peoples. This article also offers new vantage on questions of nostalgia, continuity and rupture in the Lao socialist revolution, as well as on broader debates about how to reconcile developing countries’ right to ‘catch up’ with the equally pressing need for agrobiodiversity conservation and global ecological redress.

ABSTRACT In their efforts to dissuade Africans from engaging fruitfully on matters of design, including design anthropology, colonialists dismissed the indigenes as only capable of designing witchcraft and sorcery for which they were sadly famed in colonial anthropology. Arguing that twenty-first century African universities need to include design anthropology in the curriculum, this paper contends that the future of anthropology, and of Africa, lies in design as is evident in discourses and practices on designer babies, designer humanoid sex robots, industrial robots, designer robotic spouses, synthetic biology, Artificial Intelligence, human enhancements, nanofabrication, biohacking, gene and genome editing, reverse engineering and rewiring humans, gene and genome deletion, social designs and so on. Drawing on autoethnography and extensive literature review, the paper argues that design anthropology is increasingly becoming relevant in a world that is rethinking modernist designs which are at the core of the Anthropocene. Put differently, design anthropology enables [African] graduates to engage with contemporary, empirical issues of design in a twenty-first-century world where the discipline can only survive by shifting focus from an obsession with sterile discourses about, inter alia, the past and present of African witchcraft, culture, society and sorcery.

ABSTRACT This study, based on three years of interviews, archival work, and ethnographic fieldwork, explores how social organisations integrate governmental and Party ideologies into the grassroots of urban society, and evaluates the effects of these efforts. Contrary to the widespread belief among the middle class that social organisations simply act as conduits for the will of the government and the Party, this study uncovers a notable absence of official backing for their activities by the state. This apparent contradiction, which might seem baffling at the grassroots level, becomes more comprehensible when examining the function of social organisations. They not only articulate the aims of the government and the Party, thereby addressing a critical void in the existing literature on co-governance, but also shield the state from direct criticism by the middle class. Employing the Chinese proverb ‘Fox Fake Tiger’—which typically denotes a scenario where the fox leverages the tiger’s perceived strength to enhance its influence in a manner it could not achieve on its own, thus critiquing those who depend on the authority of others to garner respect or induce fear—this study illustrates how social organisations, much like the fox that announces the tiger, subtly reinforce the state’s control and credibility within these communities, in line with the ‘whole-process democracy’ campaign. This analogy emphasises the complex role of social organisations in magnifying state authority and legitimacy through delegated power, a dynamic that merits further investigation concerning governmentality and the mentalities of the middle class.