Writing Future Worlds: An Anthropologist Explores Global Scenarios

ISBN-13: 9783319706276 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 295 str.

Ulf Hannerz

Opis

A number of these key concepts-`the end of history,' `the clash of civilizations,' `the coming anarchy,' `the world is flat,' `soft power,' `the post-American century'-suggest what could become characteristic of this new, interconnected world.

Spis treści

Prologue: Atlantis and 1984.- 1. The ”One Big Thing” Quintet & Co.- 2. When pundits go global.- 3. Playing with maps.- 4. Side shows: Eurabia, MexAmerica.- 5. Reporting from the future.- 6. Contemporary habitats of meaning.- 7. Culture: between XL and S.- 8. Soft power.- 9. Scenarios from everywhere.

O autorze

Ulf Hannerz is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden, and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. A former Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, he has taught at American, European, Asian, and Australian universities, and has carried out field studies in West Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, as well as a multi-site study of the work of news media foreign correspondents. 

Blurb

This book is a detailed exploration and analysis of the rise of a publishing genre providing speculative, global, and comprehensive accounts of near term geopolitical trajectories. In exploring these works from an Anthropological perspective, Hannerz focuses primarily on textual materials – the books and articles themselves, ancillary publications by the same authors, and their textual afterlives as evident in subsequent commentaries, reviews, and, occasionally, debates. Such works clearly figure saliently and, at times, consequentially in the shaping of public and policy discourses around international relations, politics, and the ongoing explanation of emergent global phenomena.