Prologue  ix

1. Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems  1

2. Four Cultural Genealogies (or Haplotype Genealogical Tests) for a Recombinant Anthropology of Science and Technology  51

3. Emergent Forms of (Un)Natural Life  114

4. Body Marks (Bestial/Natural/Divine): An Essay on the Social and Biotechnical Imaginaries, 1920-2008, and Bodies to Come  159

5. Personhood and Measuring the Figure of Old Age: The Geoid as Transitional Object  197

6. Ask Not What Man Is But What We May Expect of Him  215

Conclusions and Way Ahead: Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopolitics, and Anthropological Futures  235

Epilogue: Postings from Anthropologies to Come  244

Notes  273

References  331

Index  379

“This intellectually wide-ranging and spirited book poses the question of what kind of anthropology might be required to deal most effectively with emergent human experience. . . . Fischer has written a book for our times that
will provoke much thinking.”—Melinda Hinkson, Anthropological Forum

“If anthropology is to survive and reproduce itself for future generations, then the widening of subject matter, unabashed disciplinary borrowing, and grounding in the cross-cultural study of meaning that Fischer recommends are necessary antidotes to contemporary anthropology’s seeming failure of nerve, its ineffectiveness in claiming a seminal space in the sun within the transnational circuits of a rapidly changing global world where human relations are increasingly dependent on technological innovation and effective communication.”—Regna Darnell, Oceania

“This intellectually wide-ranging and spirited book poses the question of what kind of anthropology might be required to deal most effectively with emergent human experience. . . . Fischer has written a book for our times that
will provoke much thinking.”—Melinda Hinkson, Anthropological Forum

“If anthropology is to survive and reproduce itself for future generations, then the widening of subject matter, unabashed disciplinary borrowing, and grounding in the cross-cultural study of meaning that Fischer recommends are necessary antidotes to contemporary anthropology’s seeming failure of nerve, its ineffectiveness in claiming a seminal space in the sun within the transnational circuits of a rapidly changing global world where human relations are increasingly dependent on technological innovation and effective communication.”—Regna Darnell, Oceania

“Anthropological Futures is both a review of core questions and scholarship and a risk-taking, future-oriented mapping of the knots of culture, nature, person, body, and science. It is a wide-ranging conversation conducted with serious erudition and originality, replete with ideas for work to come.”—Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz

“As always, Michael M. J. Fischer provides deeply grounded yet very experimental and future-oriented ideas about cultural anthropology, and cultural analysis more generally. This book is a fabulous resource.”—Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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