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This lecture is prompted directly by the theme, ‘The future with/of anthropologies’ of the JASCA/IUAES conference, Tokyo May 2014. What might we value about anthropology that we welcome its multiplication (diverse anthropologies), or indeed wish to imagine a future with it? In the spirit of the conference, it seems important to dwell on some of the ways in which anthropologists are always in the company of others, and their discipline in the company of other disciplines. While the plurality may be stimulating, however, it is the relations that count, and specifically the way relations create ‘multiple’ forms of knowledge. In thinking about the future, then, might its practitioners strive to keep anthropology multiple? If so, just what kind of tool does the general concept of ‘relations’ provide? The question is interesting at a very simple level: general it might be, the concept also has its own specific history within the English language. Such parochialism is what makes the diverse strands of English-speaking anthropology but one among many ‘anthropologies’. Yet despite the limitation of the concept (‘relations’), for a long time it has at least been a marker for, or stand-in for, an aspiration on the part of its anthropological users: namely, to see (beyond) their own conventions of knowledge-making. Hence their interest in other people’s ‘relational’ worlds. Is this aspiration something they might identify as distinctive to their practice of the discipline? Can one even ask what forms relations might take under techniques of knowledge-making that flow from new modes of data management? It would be interesting to ponder on the procedures by which information-making processes are concealed, given that showing the relational steps of such making has been, at least in English, a means by which anthropology has endeavoured to show at once the truth and the contingency of its knowledge. In response to our hosts’ outreach to the English-speaking world, this reflection is offered as a small return. The manner in which the convenors of this conference have set out their invitation to think about the future is much appreciated. At the same time I am all too aware I am unlikely to say anything about the future that this distinguished audience does not already know about the present.In the anniversary year of the Japanese Society of Social and Cultural Anthropology (JASCA), I cast back to the founding of the British version, the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA), in 1946, when a sense of a ‘new school of social anthropology’ was very much in the air (cf. Mills 2008: 61). It has been said that ‘the closeness of the fraternity was one way in which the highly amorphous subject of anthropology was given some manageable bounds’ (Jack Goody, quoted in Mills 2008: 65). It was not the paradigms or models alone that made the subject, but the willingness for dialogue, interchange, and what we would today call networks between practitioners. Nothing unusual, you might say, for this is a combination people already communicating take for granted, but I see it also as an aspiration of this meeting in Tokyo, at least, where we have not until now been able to make assumptions about communication.As to the future, I suspect academics divide into those who imagine the future as a road ahead of them, stretching into the distance, and those for whom the future already hides in their surroundings, jumping out to everyone’s surprise, where you never know what is going to appear or who is going to walk through the door, or for that matter when you open a door—or slide a partition—what you are going to see outside. The former vision, the road ahead, is more conducive to a narrative, but I have only ever been able to imagine the second kind. This address hopes to open one or two doors.
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