For the last nine weeks, we explored anthropology outside the traditional realm of past and present societies, instead considering how the study of human behavior can imagine and determine the future. We unpacked the relationship between ethnography and science fiction, finding each as much a reflection of their author as that which they purport to understand and predict. By crafting a narrative of our present that we anticipate will have value after we’re gone, we’ve written our own speculative fiction that prefigures part of our afterlives. We move into the future with our continuously evolving bodies and with the static, material ghosts we leave behind. No longer students critiquing past work, we faced the fundamental questions of the anthropologist and the interlocutor: Who are we and how do we want to communicate this life?
When we reflected on the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic recurred as the preeminent concern which defined us and our college experience relative to other generations. This shared experience rendered the virus the only theme we earnestly considered for our time capsule. Nevertheless, our intimate contributions reveal the myriad perspectives enclosing a supposedly singular event. Five groups of four students each compiled an object designed to illuminate some aspect of how they experienced the pandemic as students at the University of Chicago. A sixth group chose an appropriate vessel and location to embody its contents. Every member of the class also had the opportunity to contribute a mask and any personal documentation, creating a repository of perspectives that we hope will interest future anthropology students.
By focusing exclusively on the pandemic and our personal experiences, we risk reducing our generation and the year 2020 to a singular narrative of anxiety, loss, and hope within a predominately affluent, white, and prestigious undergraduate institution. There’s a remarkable power in lived imaginaries to not only liberate but to oppress, and it’s important to remember that the objects in our time capsule do not represent an incorrigible truth, but merely comprise some subjective reflections specific to a historical moment. Disposing of our past in the future creates an opportunity for learning, but raises concomitant questions regarding responsibility for our present burden.
To whomever opens this box: Have empathy for your world and all of the people in it. If we learned anything from this class, it’s that there is not just one future but many, and all become meaningless without an open mind.