Yet an increasing acknowledgement is emerging that the privileging of the past over the future is a widespread tendency in anthropology more broadly. Indeed, in my search for an anthropological toolbox to grapple with people’s engagements with futures, I found that anthropologists far more experienced and talented than I shared my sense that our discipline needs to try harder to understand people’s yearnings for possible futures and their relative capacity to create them (e.g. Appadurai 2004; Guyer 2007; Malkki 2001). While religious and magical dealings with futures have attracted considerable attention, more secular everyday forms of yearning and planning seem to remain understudied, particularly if they cannot be understood straightforwardly as part of cultural idioms.

(Stef Jansen "Hope and the State in Anthropology of Home: Preliminary Notes")