Speculative Anthropology

It wasn't very long ago that the imagination could make its way into the world as an autonomous agent of seemingly repressed desires. I want to return to that time when the world was an unfinished ethnographic map and it was possible to imagine a tribe with a specific set of characteristics and be fairly confident that they would eventually be discovered, naked and scarred and superstitious. But now that hope has degenerated into faith. Now that we have found whatever is out there and can successfully determine what they will develop into, the imagination is useless.