Writing Future Worlds

Reviews / Votes

"From the 'end of history' to the 'clash of civilizations', popular scenarios conceived by scholars and journalists have in the past decades stimulated the imagination of contemporary societies as much as they have revealed their anxieties. With his uniquely elegant style and subtle irony, Ulf Hannerz offers a penetrating anthropological reflection on this singular anticipatory genre that simplifies and dramatizes the representation of global tensions. Multiplying examples and crossing perspectives, he proposes an indispensable critical analysis of the way in which our worldviews are shaped." (Didier Fassin, Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA)

"With characteristically laconic but amiable barbs, Ulf Hannerz probes and dissects the generalizations about culture emanating from the 'pundits' - those self-appointed, often academically respectable experts on the cultural and political future of the globe, many of them American or focused on America's role, who variously pontificate about the imminent dissolution of the-world-as-we-know-it. Hannerz, a seasoned ethnographer with a pragmatic global vision grounded in the direct experience that many of the pundits lack, both recognizes their skill at dominating public debate and provides an effective antidote to the dangerous moral and cultural panic that their anthropologically naïve thinking represents (and often triggers). This book deserves greater and longer-lasting prominence than those with which it engages." (Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University, USA)