Detail from one of Émile-Antoine Bayard’s illustrations for Jules Verne’s ‘Around the Moon’ (1870).

Bathing in Pessimism

Payal Arora, a digital anthropologist at Utrecht with a long history of thinking about global digital cultures and their inequalities, spoke about hope and optimism at a conference I was at in early April in Cambridge, UK. Addressing an audience of mostly tech-policy makers and academics, she showed statistic after statistic on how people in the Global South tend to be more optimistic about climate change, the potential of social media and the influence of technology on our lives than people in America or Europe. The western critics versus the Global Majority hopeful. Her conclusion was unsurprisingly that both sides of the coin are necessary to both make sense of the world and move forward: the critique of academics, journalists, whistleblowers, non-profits and other adversaries but also the at times concrete optimism of industry people, users, employees and ‘change makers from within’.

I tend to agree. In fact, I agree so much that I’m trying to hold both tendencies and directions in me at the same time. After years of almost purely academic work, I was frustrated with the perpetual critical pessimism that the progressive academic elites like to bathe in. That sentiment was one reason I (kind-of) quit last year. I missed a version of optimistic realism that was anchored ‘in the world’; pure idealist critique from the outside increasingly frustrated me. Not to say that ‘the real world’ is always so much better at the former – but academia is often so happy to restrict itself to the latter.

Hope is everywhere 

Now, just a word on my academic pathway to understand where I’m coming from and going towards: I am not your typical anthropologist who picks a ‘tribe’ of sorts and sticks with it. While my PhD was concerned with understanding survival practices among people experiencing homelessness in Paris (Lenhard 2022), I afterwards spent five years researching technology venture capital investors between Silicon Valley and Europe. Surprising parallels arose between both these worlds.

I found people depending on hope and optimism in their everyday lives and practices in both worlds. People experiencing homelessness depend on being hopeful every day – literally to survive. Hope drove many of my interlocutors in London and Paris on to continue to look forward, to try and make better lives.

Venture capital investors in turn depend on believing in a techno-optimist future made by entrepreneurs. Too many doubts and thoughts about ‘what could go wrong’ and they can’t convince themselves to give a single entrepreneur with a crazy idea any money.

For people experiencing homelessness, hope was necessary to keep begging and working hard on ‘moving on’, into housing, eventually, hopefully, to connect back with their families. I observed how hope for my informants was a quintessential guiding principle.

In my research and subsequent work with VC investors, hope was in fact the core value of everyday life. If you understand an investor’s job as ultimately making investment decisions, for VCs these decisions were driven by a strong belief or conviction, as they often described to me, in the entrepreneur, the founders, and their team. Only if the VC investors were convinced and hopeful about the vision the entrepreneur painted for them, could they invest. Hope in the better techno-future is their driving principle.

More good, still

My plea for us anthropologists is simple: I want to resurface what Robbins (2013) described in his ‘Anthropology of the Good’ article (and subsequent extensions). I do agree with his historical reflection on the anthropologist’s focus – moving from ‘savage’ to ‘suffering’ – and the need for a new ‘slot’. What I am still not seeing enough of, including in the pages of EA (which I am an editor of) (with exceptions, see Millar 2024), is an outlook that focuses on capturing the good as much as the bad.

We need more ‘realistic good’, rather than pessimistic critique. This is especially true in our hard times – both in anthropology as a discipline and academia generally but even more in our world impacted so drastically by a large variety of human-made changes and threats, from climate change to AI. We need new hopeful narratives and as anthropologists we’re so uniquely placed to find the most inventive and powerful ones of those – and tell their stories. To do that, our analytical toolkit, especially in economic anthropology, today should start more often with: what good are these people I’m spending time with driven by? What good are they seeing?

References

Lenhard, J. 2022. Making Better Lives – Hope, Freedom and Home-Making among People Sleeping Rough in Paris. Berghahn.

Millar, K. 2024. Toward and economic anthropology of wisdom. Economic Anthropology, 11 (2), 168-176.

Robbins, J. 2013. Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19, 447–462.