Futurity Beyond the State: Illegal Markets and Imagined Futures in Latin America
Date
2022-10-21
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Latin American Politics and Society
Abstract
This collection of articles features field-based research on illegal markets across Latin America, with special attention to the expectations and representations of the future that surround and emerge from people’s involvement in illegal economic activities. In contrast to explanatory models in the social sciences that are oriented toward the past and the present—where “an outcome is explained by previous events, leading causally to what is being observed in the present” (Beckert and Suckert Reference Beckert and Suckert2020, 2)—we are witnessing renewed interest across various disciplines in the future, understood as a temporality that is socially produced, circulated, and experienced. Scholars in anthropology, sociology, and political science are now documenting the ways that people imagine the future and orient themselves in practice toward potential opportunities and outcomes. Futurity has emerged as a keyword that refers to an affective phenomenon with concrete and specific manifestations and significant implications for everyday life.
Description
This article was originally published in Latin American Politics and Society. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/lap.2022.24
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Citation
Dewey, Matías, and Kedron Thomas. “Futurity Beyond the State: Illegal Markets and Imagined Futures in Latin America.” Latin American Politics and Society, 2022, 1–23. doi:10.1017/lap.2022.24.