Workshop
Temporalities of Futuring: Heritage, Custom and Tradition in the Himalayas
- Date
- Tuesday 20 January 2026
- Time
- Address
- Darjeeling
‘Futuring’ is a concept which our project introduces to refer to the ways in which actions and orientations of human and more than human actors make implicit reference to the future—not through deliberate forecasting, but through lived practices shaped by experience. Futuring draws on what Pierre Bourdieu (1990: 53) termed dispositions: durable, transposable and embodied patterns of thought and action that reflect spatial, temporal, conceptual and societal hierarchies of everyday life. Futuring is about agentive action which is to the actors self-evident, intuitive, and—for them—seemingly does not require explanation. Bourdieu considers such dispositions as an outcome of a process of socialisation, which is primarily human centred. In the Himalayan context, can such dispositions also extend to more than humans? In this workshop, we intend to explore, based on ethnographic examples taken from South Asia, how futuring triggers, negotiates and defies competing notions of temporality.
Concepts such as heritage, custom, and tradition, being used in everyday parlance, can impose and legitimize political claims. Often, labels such as these are associated with the past and can reinforce inequalities, hierarchies, and dependencies through such temporal references. Futuring challenges this unilinear temporal framework, revealing how the future, the past, and the present can be simultaneously, and at times unevenly, referenced. How do acts of Futuring surface in interactions, practices, and conflicts among humans and more than humans? What kind of ruptures and openings does this create, and what kind of relationships emerge? How does this reconceptualise notions such as heritage, custom, and tradition?
For this academic workshop, we invite contributions based on original ethnographic research that engage in new ways with thinking about and experiencing time. Contributions can involve, but not be limited to:
- temporal orientations in more than human contexts;
- reflections on projects of heritage and heritagization;
- methodological interventions;
- (re)thinking concepts such as crisis, the anthropocene, and indigeneity;
- time as a political concept.
Would you like to contribute to this workshop?
If you would like to contribute to this workshop, please send an abstract (max. 300 words) to <research.abhimanyu@gmail.com> by October 1st, 2025. Please include your name and affiliation, as well as relevant contact details. The outcomes of the selection process will be shared by October 15th. The workshop will be held on January 20 2026, in Darjeeling. The workshop operates on a limited budget, and only a limited number of need based partial travel grants can be made available to selected participants based in South Asia. The workshop will cover the costs of accommodation and stay in Darjeeling.