In 2017, just as Trump and company were starting their first term, I turned the end of my Intro-to-Anthro class into a reflection on “10 big questions about humanity.” The final question was: “What will happen in the future?” Now, eight years later, as Trump and a different company are in their second term, it seems worth revisiting what I thought anthropology could tell us about the future.
This was the last of ten questions I posed that semester. The others have since been folded into other parts of this site, but this one seemed worth preserving as a retrospective.
I should say upfront: anthropologists are terrible at prediction. Michel-Rolph Trouillot noted in 2003 that political science, economics, and sociology once “basked in the glow” of medium-term predictability—but that glow had faded. The future, he wrote, was fracturing into “a near-present that challenges our technical mastery, and an aftermath, out of real time, that our imagination has yet to seize.” That felt true in 2017. It feels painfully true now.
Still, I made seven predictions. Not about elections or stock prices, but about patterns anthropologists notice when we take the long view. Looking back, I’m struck by how many held up—not because I’m clever, but because these weren’t really predictions at all. They were observations about structural continuities that most social scientists were too focused on the near-term to see.
The Seven Predictions
1. Paradoxical combinations of the modern and traditional will keep proliferating
In 2017, I pointed to my own research on artisans using global supply chains to sustain traditional crafts. By 2025? TikTok shamans, cryptocurrency-funded Indigenous movements, AI-assisted weaving. The paradoxes only multiplied. Technology doesn’t replace tradition—it creates stranger and stranger hybrids.
2. The people everyone thought were “fading away” will not fade away
Anthropology was practically founded on the assumption that Indigenous peoples were vanishing. A century of “salvage ethnography” tried to capture cultures before the bulldozers arrived. In 2017, I cited María de Jesús Patricio’s candidacy for Mexican president—an Indigenous woman running for the highest office would have been unthinkable a century earlier.
By 2025, Indigenous-led climate movements have global influence. Land Back campaigns reshape conversations about property and sovereignty. Traditional ecological knowledge informs fire management, mental health treatment, and sustainability policy. The people who were supposed to disappear are increasingly setting the agenda. For more on this, see Indigenous Response to Colonial Extractivism.
3. The nationalist and populist backlash will continue
In 2017, Brexit had just happened and Trump had just been elected. Many analysts treated these as aberrations—temporary spasms before a return to normal. Anthropologists, trained to see patterns across time and space, recognized something different: these weren’t glitches but symptoms of deeper structural shifts.
Eight years later, the backlash has morphed into new forms across every continent. See the video From Assimilation to Deportation as a supplement to the class on Ethnicity and Nationalism:
4. The world is multi-polar, but highly unequal within and between countries
No single superpower dominates, but inequality is everywhere—within nations and between them. By 2025, billionaires race to space while food insecurity expands. The multi-polar prediction was easy; the depth of inequality exceeded what I imagined.
5. Politics will be volatile. Inequality doesn’t automatically produce progressive politics
This one I wish I’d gotten wrong. Economic suffering doesn’t necessarily lead to left-wing movements or coherent resistance. Sometimes it just produces chaos, resentment misdirected at scapegoats, and a politics that makes things worse for the people already struggling. The volatility of 2017-2025 exceeded even my pessimistic expectations.
6. The planet we share is not limitless
For most of the history of colonialism and capitalism, people acted as if resources were infinite and waste could be dumped without consequence. In 2017, I predicted environmental limits would become undeniable, even to those who built careers denying them.
By 2025, climate catastrophes have made this prediction feel almost quaint. What’s striking is how little acknowledgment changed behavior. Knowing limits and respecting them turn out to be very different things. For more on this, see Anthropocene Anthropology.
7. The anthropological approach—generous, comparative, critical—will be more important than ever
Mixed results. The need for anthropological perspective intensified—we desperately need ways of thinking that take human diversity seriously, that look beyond the near-term, that question assumptions others take for granted. But anthropology as a discipline has struggled to matter outside the academy.
What I’d Add Now
If I were making predictions today, I’d add one more: the solutions to our crises already exist. They exist in the diverse ways humans have organized life across cultures and across time. The question isn’t whether we can solve our problems—it’s whether we’ll listen to the people who’ve been trying to tell us how.
Franz Boas wrote in 1945: “No longer can we keep the search for truth the privilege of the scientist.” And Trouillot reminded us that “anthropology will only matter to the populations that we study and to most of our readers if it evokes a purpose outside of itself.”
Eight years after my 2017 predictions, I’m less confident about anthropology’s ability to matter—but more convinced that its perspective is exactly what we need.
Explore Further
For related themes, explore the Environmental Engagements hub and Teaching Anthropology hub.