One emerging research network is working to shift anthropological focus to the future of Indigenous Amazonia, rarely before the subject of scholarly debate.
When we think about the future, we often imagine something abstract or vague. Dr Natalia Buitron and Dr James Andrew Whitaker are trying to make it more concrete.
For Buitron, the future is grounded in space and place. As Jessica Sainsbury Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Amazonia, she works with the indigenous Shuar people of Ecuador in the upper Amazon. Pushed to protect their ancestral lands from encroachment, the Shuar have increasingly moved from dispersed riverbank homes to more permanent village settlements.
This transition brought an unforeseen consequence: a significant shift in the Shuar's relationship to time. Buitron observed that with the formation of villages came the arrival of development projects – from missions, NGOs or the state – which introduced future-oriented language and planning that was previously unfamiliar. “This project will train the next generation within 10 years,” they might predict. This strongly influenced how village leaders spoke not just to outsiders, but to their own people.
This collective planning for the future prompted deep reflection on the Shuar’s ritual tradition of Ayahuasca-induced visions. They have a long history of influencing expectations about individual futures.
“The Shuar were comparing these individual visions to the collective, project-driven ones,” explains Buitron. “They would say: is it a vision like we have? In trying to understand those connections, I hadn't realised how much I was studying their understanding of the future.”
At the same time, Whitaker’s interest in the future emerged during his work with the indigenous Makushi people of Guyana in the eastern Amazon. As climate change drives increasingly unpredictable weather conditions and seasonal patterns, cassava farming—a staple of Makushi life—has been severely disrupted. The future has become an area of increasing concern.
The future as an ethnographic subject
These realisations brought Buitron and Whitaker together to further explore questions about the future.
The result was a Cambridge-based workshop, co-organised by Buitron and Whitaker, at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), gathering an international group of anthropologists and historically-focused scholars working across the Amazonian region. It marked the first meeting of an emerging research network dedicated to understanding how indigenous and traditional peoples in the Amazon think about the future, and why it matters to them.
While concepts of time and temporality have long been studied by anthropologists, the focus on possible futures, particularly experiences and understandings among indigenous and traditional peoples, remains relatively new. Only in the past decade has the future as an ethnographic subject become a recognisable and important new field with a growing literature.
For Buitron, the earlier neglect can be explained by ethnography’s prioritisation of continuity and tradition. “As we engage with particular groups of people, we study their conceptual frameworks, patterns and structures that have been in place long before our own arrival as anthropologists,” she says.
“The assumption is that what you're studying in the present relates to previous times because people have been transmitting certain characteristics, traits, ways of thinking and speaking from the past. This cultural connection biases anthropology to traditional outlooks or continuity.”
For Whitaker, the focus on indigenous futures – or "ethnofuturity" – could reshape how we think about time in indigenous historical studies, while also amplifying the voices and concerns of Amazonian people today.
Image: Children walking through newly opened roads in the forest, taken by Yutsu Maiche.
Why this matters now
Despite growing attention, the future has never been a primary subject of scholarly debate for the Amazon region. “The moment is ripe for this kind of contribution,” stresses Buitron.
In the Amazonian context, the weight placed on tradition is particularly strong. Since the 1970s, anthropologists studying the region have shifted their focus from colonialist and external perspectives to foreground indigenous peoples and their ways of understanding and engaging the world.
“While this was extremely positive,” says Buitron, “we think this turn of interpretation created another bias, that indigenous people could only be studied through the lens of continuity and that any change is dictated by the sociocultural structures that people share. There is often an assumption that these structures must come from the past.”
Buitron and Whitaker do not wish to dismiss the importance of the past. But the focus on the future is also a way to deepen the scholarly shift towards indigenous agency.
To open up this debate, the workshop posed a series of unexplored questions. How do indigenous people understand their own futures, and where do those futures come from? Is it possible to study indigenous agency through a future lens? And ultimately, how is the future connected to the past?
From Ecuador to French Guiana, Brazil to Peru, the workshop revealed how indigenous and traditional peoples are imagining and negotiating different kinds of futures for themselves.
Examples of future-thinking
An exploration of the future can feel particularly urgent in the Amazon. The region is increasingly centre stage in climate debates—either as a site of dystopia or salvation—crucial to the stability of the global climate and the future of humanity.
One presentation by Vanessa Grotti and Marc Brightman (University of Bologna) shared in-progress research on this critical juncture. It explored how the indigenous Wayana people of French Guiana are collaborating with activists to safeguard the future of the Maroni River. Decades of illegal gold mining have severely polluted the river, leading to a surge in toxicity. A parallel rise in social challenges among the Wayana is driven by a growing sense of hopelessness. In response, the Wayana are now calling on the French state to uphold both their health rights as citizens and the rights of the river as a living ecosystem.
Not all papers focused on climatic futures. Laura Mentore’s research (University of Mary Washington) examined how the indigenous Waiwai people of Guyana envision their futures through recurring cycles of village relocation and rotational land use. Traditionally, the Waiwai relocate every 40 years, shifting horticultural activity to new areas. However, this practice has been constrained by Guyana’s land titling policies, which treat villages as permanent settlements. While the state operates with a linear concept of time, the Waiwai perceive the future through the lens of cyclical movement and the anticipation of their next relocation.
The workshop also considered ordinary forms of change in people's everyday lives: how they speak about it, how they feel about it, and how they predict it. Agustina Altman (CONICET) presented one such example on ‘evidentiality’ among the Moqoit people of Chaco, Argentina. The Moqoit distinguish between what is directly witnessed and what is known indirectly. Rather than speaking explicitly about the future, they refer to the unknown. They make predictions about what might happen, but also engage in what Altman calls “postdictions” — retrospectively adjusting their accounts of events to suggest that outcomes had been anticipated all along.
Crucially, the workshop also situated the future in relation to emerging indigenous concepts such as futuro ancestral (ancestral futures), championed by the indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak.
Image: Drawing by Shuar schoolboy about his future vision of his village, equipped with urban amenities, Natalia Buitron, 2018.
Cross-regional dialogue
An innovative element of the workshop was its “keynote dialogue”, featuring Will Rollason (Brunel University London) and Casey High (University of Edinburgh). As scholars of the Pacific and the Amazon, respectively, they compared how these two regions engage with questions of futurity.
“We found it useful to draw comparisons with existing research in the Melanesian context of the Pacific,” says Buitron. Anthropologists in that region have long posed pioneering questions about how societies and cultures relate to past, present and future. Rollason, for example, edited an influential volume titled Pacific Futures (Berghahn Books, 2014), which asked how our understanding of social life in the Pacific would be different if we approached it from the perspective of the future.
A new edited volume
Building on momentum, the group is now developing an edited volume to bring together key trends from the past two decades.
The project draws particular inspiration from one foundational text in the field:Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia by Carlos Fausto and Michael Heckenberger (University Press of Florida, 2007).
“We might imagine ourselves in dialogue with this signature book,” explains Buitron. “With its publication, indigenous agency became the key lens through which to study ethnohistory. We must also highlight indigenous agency, but ask, what was missed? Which new insights emerge when we highlight the future instead of the past?” Contributors will be examining what agency means and looks like on the ground within a future-oriented context in Amazonia.
“This might sound like an abstract, theoretical intervention,” says Buitron. “But it is really thinking about how people anticipate, orient events and actions, and project themselves forward in time. We are ethnographers after all. Whatever summative statement we come up with, ultimately, we’re trying to think ethnographically about the future.”
Dr Natalia Buitron is a socio-political anthropologist exploring institutional creativity, political subjectivity, and indigeneity. She is Jessica Sainsbury Associate Professor in Anthropology of Amazonia in the Department of Social Anthropology, and a Fellow and Director of Studies at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. Her co-organised workshop on 'Amazonian ethnofuturities' was held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) on 4 April 2025.
Words by Joanne Dodd, Communications Coordinator in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Cambridge.
Lead image: Shuar girls readying for a beauty queen competition which prepares them for the future. They are accompanied by children off to play football, another important index of the future, Natalia Buitron, 2012.