On Anticipatory Accounts

In: The Cambridge journal of anthropology, Band 37, Heft 1, S. 93-107

Abstract

Engaging an account of a judicial decision made in the Los Angeles Mental Health
Court, this article interrogates the role of anticipation in the lived negotiation
of moral, social and institutional orders. As Judge Samuel Benton recounts his
attempt to let himself 'emotionally off the hook' in the wake of a patient's suicide,
anticipation emerges as: 1) an ordered, linear sequencing of events towards logical
ends; 2) unsettled, temporally disjunctive engagements with the past in order to
make sense of present experience and ambiguous futures; 3) existential negotiations
of one's potential morality and social belonging; and 4) distributed organization of
information between people and across objects in order to elaborate present and
future experience. These manifestations of anticipation reveal the social and temporal
contingency and deep intersubjectivity of our negotiations with uncertainty in the
unsettling process of becoming moral.