In my view, the future of anthropology lies less in the filling out of new ethnographic enclosures and more in increasing our capacity to open up what were once unthinkable lines of inquiry. Archive ethnography facilitates this, as it leaves the ethnography open or unfinished, reaching outside itself, so that the tensions that animate it and render it productive persist beyond any “final word.”
In a sense, my view of a possible anthropology is inspired by something like an "archival ethic," characterised by slowing down and reconsidering how we think about our work, across numerous stages, all the way from research design to write up. To be ok with having many fits and starts and restarts. A prime example of this ethic may be found in the way Foucault characterized his approach to the second volume of his history of sextuality, which took much longer and a much different form than he originally expected:
"As to those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next-as to those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet” (The Use of Pleasure, 7).
