‘Utopian Confluences’

The first 2021 issue of Social Anthropology contains a Special Section on ‘utopian confluences’ guest-edited by Ruy Blanes and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. This is, indeed, an interesting and important topic, partly because the multiple crises that characterise our times call for progressive visions and practices, but also because they challenge our analytical grip: how to understand – that is, conceptualise and theorise – utopian mobilisations in the contemporary context of immense global complexity? Incidentally, the contributions also pose another challenge, which one often confronts in current anthropological discourse: how to discern substantial arguments in texts that overflow with evocative and metaphoric prose? What are actually claimed here about the character of utopian mobilisation?