anticipation by default

is the idea that the open-ended nature of ethnography permits one to recover the antecedents of future crises from material not collected for the purpose.

For all the important problematizations of ethnography (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986), it remains a useful tool for the temporally conscious investigation of culture because it is an 'open-ended mode of study' that permits one to 'recover the antecedents of future crises from material not collected for the purpose' (Strathern 2004:7). This is what Strathern terms 'anticipation by default' (7).

anticipation by default, n.All

anticipation by default