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Jean-François Lyotard's famous characterisation of the postmodern condition as the ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (1984: 23–24) has been influential in the anthropology of the 1980s, both in the sense of its internal methodological scepticism and as critical realism that questioned the post-utopian state of the external world that anthropology explored. The anthropology of globalisation and neoliberalism that followed from the 1990s onwards has also stressed presentism and the contemporary as qualities that were to be lived as well as researched without assuming their teleological ends. As observe the guest editors of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale's special issue ‘Curious Utopias: Dreaming Big Again in the Twenty-first Century?’, Ruth Prince and Tom Neumark, human expectations seemed to have undergone a ‘seismic shift’ away from grand dreams and narratives. But they also note that there has been a ‘concurrent and apparently countervailing trend: a return toward ambitious, even self-asserted utopian imaginations and schemes of economic, political and societal transformation’. Now, this is curious: discredited visions of utopian futures celebrate a return in the worlds studied by anthropology. Using curiosity as both a mode of anthropological inquiry and as a state of utopian imagination, this special issue tries to find a new home for utopia within anthropology.

This issue marks the first time that Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale is published by Berghahn Books. It is also the first time the journal is being published in an innovative ’subscribe-to-open’ model, an approach that has the potential to transform scholarly publishing. After a motion proposing the move to Open Access was approved at the EASA conference in Lisbon 2020, the membership voted overwhelmingly to end SA/AS's fifteen year contract with Wiley and move to Berghahn. The move has involved a great deal of careful preparation, and the journal editors would like to thank all those libraries who are continuing to support the journal, as well as the EASA members who are making this transition possible. We trust and hope your libraries will continue to support this sustainable Open Access model. We look forward to SA/AS making the most of the many opportunities this innovation offers. We thank Berghahn Books for its enthusiastic support of this journal during the technical transition and onward.

In July 2022, at the EASA meetings in Belfast, we passed the baton to a new editorial team comprising Chief Editors Dimitra Kofti (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens) and Isabelle Rivoal (University of Paris, Nanterre) as well as Assistant Editor Ville Laakkonen (Tampere University) and Book Review Editor Arne Harms (Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology). The new team has started to process new submissions and will introduce itself in one of the first editorials of 2023. We look forward to their contribution to this distinguished journal and wish them a felicitous term of office.

As we all know, ‘urgent’ is a frequent subject heading used for emails and documents. It is also ubiquitous in calls to action against climate change and ongoing wars. In many ways, the word draws our attention to imminent crises, such as humanitarian disasters or the outbreak of diseases. Yet, the ethnographic contours of said urgency and imminence are far from self-evident. As this special issue's guest editors Andreas Bandak and Paul Anderson put it, urgency is always a claim of urgency. What is at stake in such claims, they submit, are not just the necessary resources, rights, expertise and power to ‘act now before it is too late’, but also a specific temporality. By separating the ‘now’ or ‘imminent’ from ‘before’ or ‘always’, time gets measured differently: it turns from being a quantitative entity to a qualitative and even incommensurable process. Indeed, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic marked the year 2020 as the dawn of a ‘new era’ in human biology and biopolitical governance (Bermant and Ssorin-Chaikov 2020). In a similar vein, other events turned out watershed moments in history: the 2008 financial crisis inaugurated the ‘age of austerity’, while 9/11 claimed the new ‘normalcy’ of living with terrorist threats and permanent war on terror – even if in many places around the world living with terrorist threats was rather normal for a long time before 9/11. If modernity can be viewed as a stretched-out present producing ‘newtime’ (Neuzeit, see Koselleck 2002), including irregular crises, it is no surprise that new eras keep appearing and supplanting each other all the time. What makes the temporality of urgency distinct from ‘modernity as time’ (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017) and particularly from its twentieth-century teleological futurism of capitalism, state socialism or neoliberalism, argue Bandak and Anderson, is its ‘presentism’ in the sense of François Hartog (2015).