The project form is one of the most pervasive organisational technologies in the world today. Across scales and spheres of activity, projects permeate the worlds that anthropologists live in and study, appearing as: economic development projects, infrastructure projects, conservation projects, research projects, institutional reform projects, entrepreneurial projects, humanitarian relief projects, heritage preservation projects, and so on. Indeed, projects are so commonplace that it is easy to take for granted how their distinct organisational form structures and animates diverse social environments. We expect individuals to have projects, and no organisation is worth its salt if it does not have projects and measure their stages of fulfilment and ultimate completion. Projects, in short, are a major, yet under-recognised, organising unit of modern life.
In this article, we seek to elucidate how the project form shapes a variety of temporal dynamics that are evident in project making. We understand the project form as a goal-driven approach to planning, resource allocation and task coordination. It is a historically specific structure for non-routine, purposive action that is characterised by its adaptability, portability and scalability. The project form can be realised in heterogeneous ways. Pursuits as varied as a mission to the moon, the construction of a ‘smart’ city, a child's science fair entry or a home renovation are formatted as projects.
One factor that unites such diverse projects is their temporal logics and limits. By definition, projects are temporary – they are meant to expire once their goal has been achieved (see Lundin and Söderholm 1995). This temporariness contrasts projects with state-led programmes of service provision (e.g. health care, sanitation), which are imagined as ongoing and indefinite; with twentieth-century capitalist production logics (e.g. Fordism, Taylorism), which transcend particular work assignments; and with everyday practices of kinship, social reproduction and care. Yet, projects are also temporal – they tether activity to timelines and schedules; they divide time into distinct phases (preparation, execution, wrap up); and they entail both synchronisations and disruptions among and across ‘multiple social orders’ (Gershon 2019). Furthermore, projects presuppose and ground temporal imaginaries – for example, time as partible, mouldable and progressive – that mediate how people see the world and act in it. Numerous document genres, such as proposals, plans, schedules, charts, budgets, reports and evaluations, materialise this assumption of time-delimited, sequenced progress and organise social relations around it (see Graan 2022). The project form thus implies but also produces temporal configurations.
As the articles in this special issue elaborate, the project form's ability to condition and shape temporalities testifies to its wide-ranging normative power. As Sara Ahmed (2017: 43) argues, a feminist awareness to social norms reveals ‘how power works as a mode of directionality, a way of orientating bodies in particular ways, so they are facing a certain way, heading toward a future that is given a face’. The normative temporalities that inhere in the project form, we contend, enact their own variety of such ‘power as directionality’, subjecting actors to orientations and expectations that have larger repercussions for social environments.
Normative project temporalities register in several discernible ways. For example, by assuming time as both segmentable and progressive, projects orient actors to particular practices of goal setting and labour coordination. Through such orientations, the project form prefers and privileges action that is amenable to scheduling and management such that some kinds of action and aspiration can be formatted as projects but others can't. In this way, project norms direct and limit how actors are able to imagine agency and act on the future.
Moreover, and similarly to what Shore and Wright (1997: 9) once wrote of policy, projects do not only ‘outline the course of action to be taken, they also serve to fix that course within the framework of a wider and more universal set of goals and principles’. The project form undergirds a structure of authority that enables projects to contain and absorb otherwise unruly temporalities encountered in project making. This power of projects to ‘fix’ a course of action also enables project visions to linger long after active project making has stopped. Projects often generate prospective but tangible futures that can inform social action well beyond when the projects themselves have come to an end. In sum, then, projects manifest a normative power that directs social action, contains unruliness and produces abiding material and imaginative debris.
The normative power of the project form is inherently temporal, and the temporality of the project form is inherently normative. To fully understand the effects of this power, we must also grasp the disjuncture between the ordered time of rational progression that projects map out and the multiple, often disorderly temporalities encountered in and produced by the course of project making. That is, while the project form grounds a normative template for action, any given project is always a contingent social achievement. This is a messy space that summons empirical scrutiny. As the articles collected in this special issue reveal, intricate processes of project making constitute an ethnographic object that can disclose the varied agencies, temporalities, excesses and limits of the project form. In this introduction, we tack back and forth, considering both the normativity of the project form as a recognised style of acting in and on the world and also the contingency of project making as a social process. These two aspects cannot be captured in a Platonic opposition between an ideal and its instance. Rather, the normativity and contingency of projects exist in complex interrelation, with project norms directing action and corralling exigencies not despite contingencies but because of them.
In focusing on projects and project temporalities, one of our goals is to contribute to existing anthropological research on projects by foregrounding the project form as an object of analysis in its own right. At present, there is no dearth of anthropological or allied studies examining some sort of project, whether they be projects of economic development (e.g. Copeland 2019; Ferguson 1994; Li 2007; Mosse 2005; Scott 2023), humanitarian relief (e.g. Dunn 2012, 2017; Krause 2014), democracy promotion (e.g. Coles 2007), ecological conservation (e.g. Lowe 2006), scientific discovery (e.g. Latour and Woolgar 1979), civil society (e.g. Mikhaylova 2018; Sampson 1996, 2003), heritage preservation (e.g. Rautio 2021) or infrastructural improvement and decay (e.g. Harvey and Knox 2015; Ssorin-Chaikov 2016). Yet, despite the prevalence of anthropological research that takes some project as the locus of ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologists have, with rare exception (e.g. Li 2007; Mikhaylova 2018; Mosse 2005; Sampson 1996, 2003; see also Krause 2014), overlooked the project form itself, not to mention its normative powers and temporal logics. Academic analyses of the ever-increasing projectification of contemporary society have instead been left to scholars in organisational sociology and project management studies (e.g. Boltanski and Chiapello 2005 [1999]; Hodgson and Cicmil 2006; Jensen et al 2016; Lundin and Söderholm 1995). The result is illuminating yet universalising studies that are bereft of ethnographic specificity.
Our analysis of projects and project temporalities advances an anthropological conception of the project form and scrutinises the wide-ranging social effects of project making. On the one hand, we establish that, like the commodity form (Marx 1981 [1867]) or the nation form (Balibar 1991), the project form has been central to social formations glossed by the concept of modernity. The project form thus warrants analysis and our account of its normative power is a step toward that end. On the other hand, we recognise that like commodities and nation-states, the project form is global now and has been subjected to distinct and diverse emic articulations. Indeed, neoliberalism fuels this condition as projectification, the reformatting of work through the project form, increasingly extends into new domains and cultural contexts. Ethnographic perspectives on project making thus lead us deeper toward an understanding of how project logics have shaped and continue to shape agency and time across social worlds. Anthropologists have been doing this in particular case studies. Our aim is to zoom out, to see the forest for the trees, and to reckon anthropologically with the project form as a world historical force.
This introduction begins with a short overview of the historical significance of the project form and its recent, neoliberal iterations. We then turn to highlight three different but interrelated modalities of the normative power that result from the project form's figuration of time: projects as a model of purposive human agency; projects as a form of temporal containment; and projects as an ideal of action and futurity that haunts environments long after formal work on the project stops. In these three sections, we also highlight how the special issue's four ethnographic articles explore the normative power of the project form and its implications for temporality. We conclude by reflecting on how an anthropology of the project form can contribute to scholarship on time and agency more generally. In doing so, we stake out why systematic anthropological attention to projects is needed and long overdue.
On the Modern History of the Project Form
The project form's normative temporalities are bound up in its own historical development. Although we recognise that groups have completed complex tasks across human history, the model of ‘a project’ is distinguished by understandings of time and action that are of modern vintage. As Nancy Munn once noted (1992: 106), Pierre Bourdieu might have overstated the dichotomy between ‘traditional’, present-oriented social formations and capitalist societies for which the future is forecasted as ‘a field of possibilities to be explored . . . by calculation’ (1979 [1963]: 8), yet capitalist modernity did usher in a radically novel orientation towards the future (cf. Koselleck 2004). The practices of planning, scheduling and budgeting – all of which are essential to project making – presuppose a future-oriented conception of time as progressive and commensurable. Projects thus partake in what has been called ‘modern time’ (Bear 2014), the ‘abstract time’ of capital (Postone 1993), the ‘empty, homogenous time’ of the nation-state (Anderson 1991) and ‘settler time’ (Rifkin 2017). In arguing for the historical specificity of the project form, we seek to provincialise these ‘times’ of modernity (cf. Valentine and Hassoun 2019) and concomitantly recognise the sheer multiplicity of ways in which time, agency, creation and collaboration have been and can be formatted.
But projects have not merely conformed to modernity. The project form also provided a structure through which humans have been able to organise, harness and extend ‘modern time’ toward productive ends. According to historians Vera Keller and Ted McCormick (2016: 426), the modern sense of the term ‘project’ entered European languages in the seventeenth century from the world of architectural drafting. ‘Projects’ or ‘projections’ referred to the graphic images used by builders to guide their work. By analogy, the term also came to denote speculative plans for ventures beyond the commonplace or into new territories. Tellingly, Keller and McCormick (2016: 427) relay how Robert Hayman, in 1628, framed his proposal for an English colony in Newfoundland as a ‘project’, continuing that ‘such visions of (re)creation evince a distinct attitude to space, time, and scales of action’. Important too is how project makers, like Hayman, used proposals to secure investments (such as a colonial charter and financial support from the English king) on the promise of later profit. This early capitalist, speculative dimension of projects was later epitomised by the maligned figure of the ‘projector’ (see Graan 2022; Keller and McCormick 2016; Novak 2008). The term initially referred to individuals who sought royal patents for, and private investment in, new kinds of economic venture, from novel approaches to iron smelting to colonies in the Americas. By reputation, their claims of a handsome return on one's investment were to be received with extreme caution. Yet, even in the seventeenth century, project makers had their defenders (see Defoe 1897 [1697]) and with time, projects (mostly) shed the connotation of projectors’ dubious schemes.
While more could be said about the history of the project form, the above genealogical sketch suffices to demonstrate the multiple ways that primordial projects manifested both historically specific and historically significant temporal logics. Already in the early modern period, ‘projects’, as defined in proposals and plans, provided a format through which social actors (at least elite ones) could envision new realities and describe the steps and resources necessary to bring them to fruition. This conception manifested a temporality of progressive achievement, that is, of gradual progress to a pre-defined goal, as well as a temporal imaginary of progress, that is, a world changed and made better through acts of ‘improvement’ (see Slack 2014; cf. Koselleck 2004). As this historical account shows, these temporal presumptions of the project form were themselves predicated on a European colonial imaginary that saw indigenous lands as ‘an empty sheet’ on which to ‘cast the future’ (Keller and McCormick 2016: 427; cf. Uusihakala this issue). The goal-directed, progressive time of individual ‘projects’ proposed for the Americas combined extractivist designs with colonial fantasies of civilisational superiority and White supremacy, voiced through discourses on progress and improvement, that fuelled slavery, genocide and oppression in the New World. Indeed, it is worth considering how the oft-referred-to ‘Colonial Project’ began as so many colonial projects.
From this colonial crucible, the project form soon spread to other domains. Providing a structure through which to articulate plans for time-bound, transformative action as well as to calculate expected costs and returns, projects proved integral to the development of both capitalist-speculative practices and state administration and governmentality (Foucault 1991; cf. Keller and McCormick 2016: 437f). Like the factory (Thompson 1967) and the plantation (McKittrick 2013; Mintz 1985), the project form integrated and inspired techniques (such as budgeting and scheduling) to regulate and predict time and resources so as to optimise future outputs and profits. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, projects constituted the obvious template for social and material improvement, whether it be in the capitalist west (e.g. Latour 1996), the socialist east (e.g. High 2021) or in what was then labelled the Third World under the auspices of ‘development’ (Escobar 1995; Gupta 1998). Emerging as the default form for the wide variety of state-led interventions that define ‘high modernism’ (Scott 1998), projects spanned the construction of infrastructure, scientific research and military development.
More recently, so-called projectification (Jensen et al 2016) has spurred on the post-industrial reorganisation of work, as firms adopt project-making to pursue innovation, to adapt quickly to markets, and of course to lower overheads through the precarisation of labour. In the corporate world, but also in government (Irani 2019), projects have increasingly come to connote a more flexible agency that assembles, coordinates and momentarily stabilises actors, resources and activities within a social and economic terrain dominated by fluidity and constantly reconfiguring networks. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2005 [1999]: 104–105) put it in their influential examination of The New Spirit of Capitalism, ‘Projects make production and accumulation possible in a world which, were it to be purely connexionist, would simply contain flows, where nothing could be stabilized, accumulated or crystallized’. Arguably, this combination of adaptability with relative stability explains the project form's inflated ubiquity in the contemporary era (see also Rommel this issue).
Across these historical moments, then, the project form has provided a distinctive model for human actors to imagine and enact visions of a world transformed, whether in pursuit of profit, order, dominion or some version of the common good. Contemporary studies of the project form, we suggest, should not be divorced from this history. Of course, not all project making in the world today involves exercises in high modernism, capitalist speculation or colonial expansion. Rather, meanings and understandings vary across ethnographic context. As Keller and McCormick (2016: 426) show, cognate versions of the lexeme ‘project’ (originally from the Latin, projicere) appeared in many languages (e.g. Projekt in German, projet in French), but there are also many other, unrelated terms used to refer to projects and project-making (e.g. mashru‘ in Arabic, as Carl Rommel discusses in his article in this issue, or hanke in Finnish). Such etymological diversity gestures to the fact – unsurprising for anthropologists – that projects warrant detailed, context-sensitive ethnographic examination. That being said, the time-bound and ultimately modern normativity that the project form promises is recognisable in projects of very different kinds and origins. It is thus well worth considering how project phylogeny informs the agencies and temporalities of project making today. The articles collected in this special issue elaborate important examples of this commonality in the midst of cultural diversity.
Projects as a Model for Purposive Human Agency
Across its historical and geographical manifestations, one primary modality of the project form's normative power is the way in which it casts humans as subjects of purposive action, that is, as agents who can know and transform social realities through methodical, time-delineated labour. This is a particularly modern vision that presupposes that time can be harnessed for the generation of value in a well-defined future. It grounds a distinct outlook on the human species and its surroundings that engenders ‘an amplified sense of our own agency to intervene in, or even trick, time’ (Bear 2017: 145; see also Bear 2014).
The project provides a ubiquitous, recognisable and flexible format for the enactment of such a modern human agency. Insofar as the project form provides actors with tools to imagine time, action and progress in internally defined and therefore decontextualised ways, the project form makes it seem possible to transplant projects to significantly different settings. It should come as no surprise, then, that projects have become a default organisational vehicle for ‘navigating’ those multidimensional and variegated ‘timescapes’ – comprising ethics, technologies, austerity policies, gender roles, debt and kinship relations – that, according to Laura Bear (2015), condition the generation of value under contemporary capitalism (see also Bear et al 2015). Indeed, several of our era's most emblematic future-oriented and aspirational activities – planning (Abram and Weszkalnys 2011), policy (Shore and Wright 1997), speculation (Bear 2020), dreaming (Schielke 2020), credit (Han 2011), governance (Mitchell 2002), not to mention academic research (Trifuljesko 2021) – recurrently serve as components of specific projects, which they thereby constitute and reproduce.
Notably, the normative power of the project form manifests in ways that privilege some kinds of agency while marginalising others. For example, projects assume what might be glossed as a managerial agency – a human actor, who designs, coordinates, schedules and evaluates – as the driving force of action. This is a specific model of agency that may be ill-suited to address problems, such as war trauma (Dunn 2017) or climate change (Haraway 2016), that demand more holistic and long-term forms of redress (see also Graan 2022). In addition, as Tania Murray Li details (2007), projects emerge through a process of ‘problematisation’, of representing the problem that the project is meant to solve. Yet, the scope of such problematisation is always limited by the agencies and temporalities prescribed by the project form. In the world of development, this means that problems that are deemed ‘structural’ or ‘political’ are viewed as intractable, unmeasurable and thus unaddressable by time-constrained, project-based solutions (see also Copeland 2019).
The normative power of the project form also directs human agency to particular timescapes and temporalities. For example, although the project form might be emblematic of the reorganisation of capital accumulation and labour in recent decades, its model of agency also stands out against prevailing descriptions of neoliberal temporalities. From different vantage points, anthropologists have argued that the contemporary era has foreclosed actors’ possibilities to act in time and manipulate temporal flows. Ethnographic studies have depicted neoliberal time as hopelessly speedy and accelerated (Tomlinson 2007), as unpredictable and stagnant (Mains 2007; Schielke 2008), as devoid of futures (Scott 2014), as marked by urgency (Bandak and Anderson 2022) or as saturated by prolonged waiting (Elliot 2016a; Hage 2015). In an influential 2007 article, Jane Guyer evocatively summarised key features of this neoliberal predicament as ‘a combination of fantasy futurism and enforced presentism’ (2007: 410). The intermediate ‘near future’, by contrast, had been ‘evacuated’ as a timespace for management, planning and action.
Ethnographic examinations detailing how projects conjure up and format social agency under late capitalism place these discussions in a new light. As shown in contributions to this special issue by Carl Rommel, Adam Sargent and Deborah Jones, the project form's imaginary of transformative human agency can offer a sense of control over time and its unfolding – what Georgina Ramsay has theorised as ‘temporal sovereignty’ (2017). Attention to the project form thus provides a means to analyse more precisely how actors hope for (Miyazaki 2004), navigate (Bear 2015), work on (Elliot 2016b) or trick (Moroşanu and Ringel 2016) the future. Furthermore, we contend that projects constitute one of few genres by which actors seek to conceptualise and act on the near future that Guyer portrayed as unmanageable and evacuated. Today, projects are arguably the most recognisable and accessible organisational format for breaking out of neoliberalism's temporal impasse (see Rommel this issue; Abram 2014).
And yet, despite their promises to realise predictions of a world transformed, projects’ imaginary of control over the near future often ends up incomplete (cf. Abram and Weszkalnys 2011: 8–9). This is powerfully illustrated by Deborah Jones’ article (this issue) on a landmine removal project in eastern Ukraine, where Russian aggression in 2014 resulted in the illegal annexation of Crimea and the attempted breakaway of the self-declared Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics. This context, as Jones shows, reveals one limit to project temporalities. On the one hand, the project form structured the ‘near term’ as a horizon of action that organised the mine-removal NGO's critical, lifesaving, but incremental work. Yet, on the other hand, the sheer scale of mine removal in eastern Ukraine – the completion of which could take generations – also rendered such projects quixotic and unfinishable if ever so necessary, a tragic point only underscored by Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine that began in 2022.
Carl Rommel (this issue) develops a different but complementary point in his ethnography of project making in Egypt. He shows that the typical, instinctive remedy for projects that fail is to launch new projects, leading to iterative sequences of projects that lack clearly demarcated beginnings and ends, but which nonetheless ‘make the world move’. The result is an ‘everlasting’ (cf. Baxstrom 2011) or ‘suspended’ (Carse and Kneas 2019: 18–20) present, in which flexible projects appear as ever-more attractive and irreplaceable. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the project form's normative capacity to envision the near future as actionable can, in some cases, reproduce the very ‘short term’ as a default temporal framework for action. Thus, while projects provide one of the contemporary era's most recognised social templates to actively structure and manage the near future, their promise of human agency and control is also slippery.
Projects, Alter-Temporalities and Containment
Another defining feature of the project form is its ability to regiment temporalities, that is, to demarcate and order time within what is presupposed to be a rational process of goal-attainment. Indeed, the imaginary of human agency discussed above both depends on and sustains this feature, as the conventions of project making attest. The genres of planning, scheduling, accounting, management and evaluation that projects incorporate cast time in terms of a smooth progression, where time-sensitive steps and stages culminate in a desired end. This ideal, normative model of projects’ sequenced temporal flow can be glossed as ‘project time’ (see also Carse and Kneas 2019; Koster 2020).
Almost certainly, everyone reading this article has had their own encounters with project time. Simply by following the instructions for IKEA furniture or a LEGO set, you interact with a graphic representation of the ordered temporal progress that characterises it. As denizens of thoroughly projectified academic institutions, you also likely experience its normative force when (re)producing representations of project time in grant and research proposals.1 The neat temporal vision forecasted by the project form, however, is inevitably complicated by the exigencies of project making. That is, although projects imply an ordered organisation of time, they are also situated in time, lodged within the rhythms and arrhythmias of market temporalities, corporate governance, social antagonism, material degradation and colonial encounters, to name just a few. In consequence, as virtually anyone who has ever participated in a project (or tried to build IKEA furniture) knows, the abstract, partible time of project planning rarely translates seamlessly into project completion. Complications arise. Plans fall apart. Deadlines are missed. Thus, despite the clean organisation of project time, the process of realising a project is a contingent one that inevitably requires accommodations and adjustments. To echo Simone Abram's pithy observation: ‘Despite their sometimes grandiose pretentions, plans are not always sovereign’ (2014: 133). This is especially true for project making.
The gap between project forecasts and project making comprises heterogeneous and multiplex temporalities. In this zone, project time meets porous social orders (Gershon 2019) and must react to alter-temporalities that are formatted otherwise, for example, of religious celebration, everyday domesticity, social revolution, natural systems, bureaucratic review, consensus building, labour negotiation or market valuation (cf. Abram 2014; Harvey and Knox 2015; Koster 2020; Li 1999; Mitchell 2002; Mosse 2005; Roy 2024). It can also happen that the very scale and ambition of a project exceeds the ordering logics of project time, resulting in projects without end (Jones, this issue) or an iterative succession of projects (Rommel, this issue) that break projects’ claims to smooth progress. Furthermore, as Katja Uusihakala (this issue) shows through her analysis of the British government's project to relocate British children to Rhodesia, the temporal imaginaries that justify projects, such as ‘imperial infinity’, can collapse or retreat, leading to projects that are unmoored from the temporalities that gave them purpose. In the space of such contingency, as Adam Sargent (this issue) shows in his study of a construction project in Delhi, inscriptions of project time (e.g. in work agreements, accounting books and schedules) are often produced retrospectively, during or after project implementation so as to meet others’ (e.g. investors, supervisors, clients) expectations of ‘time-boundedness’. From this perspective, project time can be as much a product as a premise of project-making activity.
The gap between the neat forecasts of project planning and the typical messiness of implementation also serves as a reminder that projects should never be reduced to their plans nor should project temporalities be reduced to project time. Projects necessarily extend beyond planning and, correspondingly, the project form incorporates practices and technologies to anticipate and tame that which cannot be planned for. On examination, one can see how the project form and the repertoire of genres that constitute it provide a dynamic structure that absorbs, defuses or ejects the tensions and contradictions that result when project time runs aground time figured otherwise. For example, common facets of project making, from evaluation and oversight to reporting and ‘pivoting’, that is, recasting project aims or visions (see Sjödin n.d.), provide mechanisms by which the project form can stretch to (possibly) sublimate and neutralise obstacles. This ability of the project form to contain the unruly temporalities that it by necessity brings together constitutes another modality of its normative power.
A few examples drawn from ethnographies of projects help explain this point. First, as Tania Murray Li (1999) argues in her examination of a government programme for ‘the resettlement of isolated peoples’ in Indonesia, projects entail forms of compromise that give project stakeholders ‘room to manoeuvre’ within the interactions and across the stages of project implementation (cf. Rautio 2021). In complement, David Mosse (2005: 39) discusses how project reports can function to dissimulate differences of opinion and disputes that might otherwise impede progress on a project (Mosse 2005: 39). Similarly, Philip Quarles van Ufford (1993) argues that projects often rely on ignorance, both strategic and structural, to contain incompatibilities among the expectations, interests and temporalities of project participants. Finally, Simone Abram's (2014) ethnography of municipal planning in Scandinavia describes how planning often includes nesting structures that provide flexibility when circumstances change.
Projects thus do not merely encounter heterogeneous temporalities wherever they happen to be implemented; they also include means (e.g. compromise, documents, ignorance, nesting structures) to corral heterogeneous temporalities and to shore up the normative, progressive moment of project time. This ability of projects to contain tensions, or to project them onto external sources, reproduces the project form as an attractive model of action, despite the seeming inevitability of complications and unintended consequences. Of course, projects are not always able to contain and subordinate conflicting interests and processes. Time and time again, projects do come undone (e.g. Latour 1996; Roy 2024) in ways that cannot be recuperated within audit culture narratives of relative ‘success’ and ‘failure’ (see Li 1999; Mosse 2005; Quarles van Ufford 1993; Strathern 2000). Nevertheless, the normative expectations of the project form entice people to act in and on time in ways that both reproduce project time and also patch over the inherent unruliness of project making. Project elasticity, that is, the capacity of projects to contain and tame time, emerges from and recreates the project form's normative power.
The Power of Project Afterlives
The disjuncture between neat project time and the messier temporalities of project making also problematises the idea that projects have well-defined closures. Ideally, all projects come to an operational end, yet they often mediate and shape experiences, materialities and temporalities long after they are (or should have been) completed. This propensity of projects to linger past official endpoints gestures to a third modality of the normative power of the project form: a capacity of projects, whether completed or abandoned, to remain, haunt and disturb landscapes, dreams and social relations in an often nebulous period of ‘project afterlives’.
Anthropology has recently seen a surging interest in the phenomena that Walter Benjamin once theorised as ‘afterlives’ (1999). Ethnographies illustrate how aftermaths facilitate renegotiations of pasts and futures (Scott 2014; Schielke 2015; Thomas 2019), reshape hope and affect (Hage 2003), reconfigure social relations and subjects (Humphrey 2008; Rommel 2018; Sharpe 2016) and accelerate socio-political interventions (Simpson 2013; see also Klein 2007). Whereas some scholars locate the transformative potential of aftermaths in new beginnings and clean slates (Simpson 2013; Ssorin-Chaikov 2016), others note that destruction never constitutes a definite endpoint (Sharpe 2016). Whether one prefers to call it ‘debris’ (Stoler 2008), ‘rubble’ (Gordillo 2014), ‘wake’ (Sharpe 2016), ‘ruins’ (Navaro-Yashin 2012) or ‘remainders’ (Bryant 2014), social, ideological and material-affective remains from previous eras inevitably spill over into the present. The past is always re-membered, re-appropriated and re-worked as the world is created anew.
Our interest is less in how the aftermath of transformative events incubates new projects (Simpson 2013) than in the afterlives of projects that once were. How and for whom does the project form mediate activities, experiences, memories and historical reckoning after project time has come to an end? How do projects’ temporal imaginaries and visions of the future live on, even after the ending rituals of a project (e.g. final reports and promotions) are completed and the institutional motors that (re)produce project time have left? What project ruins remain, and how (if at all) are they recuperated within subsequent lives, temporalities and projects?
Inevitably, different processes of project ruination reflect different degrees of completion and disintegration. As Deborah Jones's (this issue) ethnography of landmine removal in eastern Ukraine illustrates, when the scale of a problem exceeds projects’ planning capacity, it can be very difficult to tell if a project has been, or even could be, finished. At other times, the question of whether an unfinished project is under development or in ruins is almost entirely in the eye of the beholder (Ssorin-Chaikov 2016: 694, 710–711). Yet, even though finishedness might be an ideal that is never fully achievable, the normativity of project time renders time-boundedness a pervasive ethnographic reality. Rommel's (this issue) study shows that small-scale investor-projectors in urban Cairo understand and accept that projects typically do not come to a conclusive end. Nevertheless, the dream of once and for all acquiring a measure of ‘stability’ remains a compelling one, urging people to launch series of ever new projects. Such layering of subsequent projects on top of earlier ones results in complex and unexpected palimpsests that generate socialities and temporal configurations that are irrecuperable from within the logics of projects themselves.
Moreover, project components rarely remain in equal measure: while physical and social infrastructures might persist, institutional memory often departs with the managers and project paperwork can vanish in the obscurity of distant archives, creating the conditions for structural amnesia (Ssorin-Chaikov 2016: 712). At other instances, the aftereffects of completed or abandoned projects constitute what Ashley Carse and David Kneas call ‘present absences’ (2019: 17–18): still existing institutional forms, knowledge and expertise, altered landscapes, and subjectivities generated by projects that are no more (see Schler and Gez 2018). Such present absences can mark personal biographies as Katja Uusihakala (this issue) examines in her research on a British child relocation project. As several scholars have shown, memories and reminders of past plans, hopes, lives and relationships dot the ruined landscapes of previously visionary projects long after the hubris of high modernism has lost its traction (e.g. Ghannam 2002; Yarrow 2017: 581–584).
Finally, the afterlife of projects can also be of a less tangible kind. Because of the project form's distinctly modern promise of agency and its stylised timelines, planning and sequencing, projects from the past can lend themselves to extrapolation into a present in which the futures promised by the neat project time are conspicuously unfulfilled. As Thomas Yarrow's (2017) research on an abandoned resettlement project in Ghana shows, the remains of incomplete projects can have an uncanny capacity to evoke detailed visions of what could have been that gives rise to ‘myriad juxtapositions of actual circumstances with the unrealized plans of modernization’ (2017: 567). Here, we see a blurring of the desire for the fulfilment of particular project promises and a more general desire for the imaginary of a progressive future that projects condition. As such, the case recalls Adam Sargent's (this issue) remark that ‘What must be accounted for is not only the ethnographic fact that the smooth progress of development that infrastructure promises is illusory. We must also account for how such a desirable illusion is built, and rebuilt, even as it is never delivered’.
From these examples, it might be easy to see project afterlives as a phenomenon that exceeds or exists beyond the temporal regimentations that characterise the project form. Our argument, however, is that the project form and its procedures to demarcate time and activity condition even this moment in the social life of projects. Even though project time is typically cordoned off by the accounting and document genres by which project managers signal the ‘end’ of a project, project afterlives inevitably follow, and it is in such moments that we can see how the futurities and distinctly human agency that the project form conjures up are appropriated, transformed and intermeshed with other timelines and agencies. This capacity of projects to generate multifaceted debris that continue to matter is yet another modality through which the normative power of the project form not only comes into relief but also endures.
Conclusion: Toward an Anthropology of the Project Form
We began this article with the assertion that projects are everywhere. Through our closer examination of the project form, its temporalities and its normativities, we hope to have arrived at a place where we can answer the question, why? On one level, of course, the omnipresence of projects stems from the adoption of project making by governments, schools, organisations and businesses across the long centuries of the modern period. Such institutions worked to disseminate the project form and to codify its genres of planning, scheduling, management and evaluation. Reciprocally, project making was also integral to the dissemination and codification of government, schools, organisations and businesses as institutional forms. Contemporary waves of projectification have only expanded the reach of project logics. Today the project form's modern genealogy is found reverberating in more contexts that ever before.
Yet, on another level, as we have explored, it is the temporalities and normativities afforded by the project form that make it so very compelling. The project form grounds a field of human agency, it mediates particular visions of the near future as mouldable, and it structures the work of transformation, demarcating what was from what will be. At the same time, the project form can absorb contingencies into its normative, progressive temporality through tools to contain the uncertainty of action across multiple social and temporal orders. And even when project making ends, the fantasies of project agency and of project futures past often remain an active presence. Projects are not the only way of acting in or on the world, but their specific ability to frame time and action make them integral to contemporary lifeworlds.
Our excursion through project temporalities and agencies illustrates the broader significance of projects and project making to the field sites that anthropologists study and theorise. Critical investigations of the project form, such as those collected in this special issue, can inform and expand, not only the way that anthropologists analyse particular projects, but also how anthropologists conceptualise and specify theories of time and agency (see also Rifkin 2017; Valentine and Hassoun 2019). We hope that this introduction has provided a sketch of how an anthropology of the project form can contribute to sociocultural anthropology more broadly in at least three ways.
First, we propose that once one attends to the normative power that inheres within the project form, notions of both agency and projects appear differently. All too often, by our reckoning, scholarly works on agency treat projects as the default expression of human activity. For example, in a sophisticated attempt to rethink agency, practice and power, Sherry Ortner (2006) argues that it is through projects that social actors conceive of and extend their vision or design of the world, yet exactly what a project is (and is not) is never specified. Consequently, project making becomes a conceptual shorthand for agency in general (see also Graan 2022). Similarly, Anna Tsing (2000) discusses globalisation as formed through often conflicting ‘projects’ that themselves produce the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ as scales of action. In doing so, Tsing importantly challenges earlier metaphors of ‘global flows’ that obscured the politics and political economy of globalisation. But, as with Ortner, a loose notion of ‘projects’ marked by future visions and goal-oriented designs still serves as the default conception of action. In contrast, the articles gathered in this special issue demonstrate time and again that projects are not neutral vehicles for human action. Rather, the normative power of the project form shapes and formats human agency to its own logics and its own temporalities. Ultimately, this suggests the need for greater historical specificity and reflexivity in anthropological theorisations of agency.
Second and in parallel, we hope that this special issue will contribute to the larger anthropological discussion of time and temporality by highlighting the project form's prevalence and significance in navigating and reproducing temporal orders. Modern time, as Laura Bear argues (2014), is always beset by multiple, heterogeneous temporalities that actors and institutions must variously mediate and sublimate. Such labour is necessary to (re)produce the temporal imaginaries of capitalism and the nation-state. In this milieu, projects constitute a primary social technology by which modern time is projected, patched and preserved. As we have argued here, the project form presupposes progressive and commensurable time as a field for goal-directed human action. In addition, the elasticity of the project form, its ability to stretch and contain multiple social temporalities, is necessary to (re)produce progressive, commensurable time despite the messy temporalities of project implementation. Moreover, as our inquiry into project afterlives shows, the project form is also one site in which modern time takes on a defined shape, hence, the possibility of desire for project agency itself and its promises of authoring new futures. An anthropology of the project form thus brings to the fore precisely the labours and forms through which progressive time is recuperated despite its shortcomings and dead ends.
Finally, we hope to draw attention to the organising force of the project form in anthropological scholarship. As we noted in the article's introduction, anthropologists increasingly take projects as a location for their research, even if the project form is rarely the object of study. This research, to be sure, has produced illuminating analyses of development, conservation, humanitarianism and technoscience in addition to the forms of governance that they orchestrate. Yet, it has rarely reflected on why ‘projects’ have emerged as such compelling and obvious locations for anthropological research. By spotlighting the project form, this special issue intends to initiate a conversation about this question. Is there something about project making, with all of its normativity, temporality and contingency, that makes it especially attractive as a research setting? Might project dynamics – for example, of rational planning belied by inevitable conflict or uncertainty – even pre-script ethnographic allegory? In other words, if the project form grounds the ethnographic figure that results from anthropological research, how might we effect a figure–ground reversal and become more explicit about how project logics shape ethnographic analysis?
In proposing an anthropology of projects, we aim to bring into relief a social form that has been obscured by its very ubiquity and its claim on our common sense. As we hope to have shown here, and as the articles that follow demonstrate, the agencies and times that populate social worlds, and anthropological analyses, so very often conform and respond to project logics. In analysing the normative power of project form, we thereby inquire into the very formatting of contemporary social life.
Acknowledgements
This article benefited from engagement by many peers. The idea for this special issue took shape following conference panels at the 2019 Meeting of the Finnish Anthropological Society, held in Helsinki, and at the 2020 European Association of Social Anthropology conference, which occurred online due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. We thank our co-presenters, and especially Joana Catela, for their inspiring presentations at these events. Jessica O'Reilly and Ilana Gershon kindly invited us to present a version of this article at a 2021 workshop on ‘Cultural Processes of Global Development’, organised at Indiana University but held online. We thank all of the wonderful participants at that event and especially Erica Borenstein and Heath Cabot who served as commentators on our article. We also presented a draft at the Helsinki Anthropology Brown Bag Seminar. We thank Anni Kajanus for providing us this opportunity to present and are grateful to Suvi Rautio and Timo Kaartinen for valuable comments. Elina Hartikainen read a complete draft of the article and her feedback greatly improved it. Anonymous reviewers provided excellent commentaries that helped to make this article better. We also would like to thank Social Anthropology editors Dimitra Kofti and Nikola Ssorin-Chaikov for their support and guidance. Finally, Andrew's work on this article was made possible by a fellowship from the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies for his research on ‘Project Lessons: An Inquiry into the Past, Present and Future of the Project Form’. Carl's research has been funded by the ERC-advanced grant ‘Crosslocations: Rethinking relative location in the Mediterranean’ (2017–2021) and his own grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, titled ‘Egypt as a Project: Dreamwork and masculinity in a projectified society’ (2022–2025).
Note
One of our anonymous reviewers commented on projectification in academia. The reviewer noted that ‘there have been some (albeit limited) creative outcomes of this move including increased interdisciplinarity and impact’, but that ‘the timebound “project” and the demand for the next “project” also undermines the process of academic writing and fully taking forward ideas’. The reviewer's final caption was: ‘The temporality of the project is deeply controlling. The “afterlife” of the academic project is frequently disappointing.’ We expect that such views will resonate with many readers.
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