Expressions of the ‘good life’ and visions of the future: Reflections from Dili and Uatolari

In this chapter, we take up Arjun Appadurai’s (2013) call for a better anthropological understanding of the construction of the future as a ‘cultural fact’ and the implications of this for what he calls people’s ‘capacity to aspire’ (ibid.: 290) – their ability to mobilise resources in order to make strategic decisions about their future. Appadurai argues that debate and discussion around ‘futures’ is often dominated by ‘plans, goals and targets’ – language that is associated with development. Culture, on the other hand, is too readily associated with ‘habit, custom, heritage and tradition’, and therefore dismissed as grounded in the past. Yet the future cannot be other than ‘cultural’ because it is ‘in culture that ideas of the future, as much as the past, are embedded and nurtured’ (ibid.: 179–180). It is within ‘culture’, understood broadly as local systems of value, meaning and communication, that people are enabled or constrained in their ‘capacity to aspire’.