Viable Futures: Worlds of Waymaking, Orientation and Discernment

This article explores how an anthropological engagement with the interplay between life, ways and worlds may afford us a framework for understanding what makes life viable and what is corrosive to attaining viability. Centrally, it advances an understanding of viability as pertaining to paths, roads and ways, as well as to life itself. Indeed, there can be no life without roads. The problem, however, is how to envisage these when any road forward seems non-existent. Since the concept of viability invites ethnographic exploration of what it means to make a way, I propose waymaking as a central term for the anthropological lexicon. Waymaking here becomes a cipher for discerning new pathways within the limits of the world at hand. Indeed, the article does not advance a romantic notion of human agency but asks for a situated analysis of how worth, violence, and inequality plays out in and between discrepant lifeworlds.