Potentiality and Human Temporality

Abstract

In this article I discuss how anthropological investigations of potentiality can be enriched through a focus on time. The ethnographic basis of my inquiry is research conducted in Hanoi, Vietnam, on the use of sonographic imaging. Drawing on this fieldwork, I pursue two main agendas. The first is ethnographic: I explore how the potentiality of children-to-be was represented by people in Hanoi—by pregnant women, by health-care providers, and by population policy makers—showing how social attention concentrated particularly on the unwanted potential of pregnancies. People’s fears that pregnancies might end in disastrous ways were, I show, closely related to Vietnam’s history of war. The terror of the Second Indochina War lay not only in past atrocities or in present-day memories and bodily injuries but also in the future that childbearing women lived in relation to. The war was not only behind but also ahead of people. The second agenda I pursue is analytical. On the basis of my ethnographic material from Vietnam, and drawing on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, I discuss the possible analytical gains of placing “potentiality-for-Being” at the center of anthropological studies. With Heidegger, we may understand human existence as structured through an orientation to the future; seen through this lens, possibility is that through which we realize the givenness of our worlds.