This volume is an experiment: an enquiry into the possibilities and potentialities of a prospective anthropology of utopia. With different ethnographic contributions studying «empirical utopias» across the world (from ecotopias to religious havens, transnational policies, retirement homes and community agriculture), it looks beyond the commonsense understanding of utopia as a desire, an expectation, a form of imagination stemming from Western political thought. In the process, the volume explores the dynamic dialectic between human imagination and concrete action.

Maïté Maskens is a lecturer in anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, affects, bureaucracy and mobility. She is currently working on love and its boundaries, focusing on the treatment of binational marriages by public authorities in Brussels. Ruy Blanes is a Ramon y Cajal fellow at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and as of 2018 Senior Lecturer at the School of Global Studies of the University of Gothenburg. His research interests include the anthropology of religion, identity, politics, mobility and temporality. His current research site is Angola, where he explores ongoing activisms and revolutionary processes. He is the author of A Prophetic Trajectory (2014). He is also co-editor of the journal Advances in Research: Religion and Society.