Despite contemporary anthropology's growing interest in 'futures' , there has been an absence of sustained dialogue concerning the vital role of anticipation in everyday life. Seeking to bring much needed attention to the first-person perspective on futurity, in this introduction to the special issue we situate anticipation within the temporality of lived experience. Drawing on premises from anthropological studies of experience (particularly phenomenological approaches), we frame the experiential approach to anticipation by highlighting the parameters of its cross-cultural and intercontextual variability. We argue that anticipatory experience provides a crucial locus for ethnographic inquiry into the disparate and polysemous manifestations of futures in everyday life. We then seek to demonstrate how anticipation thus conceived may be productively integrated with numerous ongoing themes within contemporary anthropological scholarship. Finally, we introduce the individual contributions to the issue.

I explore the complexities of moral experience during the phase of life after a terminal diagnosis by examining the experiences of one woman living as a hospice patient in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. Introducing the notion of "existential ambivalence," I show that this can be a period of deep uncertainty, in which what matters to individuals can shift and fluctuate through time, not necessarily lining up with collective ideals of "the good death." I focus on a promise this woman made that continued to pull her toward a version of living well while she was also pulled toward dying.

In this article, I explore anticipation as a site of moral experience and moral willing when death may be nearby. Through an examination of the narratives of the wife of a hospice patient in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, I show that her commitment to not anticipate the course of her husband’s illness is a moral project pitted against biomedical modes of prognostication. In a context in which hospice care is the only option available for many older adults in poor health, I discuss the incommensurability between this position and the anticipatory horizon on which hospice care is predicated: the patient’s imminent death. I argue for an approach to this woman’s experience that takes into account the tendency for temporal orientations to be thrown into flux when death might be nearby, without reducing her commitment to not anticipate to mere avoidance or ‘denial’.

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This essay presents an ethical argument for the value of taking a theoretical perspective that privileges the particularities of individual lived experience over a priori categories of subjecthood. This argument is made through the examination of one practice – disclosure – among American patients who have recently been diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, a fatal genetic disorder. Disclosure is understood in this context as the expected sharing of a Huntington’s disease diagnosis by the patient with those close to her (primarily family). It is modeled on the practice in which a medical professional informs a patient of her diagnosis. Through advancing an account of disclosure that constitutes it as an ethically obligatory practice within the realm of bioethics, the essay demonstrates that a particular set of ethical priorities is assumed by insisting on the salience of disclosure in the lives of patients diagnosed with Huntington’s disease. Two case studies are presented to illustrate that patients’ lived experience in the wake of a Hunting ton’s disease diagnosis does not necessarily include disclosure as an ethically important practice.