The lottery of life: practices of survivance, future orientation, and everyday news routines on a Dutch Caribbean island

Journal article

This paper explores how practices of survivance (Vizenor 2008) might be conceptualized according to the localities and temporalities expressed through everyday news routines on Curaçao, a Dutch Caribbean island. I do so by taking an anthropological approach to news (understood as a social practice of turning events into collective stories) with a focus on future ‘orientations' (Bryant and Knight 2019). Building on fieldwork on Curaçao in 2015-16, I focus on how Curaçaoans act upon persistent uncertainty through future-oriented news routines. In the case I present in this paper, this means practicing news in the hope for a better future via games of chance (lottery) and with faith in a future that is inevitable (obituaries). These future orientations are open-ended. While hope speaks to an unknown future that is desired, faith speaks to the immanence of an inevitable future full of chance. Whereas institutional actors (in politics, business, media) on the island and in the Dutch world orientate toward mitigating uncertainty and anticipating risk – also, at times, in relation to capitalizing on desires and hopes – I show that everyday news routines around the lottery (of life) also show how Curaçaoans, especially those marginalized and without access to the institutional public, creatively navigate uncertainty by embracing chance. This future-oriented mode of being, or becoming, articulates tactics of survivance whereby an active presence takes shape in the contingency of everyday life.

Authors: Rotmeijer, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Anthropological Society of Oxford
• Journal: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 134-153
• Publication date: 2023-12-19
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-n14kdzjap
• ISSN: 2040-1876
• Language: English
• Keywords: chance; survivance; news; future orientations; Caribbean; JASO