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About this talk

In this year's Daryll Forde Lecture, Ramon Sarró explores how prophets, ruins, and imaginative processes connect and form meaning. This lecture explores how anthropological inquiry might be reoriented through attention to the lines of connection that link prophetic figures, material ruins, and imaginative forms of social life. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in West and Central Africa, it examines contexts marked by historical rupture and the uneven presence of state institutions, where the past persists not as a stable archive but as fragment, trace, and ruin. In such settings, speaker Ramon Sarro suggests that we are confronted with forms of what might be called remote imagination: modes of thought and anticipation that exceed established frameworks of knowledge while connecting disparate temporalities and domains of experience. Prophets appear here not as representatives of a religious category, but as singular figures whose voices traverse and reconfigure these domains, articulating possible futures through visions, narratives, and practices of anticipation. Rather than treating these dimensions as separate—religious, historical, or political—the lecture follows the connections through which they are continuously reworked. It argues that anthropology must move beyond the description of bounded social worlds towards an engagement with the imaginative processes that connect past and future, presence and absence, making ethnography itself a practice of tracing and, at times, participating in these lines of connection. The Lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the UCL Anthropology Student Common Room.

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