How many people speak Esperanto across the world? With the emer- gence of online language courses and digital media, is Esperanto more or less widely spoken than, say, 30 years ago? These are questions that matter to Esperanto associations and publishers, who rely on member- ship fees, congress attendance and purchases to justify the continuation of their activities. However, these are not among the main concerns of Martine, Daniel, Idris or Julien: for what they do, figures on Esperanto speakers are not as important as the quality of their conversations, trips, contacts and horizontal learning opportunities. Then, what does Esperanto—and, analogously, anthropology—gain and lose with such a focus on prefiguration?
Addressing this speech community and language movement from the perspective of universalism has led us to think of Esperanto ultimately as a project deeply rooted in modernism, with ambitions of becoming the de facto global language. Through this lens, we logically conclude that its present-day speakers are outcasts, a voluntary minority who supports a quixotic cause. Yet a closer look at instances of mundane language use unveils a different scenario, in which Esperanto becomes relevant to its speakers as a more open-ended achievement. From this view- point, Esperanto appears outside the framework of success and failure: it emerges as a tool that (re)politicises and brings back to the discussion the role played by languages in the fight for global justice and egalitarianism in communication.
Whereas an outlook towards prefiguration is in line with the present- oriented analytical focus ascribed to ethnography (Hastrup 1990), over- looking the way in which modern universalist discourses came into being entails losing sight of how Esperanto is conveyed as an improb- able success. Even if most Esperantists may have never effectively been universalists, such discourses that underplay the language's prefigura- tive prospects convey the perception that they were indeed universalists, which culminated in present-day Esperantists being more mocked than feared. It only becomes possible for us to discern the creativity and signif- icance of these prefigurative endeavours once we measure them against this powerful universalist discourse. This, in turn, also sets the grounds for—and the limits of—presentism.
Remaining close to metaphysical presentism, anthropologists such as Alfred Gell (1992) and Nancy Munn (1992) hold that both the past and the future only exist in their representations in the present. Drawing on these approaches, Felix Ringel (2016, 2018) suggests that anthropology should pay equal attention to every temporal relation and experience, regardless of them pertaining to the past, present or future. In this fashion, Ringel (2018) makes room for an outlook towards presently held perceptions of possible futures. Ringel's interlocutors in a shrinking town in East Germany in the twenty-first century consid- ered their personal and collective futures as an issue more pressing than their socialist and post-socialist (hardly achieved) pasts. By contrast, my interlocutors online and in Paris—mainly those engaging with Esperanto outside the framework of associations—considered Esperantos present as particularly important. Ensuring not to read my interlocutors' present experiences as determined by Esperanto's past, my analysis attempts to give symmetrical importance to how the historically devised, underlying universalist discourses and narratives that define Esperanto as 'anachro- nistic' influence the language's present-day use. In other words, a sole focus on the prefigurative endeavours of Esperantists that sidestep past discourses would risk curtailing the analytical potential of ethnography in making sense of the very present at stake.
Without leaving aside the commonplace universalist discourse surrounding Esperanto, I argue that being an Esperantist, both now and in the past, entails regularly speaking the language as a prefigurative prac- tice. In this sense, Esperantists' political activism and more egalitarian communicative practices place this language as a mundane communica- tive experiment that cannot easily fit the binarism success versus failure in the study of social movements. Could this framework of analysis be used to understand other social movements, citizens initiatives or political practices often classified as 'failures?' In proposing a novel way to look at present orientations, temporal reasonings and activism, this chapter has shown that, in Esperantists' prefigurative practices, what matters is not
replacing English or conquering the world, but keeping the conversation
going.
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