When does the story end? Presence, the present and ‘the contemporary world’

Abstract We write and read ethnography in the wake of time passing: a fact that has long thrown up a host of epistemological and ethical issues for the doing of anthropology. In this essay I revisit this classic problem—the problem of the ethnographic present—asking what happens when we rethink the relationship between ‘the present’ and ‘presence’, the latter held up not just as a methodological commitment but also, increasingly, as an ethical principle. Doing so encourages us to unpack the oft‐stated claim that anthropology is uniquely equipped to engage with ‘the contemporary world’. Where do we locate this world and how do we situate our interlocutors and ourselves in relation to it? If ethnography is often a form of storytelling about ‘the contemporary world’, when do our stories start, and when do—or should—they end?