Gypsies, Travellers and other marginalised groups are often constructed as being present oriented. However, though having only formed from the 1960/70s onwards; with a comparatively short history of shared culture and kinship, New Travellers engage in various?ways of investing in, and making,?certainty regarding their shared future. This was captured by one interlocutor asserting that ‘There will always be Travellers’, despite the newest in a string of legislation?criminalising their lifestyle being rolled out at that time. Conceptualising this group, which formed in opposition?to capitalism, individualisation and environmental degradation, as a new alternative world, this paper will explore why and how they seem so certain?they will ‘always be’. In doing so, it will also speak to current anthropological issues regarding human possibilities; what we could be and how we may make a future within and beyond neoliberalism and in the environmental conditions of the Anthropocene. Extending work applying anthropological notions of uncertainty to long-standing Gypsy and Traveller groups, I will suggest that in this case, and perhaps beyond, it may be more pertinent?to explore how they produce a sense of certainty, for example, through modes?of child socialisation and their collective mediation of death. Here, I will also examine how conceptualisations of survivance can be brought to bear on this community’s future-making activities. In this regard, the paper will explore New Travellers’ novel norms, practices, and imaginaries - their alternative worldmaking - what this consists of and what it is that endures in these processes.
