One strand of emergent anthropology that I've been following over the years has been the "anthropology of outer spaces," one recently given new life by a few anthropologists, Deborah Battaglia and David Valentine among them, who have begun to theorize space not just as shadow of terrestrial geo-politics, but as "reconstituting humanness and human sociality in the here and now" (Valentine, Olson and Battaglia 2009: 11). Space is one of the paramount sites for the legitimation of Western configurations of power/knowledge. The kinds of futures people ascribe to space--e.g., the military-technocratic order of Star Trek: the Next Generation--have a lot to do with the apotheosis of colonialism under the auspices of neo-liberal capitalism (Kilgore 2005). But there are different possibilities as well--as Vaelntine et al point out. But some of these possible, alternative futures are happening right here, in the form of Mars simulations placing groups of scientis...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.