Sitting on my desk is a book that I page through when I have a moment: Quantum City . It’s not something I’m going to assign in classes—it’s really a manifesto, with quantum looking a bit like a brand-name than a serious application of quantum mechanics to urban planning. But it reminds me how important anthropology has been to thinking about space and time as an indivisible whole embedded in everyday life. Frame from the film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov. Photo courtesy wikicommons If we think of 19 th century anthropology as the effort to produce time and space as a classificatory grid into which we might slot cultural alterity, then the twentieth century suggested a fairly successful effort to challenge that orthodoxy through a cultural relativism that also occasionally included space/time relativity, the idea, in other words, that space and time form a folded topology in social and cultural life rather than distinct variables in a li...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.