All Tomorrow's Cultures

 My contribution to a really interesting issue on science fiction and the future in Rivista di antropologia contemporanea (2023). Abtsract: Science fiction and anthropology are separate projects, each developing according to its own logic, but there have been cross-hatchings where they have met and influenced each other. The late Nineteenth century, for example, saw both an anthropology and a science fiction in service of colonialism and racism through unilinear evolutionary tropes. SF and anthropology in the twentieth century, on the other hand, explored different configurations of cultural relativism as ways of not only understanding culture, but of exploring its future. The twenty-first century has also been generative of crossings between SF and anthropology, a «speculative anthropology» that promises to re-make both

Please check out this provocative collection of papers at cultural anthropology.  Edited by Ryan Anderson, Emma Louise Backe, Taylor Nelms, Elizabeth Reddy and Jeremy Trombley (and including my own short commentary), the essays speak to the importance of SF to our imagining of alternatives.   

--> (the Wow! signal, visualized by Benjamin Crowell, from Wikimedia) In a few days, many anthropologists will attend the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.   For several days, they will track back and forth to airless, windowless rooms that exist in a strange non-place and non-time: a conference space replete with kitschy designs, cheap gilding, stentorian carpeting that suggests transit lounges and casinos at any time from the 1970s to the 1990s.   But, given the growing horror just outside these conference-room bunkers—the growing crypto-fascism from the authoritarian government, almost-certain ecological apocalypse, economic and political collapse—it’s doubly important to look to the future as the anticipation of hope, of fear and, importantly, of radical difference and change.   And this is what has happened.   This year, there are an unprecedented number of papers and panels exploring the contours...

There are many interesting formations that might be called networked phenomena.  Homophily and the tendency towards triad closure.  Scott Feld's Rule (I'm more likely to make friends with someone who has more friends than me).   Cascading behaviors (i.e., virality).  Small world phenomena (those 6 degrees of separation).  In all, a series of social forms that complicate typical binarisms like individual v. group. Instead, these behaviors are simply networked--explicable through linked nodes.  In other words, not an 'individual'; but not an amorphous, superstructural group.  These have all kinds of implications for social action, cognition, identity and feeling.  As Sampson (2012) writes, Decision are not, as such, embedded in people, or in the voluntary exchanges with others, but in the very networks to which they connect.  It is, like this, the network relation that leads the way. (168) But what happens when more and more of our p...

An essay I wrote a few years ago that has emerged from behind its paywall . . .Let's hear it for Science Fiction Studies ! http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/collins109.htm

Here's my 2009 review essay for Science Fiction Studies on some interesting secondary scholarship on Ursula K. Le Guin.  

Over the past months, I have been trying to decide (if only in my own mind) what anthropological science fiction looks like today.  After all, if you're looking for "fully realized worlds" in the style of 1960's and 1970's fiction, you'll not find it.  Even authors synonymous with "anthropological science fiction" (e.g., Ursula K. Le Guin) have moved away from that style towards something more like what James Clifford has called "partial truths".  "Ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial – committed and incomplete” (7). But, that said, anthropological science fiction still exists, albeit not by that name.  Or, rather, what's produced today is a kind of anthropological science fiction under erasure.  That is, rather than the full (and functionalist) anthropological sf of the 20th century, what seems "anthropological" about sf today are exactly those partial, contradiction-ridden evocations of difference and al...

I have often suggested that China Mieville is the best new writer of anthropological science fiction, although appending the word "anthropological" to his stuff suggests the extent to which anthropology has changed in the time since the concept was coined in the 1960's. (Although, see a March 2009 interview Mieville did with Ursula K. Le Guin (posted on her website in the MP3s section)). Mieville's Bachelor's degree is in social anthropology (at Cambridge), and reading King Rat or Perdido Street Station makes me think of Marilyn Strathern's work, with a thick dose of Donna Haraway: lots of hybridity, fecund sites of emergence of new forms of life that combine biological and machinic into fantastic topologies, all shot through with a sense of postcolonial theory and a strong grounding in Marxism. Chad Oliver (my favorite anthropological science fiction ancestor) would, I think, not really have liked his stuff, and I'm not even sure that Mieville himself...