Science Fiction’s Emergent Anthropologies. SF Beyond Anthropological Science Fiction

 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

Speculative Anthropology Series in Cultural Anthropology

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.   

Tracking the Future at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

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(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 of futures in the contexts of anthropological method and theory with the ultimate goal of working to change the present.  This is clearly anthropology’s anticipatory moment, and we see scholars from multiple subdisciplines (STS, environmental anthropology, urban anthropology, etc.) exploring what futures might be evoked in the space of anthropological intervention.  The methods and potentials of this are being shaped right now, and this year represents a watershed moment. 

In a way, I hope that this doesn’t coalesce into a canonical approach to futures.  The multidirectionality of these evocations is the best feature of this round of AAA papers: urban, multispecies, reproductive technologies, SF, dystopia, journalism, government policy.  Here the future is multiple, and my instinct would be to contribute to open futures through our anthropologies, rather than joining with, say, the dismal science to close off difference through model-driven prognostications. 

I have worked through the obstinate, online AAA schedule and commented on some of the more obvious, future-oriented panels.  That said, there are many, many papers that evoke future world-making that are not in this list, but even this partial schedule is impressive and even revolutionary (at least to anthropology).  Of course, if you know of something I’ve missed, please comment and I’ll correct my omission!  

And, by the way, shame on AAA for scheduling 3 science fiction panels at exactly the same time (2-3:45 pm on Saturday afternoon)!  Three!  The only good thing is that you can attend one, and then retire to our gaming salon where you’ll find free copies of our book, “Gaming Anthropology” and, of course, drink tickets. 

(2-0150) Anthropocene Landscapes, Infrastructures and Futures

Wednesday, November 29

12:00 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Marriott, Marriott Ballroom Salon 2 

My notes: Anthropocene brings together multiple temporal strands around contested landscapes through ecologies, technologies, geographies, etc.  These papers consider these multiple, future entanglements and the way they traffic between past and present. 

(2-0340) Future Cities: When, Where and How?

Wednesday, November 29

2:15 PM - 4:00 PM

Location: Marriott, Madison A 

My notes: Cities are informed by developmental futures envisioned by policy makers and technocrats, but these developmental narratives are also open to appropriation and resistance—to other futures less yoked to neoliberal growth. 

(3-0105) Futures Come to Matter: Future as Analytic in Ethnography

Thursday, November 30

8:00 AM - 9:45 AM

Location: Marriott, Virginia Suite C

My notes: Given that “the future” is a discursive and representational tool for organizing the present, how might anthropologists utilize this as an “analytic” in their ethnography? 

(3-0295) Future Matters: Anticipatory Knowledge and Scenario-modeling

Thursday, November 30

10:15 AM - 12:00 PM

My notes: In the style of Ulf Hannerz’s work in “Writing Future Worlds” (and he’s on the panel as well), these papers consider the “anticipatory futures” produced by various organizations in the form of “scenarios”. 

(3-1035) Fabricating Utopics: Hacking Imaginaries

Thursday, November 30

4:15 PM - 6:00 PM

Location: Marriott, Thurgood Marshall North

My notes: The panel looks to appropriations of the spirit and methods of “hacking” across a spectrum of activisms vis-à-vis the state and the community.  Hacking here refers to subverting neo-liberal ideologies to issues of social justice and parity.

 

 (3-1005) Future matters: Ethnography of Weather and Climate Knowledge and Forecasting

Thursday, November 30

4:15 PM - 6:00 PM

Location: Marriott, Harding

My notes: This panel considers anthropological approaches to “atmospheric futures” through ethnographic examinations of the various anticipatory models people and communities produce. 

(4-0180) Open and Closed Futures

Friday, December 1

8:00 AM - 9:45 AM

Location: Marriott, Roosevelt 2

My notes: These papers reflect on the “temporal turn” in anthropology and look to different examples of “dilating” or “constricting” through the politics of temporal practice. 

(4-0810) The Other Side of Hope

Friday, December 1

2:00 PM - 3:45 PM

Location: Marriott, McKinley

My notes: Extrapolating on Miyazaki’s vision of “hope” in a world of looming disaster, these papers consider the dystopian possibilities that lie on the “otherside” of more hopeful multispecies and techno-imaginaries of the future. 

(4-1225) Queering Futures: Futures as Forces, Futures as Products

Friday, December 1

4:15 PM - 6:00 PM

Location: Marriott, Roosevelt 4

My notes: Queering the future means undermining normative (and heteronormative) visions of a future that is always already an abyssal extension of the ideological-normative “now”. 

(5-0810) “Realists” of a Larger Reality: Anthropological intersections with Science Fiction

Saturday, December 2

2:00 PM - 3:45 PM

Location: Marriott, Virginia Suite C

My notes: This panel looks to intersections of anthropology and science fiction, and to the ways both have been informed by contemporary social movements.  The hope is that the confluence of all of these will open up alternatives to the fascist dystopia in which we live. 

(5-0900) Ethnography Otherwise: Imagining More-than-human Worldings through Science Fiction

Saturday, December 2

2:00 PM - 3:45 PM

Location: Omni, Congressional A

My notes: the Anthropocene demands new tropes for describing these complex imbrications of technology, nature, non-humans that transcend the facile binarisms (nature v. culture) that have characterized anthropological figurations.  These papers look to science fiction as a source for re-figuring these relationships in anthropological interventions. 

(5-0750) Toying with Our Teleologies: Anthropologists Read SF

Saturday, December 2 2:00 PM - 3:45 PM Location: Marriott, Thurgood Marshall West

My notes: The papers in this session look to SF as a provocation to anthropology and as a resource for its interventions.  But this is a critical entanglement, and includes interrogating the politics of SF (and anthropology-in-SF).  

(6-0105) Technological Futures

Sunday, December 3

8:00 AM - 9:45 AM

Location: Marriott, Delaware Suite A

My notes: this panel considers the ways technological developments are bound up with images and practice of the future, ones that swing wildly between utopia and dystopia. 

Steve Toutonghi's Join and Notes on a Networked Anthropology of the Future

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 personal and social lives are organized as networks?  This is, of course, exactly what is happening.  Yes, online social networks themselves have become more popular, but, more than that, highly localized social networks have become more popular--SNS platforms that support networks characterized by high density and centrality.  These are social networks for cliques (or complete graphs) where everyone knows everyone else, and everyone talks to everyone else.

In Korea, users engage multiple social media in their daily lives, and platforms like Facebook and Instagram have been extremely popular.  However, there has also been a concomitant growth in proprietary platforms that support social media sharing among a close circle of intimates: KaKaoTalk is one of those--with nearly 100 percent adoption in South Korea, it is the app of choice for online discussion and media sharing.  BAND is another.

Both of these suggest what Ichiyo Habuchi has called "tele-cocooning"--a term that describes a small group of friends that spend a large portion of each day in intimate, digital communication.  Or, as Ito et al define it in their Living and Learning with New Media:

    The practice of maintaining frequent and sometimes constant (if passive) contact with       close friends and/or romantic partners.

And people in South Korea are hardly alone in these proclivities.  In my ethnographic work, and in classroom assignments with my students, I have found that most social media communication takes place between small groups of confidants.  The idea of "virality" that is coveted (and occasionally feared) in YouTube videos or Twitter content is the tiny exception to a towering corpus of online media shared with a very small group of compatriots.  We tend to think of social media in expansive forms, mostly because a combination of hope and fear.  The hope (for some) is that their content will reach millions.  The fear, of course, is exactly the same.  And yet most of us interact almost wholly within a small circle--well below Robin Dunbar's number!

However: with its connotations of passivity and introspection, "tele-cocooning" may not be the best way to describe this process.  "Tele-cocconing" connotes insular lives, summoning up images of teens camped out on the sofa texting for hours, or, in Korea, a rash of phone zombie injuries where oblivious people absorbed in their phones fall down holes or get hit by cars.  But the circle of intimates that "cocoons" is simultaneously encountering and engaging the world.  For almost 2 decades, social scientists have written convincingly on the ways social media enables various forms of collective action.  What about groups of connected friends?  What kinds of social action do these groups undertake?  What do they do, and how is that different than people who lack those intimate, everyday social networks?

In a slightly different context, Steve Toutonghi take on these questions in his 2016 novel, Join, a near future where people "join" with each other, taking on a new, collective identity that is an amalgam of all of the individuals (the "drives") who have been incorporated.  The main characters, "Chance" and "Leap," are further subdivided into the men and women who make up the join: Leap One, Leap Two, Leap Three.


Joins are different from ordinary humans ("solos" or, more pejoratively, "ferals") in at least 2 respects.  First, joins are never alone.

His parents used metaphors--it's like being more attuned to all of who you are, all your different desires and fears; it's like clearly remembering who you were ten years ago, before events changed you.  They said the awareness of being more than one person included a comforting sense of companionship. (9)

Second, they are theoretically immortal.  With each drive possessing the memories of its joined alters, memories and identity might continue indefinitely.

If Chance Five dies, then Chance--and therefore Javier Quispe--will live on through other drives in the join.  That can continue forever.  In a perfect join, human beings lose both their existential sense of isolation and their mortality. (10)

This constant connectivity and simultaneity presents some challenges for Toutonghi.  How to narrate action?  The usual strategy in narrative omniscience is to switch from perspective to perspective--much harder to do here when the perspectives are both the same and different.  For the most part, Toutonghi limits the confusion through simply separating his drives by geography.


But the reasons why the narrative is challenging (and why it occasionally falters) is the reason why this is an interesting novel.  How do we conceive of distributed cognition and connected action on an everyday level?  How do we understand and narrate the decisions we make when liberal assumptions about individuality must be dismissed?


In an anthropological spirit (and his undergraduate major was in anthropology), Toutonghi explores joins as a total social fact--as a different modality of thinking and socializing, as a different politics generative of different inequalities.  The plot revolves around a malady unique to joins, a "flip" that involves one of the joins rejecting the union, precipitating a cascade effect that ends in dysfunction and death.


And it also includes a social critique.  The proliferation of joins among elites leads to a "narcissistic" introspection that supplants other, more linear, concerns.  Entranced by their own transcendence of time, other, resolutely temporal problems like social inequality and environmental degradation seem insignificant.

There has been a slow and continual erosion in the size of the refuge that the Earth can offer.  Chance has watched for years as its edges have crept inward and its center has weakened.  Death is impatient, and suffering multiplies, but not yet for joins.  They just don't notice it, as each successive catastrophe is quickly buried beneath the limitless weight of individual days and years.  For now, Chance's fellow joins are comfortable, which seems to be enough for them to continue minutely examining the mysteries of life. (332)

With de facto immortality, joins train their attention on the longue duree, to the detriment of timely concerns in the present.  And after all of this Bruno Latour-esque evocation of networked action, Toutonghi channels a bit of Sheri Turkle and Robert Putnam in the insistence on face-to-face engagement in real communities.


But, ultimately, what draws me to this novel is the quotidian life of the join.  While networked decision making has long been a topic in HCI, and more recent scholarship from people like Larissa Hjorth has investigated the affective dimensions of networked lives, the questions of everyday speech and interaction have not really been addressed.  To be sure, networked behavior is not a new phenomena, but the ubiquity of online social networking means that we have more and more opportunities to behave as chains of linked confidants.  In this context, as in other cases of networked action, interactions with place and with each other may be less explicable with theories that rest on the either/or dichotomy of individual self and social structure.  But how would that look?  How do we talk when the "I" is always chained in a network of relations?  Sometimes phrases seem familiar: "We did the homework."  "We decided to meet downtown."  But what about: "We bought a shirt" or "We ordered the cannelloni"?  Do these still make sense when we're talking about the behaviors and actions of a single(?) person?  


References



Ichiyo Habuchi, “Accelerating Reflexivity,” in Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, ed. Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

Ursula K. Le Guin: Anthropological, But Not an Anthropologist

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

Fiddling With Le Guin (2009)

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

The New Anthropological Science Fiction--A Review of Ekaterina Sedia

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 alterity--no easy way to divide the alien other from the self.  

Ekaterina Sedia's The House of Discarded Dreams (2010) follows the dream-like adventures of Vimbai and her roommates through a perambulating, mutating house rife with variously mischievous spirits. It is absolutely in the tradition of the mysterious house--the genius of place that exerts its (oftentimes baleful) influence over its residents, from Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables to Lovecraft and beyond.

But when I read Sedia's novel, I had a more contemporary text in mind--Richard Grant's View from the Oldest House (1989).  Both, after all, feature disaffected college students discovering GREAT TRUTHS amidst an inexplicable house.  In Grant's novel, it's the tiresome Turner Ashenden, a Stephen Daedalus knock-off who is a spiritless foil for the postmodern jouissance that swirls decadently around him.

Sedia's text is certainly in that bildungsroman tradition, and even takes the same mis-en-scene, but with Vimbai, a New Jersey college student with parents from Zimbabwe. Her own relationship to Harare is tenuous--some vague memories of pictures, coloring books, and her grandmother--i.e., a very different place than the Zimbabwe her politically active parents fled.

But the New Jersey beach house she moves into is just the place to explore tenuous memories, ambiguities and contradictions.  As the house inexplicably takes to sea, Vimbai and her roommates, Felix and Maya, gradually confront their unresolved conflicts through encounters with various spirits--baleful or beneficent.  For Vimbai, a bestiary of Shona folklore, from the appearance of her grandmother as an ancestral spirit (vadzimu) who, fortunately, can cook for the roommates, to the "man-fish" Njuzu, a "Zimbabwean urban legend" (110).  The house seems to materialize her ambiguous relationship to her family, to the experience of race and racism in the US, to her education (marine biology) and to her sexuality:

Obedient, Vimbai dreamt,  Her dreams were vivid--more vivid, it seemed, than the waking landscapes inside the house.  She dreamt of smells and sounds, of saturated solid planes of color.  She dreamt of Africa as she had half-remembered it from her trip, half-imagined from the coloring books her mother bought her, and then got upset when Vimbai colored children on the pages pink instead of brown. (142)

Their exploration of the house's "pocket universe" brings Vimbai up against these dreams, and up against a life that she only understands in half-articulated kaleidoscopes of memories inflected with her parent's post-colonial critiques of Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

As she confronts zombie horseshoe crabs stricken with soul loss, the cognitive dissonance is too much:

This collision of worldviews--one that allowed for talking horseshoe crabs and one that hinged on graduate school applications--made her breath catch in her throat, bowled her over, brought her to her knees, and she clutched her head in her hands. (86)

But, eventually, she begins to come to terms with herself qua the contradictory networks that run through her life, connecting her to family, to ancestors, to other women.  

With every passing second, the wrinkles on her grandmother's face grew more and more familiar, with the same inevitability as one's face is recognized in the mirror.  Soon, the vadzimu and Vimbai would not be able to tell where one ended and the other began. (242-43)

With her grandmother's animus, it is Vimbai who begins to spin her own kind of magic.  Telling her own contemporary versions of ngano (pedantic folk stories), Vimbai is able to make peace with the trickster-figure man-fish and bring some semblance of order to her world.

It is an enigmatic novel--certainly as potentially narcissistic as Grant's View From the Oldest House, but never so self-assured.  Instead, the house stands at the intersection of global networks that bring together places, cultures, identities, social class, race and sexualities.

"That there are forces in the world," Felix answered.  "Forces that run along invisible wires--like phone wires of the spirit, and sometimes you get trapped in them like Peb, and sometimes you stumble in the middle and get caught like a fly in a spider web . . ." (71)

Sailing off into the ocean falls in to that "there and back again" cycle as much Odyssean as Earthsea, but it is also a way of enjoining a world of transitional, sociohistorical connections--a physical movement to mirror the movement of immigrants.   

So what kind of anthropological science fiction is this?  Perhaps some would place it more with  fantasy, but I see here a desire to interrogate the world-making that characterized more assured science fiction in the 1960's and 1970's--think Michael Bishop's early work, but more complex and more uncertain.  With Sedia, it is not the experience of culture contact that is at stake, but the open-ended life of a person stretched between different identities, what Lila Abu-Lughod has called a "halfie".  Who is self?  Who is Other?

And this kind of question cascades into the consciousness of multiple connections puncturing holistic visions of identity: nature and culture, local and global.  An animism that takes Sedia's protagonists over and beneath the seas, and one that ultimately undermines our understanding of culture as unified, integrated and autonomously human (in the Cartesian sense).  

Book Review, The City and the City: China Mieville and the Revival of Anthropological Science Fiction

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 would particularly identify his work as anthropological. He certainly doesn't in a 2003 interview in Science Fiction Studies with Joan Gordon. There, he includes among his influences 1) his teenage fascination with RPGs; 2) his interest in postcolonial writers; and 3) his commitment to socialism. If anything, anthropology is presented as a negative dialectic leading him to reject postmodernity (then still fashionable in anthropology), and embrace a broader critique of capitalism.

But readers of The City & The City will find this his most anthropological to date--theoretically rich, critical, and ultimately subversive of contemporary militancy. The story (and I will not include spoilers here) concerns two cities (Beszel and Ul Qoma) that co-exist, one interpellated into the other at various, fractal places. Not surprisingly, a variety of institutional orders exist to police the sites where the two cities "cross-hatch," including educational programs to "unsee" the other city as well as a mysterious, vaguely para-human force (breach) to police unlawful incursions into one place from another.

That this is absolutely believable is testament to the 21st century explosion of "spaces of exception"--all of variously enfeoffed "zones" that proliferate along the edges of capital and empire, marking off places for foreign capital investment, for the suspension of one governing system for another (think Kaesong industrial complex at the border of North and South Korea), for the suspension of citizen rights or even (after Agamben) human rights: refugee camps, the chicanery of international "internship" visas, etc. When we hear, as we have now daily for years, about Bagdhad's "Green Zone," Guantanomo on the edge of Cuba, occupied territories, what we're really doing is witnessing the ability of law and politics to create hybrid spaces within nations--what Mieville calls in the context of his novel "interstitial" spaces.

Take a conventional topographic narrative--say Dickens' Tale of Two Cities--and then fold it on itself like a Mobius strip. That's the theory behind Mieville's novel (although his narrative takes a more familiar, linear form). But, in a real sense, it's also exactly the situation for much of the world's population today, all of whom, and with varying degrees of choice, shift between legal, political, social and cultural orders in a world where borders are mobile, but still very real. So: in the grand tradition of sf dating back to at least More's Utopia, Mieville describes the present through his oeuvre. And really, only through sf is this kind of description of hyper-reality possible (Mieville, I think, would not appreciate the Baudrillard reference).

The underlying message in this is the question of the ends of interpretation, the goal of analysis. Should we frolic in the interstices of global capitalism (a la postmodern jouissance) or should we solve its crime. It's no whim that leads Mieville into this uneasy amalgam of sf, fantasy and detective fiction. The city, as Poe and Benjamin knew, demands a detective--the desire to follow the thread of the crime back to its source. In the figure of Inspector Tyador Borlu lies the moral imperative to expose the workings of power beneath the phantasmagoria of interpenetrating boundaries and identities.

It is a clarion call for us to investigate the interstices of our own cities--to "breach" the ideologies that naturalize the logic of exception, and follow the crimes back to the powerful forces behind them.