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

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...

Children's day (어린이날) is upon us, so the family was off to the neighborhood CGV at 군자역 to see "Avengers: The Age of Ultron."  I'm not a fan, but I consoled myself with the thought that the movie would somehow work into my research on Seoul and science fiction.  And, indeed, it's certainly gratifying to see Avengers battling it out in front of "Kimbap Heaven."  However: without the still, I would have missed it.  For all of the money spent (and for all of the incentives the city of Seoul dished out), there's barely five minutes of Seoul in this film, and that--beside a couple of signs in Korean and an 옥상 텃밭--is of a generic "any city," bits and pieces of Seoul strung together into a non-place. And I was not the only one disappointed.  As Gang Yu-jeong argued in 경향신문: A masterpiece of atmospheric kitsch, the back alleys where the action takes place in the Avengers don't really look that different from the back alleys of Hong Kong...

Congrats to Samuel Gerald Collins for winning the 2014 Battisti Award for best article in 'Utopian Studies' (2013, 24:1)! #susmtl14 — SUS (@utopianstudies) October 25, 2014 Goes to an article I published in Utopian Studies: Train to Pyongyang: Imagination, Utopia, and Korean Unification Samuel Gerald Collins From:  Utopian Studies Volume 24, Number 1, 2013 pp. 119-143 | 10.1353/utp.2013.0013 Abstract Abstract: This essay is motivated by the seeming contradiction that Korean unification is sought after by most Koreans yet speculations about the social and cultural changes it might bring are almost absent. This may be because Korean unification denotes a series of differences contrasted to the present—because it is a potent “master symbol” with one foot in utopian speculation and the other in policy studies. In this essay, I outline some of the complexities, starting with an examination of illustrations of unification in textbooks for the tensions and co...

There's a really interesting (or at least suggestive) story in May's issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction : "Circle," by George Tucker. Oh, it's got plenty of standard SF devices: Billy Black is a Seminole shaman who never seems to get hurt at the cursed construction site he's working on in Miami (a la the "Miami circle"). Eventually, he's hired on to "exorcise" the spirits from the site and, after a couple of complications, everyone profits: the condo complex goes up, complete with the cultural "value-added" of a seminole shaman and Billy can finally buy the plot to his grandfather's grave in order to stop developers from dis-interring his body . . .Kind of a Heinlein-esque-free-market-conquers-all story. But, there's other things afoot here as well . . .The resolution of the story rests on Billy's realization that the "spirit of place" must be given recognition in order to be palliated. But what kind ...