All Tomorrow's Cultures

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...

It has been almost thirty years since Johannes Fabian published Time and the Other (1983), a scathing critique of the ways anthropologists have slotted the Other into “other” times—the “savages” or “primitives” said to resemble the West’s history.  In many ways, his critique is still relevant today; the same kinds of discourse are used to explain contemporary politics in the Middle East with reference to supposedly ancient ethnic conflicts .  But there are other temporal machinations at work these days as well.  A fairly typical, recent example: a February 22 New York Times article on South Korea’s ubiquitous computing (“ For South Korea, Internet at Blazing Speeds is Still Not Fast Enough”)—years ahead of the United States.  Instead of being slotted into the past, here Korea appears as the future—underscoring US fears of being overtaken by Asian economies.  In this way, US futures are invoked in comparisons with the demographics, educational institutions, h...

In a January 26th New York Times op-e d, " 25 Years of Digital Vandalism , " William Gibson reflects on the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.  As a genuine futurist, Gibson looks to Stuxnet as a sign of the times--and a bellwether for the future.  He confesses, "I briefly thought that here, finally, was the real thing: a cyberweapon purpose-built by one state actor to strategically interfere with the business of another."  But he's disappointed in the end, to find that Stuxnet is really just another virus--albeit one perhaps appropriated by one government against another.  He is ambivalent about the meaning of this for the future of nuclear security.  One of Gibson's strengths is his restless, global search for sites of the future.  Here, he looks to Iran, but he is best known for his (highly selective) evocations of Japanese postmodernity.  But this is a never-ending quest--the future proves elusively peripatetic.  As he commented...

I've been reading Orvar Löfgren's and Billy Ehn's Billy Ehn (Author) › Visit Amazon's Billy Ehn Page Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author Are you an author? Learn about Author Central The Secret World of Doing Nothing (University of California, 2010) in preparation for the Spring semester.  It's the first time I've used a work of ethnology   (i.e., a comparison of different cultures) in the classroom, as opposed to the conventional, in-depth monographs that are the bread and butter of US anthropology. Lofgren and Ehn explore the cultural and social life of non-events, i.e., those parts of our life that we ordinarily "bracket" as irrelevant--the times we wait in line, or idly stare out a window.  There are interesting questions--especially with regards to methodology.  How do you do anthropology when no one thinks it's even worth talking about?   Not su...

The New York Times has been adding blog content to its online site.  One of the most interesting (and most surprising) additions to the unfortunately named "Opinionator" section has been "The Stone,"  a forum edited by Simon Critchley, chair of the department of philosophy of New School in New York, that began in May. It's a philosophy blog--a welcome addition, especially compared to the blogged content on other newspapers (sports, crime, consumer news, entertainment). Over the past couple of weeks, the columns have turned to critiques of neuroscience--or, should I say, a critique of popular representations of neuroscience, where every culture and behavior has its materialist correlate measured in the release of dopamine, the firing of neurons.  Which, of course, is on one level entirely true--we are biological creatures, after all. But the results of neuroscience that trickle down intro etiolated newspaper articles present the materialist reduction as "...

I posted this at www.wfs.org as well . . . I’m back from the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.  As expected, 6000 of us shuttled between two, huge, corporate hotels on Canal Street, soaking up hundreds of panels, poster sessions, round tables and workshops organized according to our association's unique calculus—unpopular panels (like mine) should be held in cavernous banquet halls, while popular topics should be granted a room the size of a bargain berth on a Carnival cruise.    But there was also Twitter.  By all accounts, a few thousand tweets from a handful of people before, during, and after our conference.  You can see them all archived with the #aaa2010 hash code. There was “Kerim” (as he is known at the anthropology blog, “Savage Minds” [ savageminds.org ]), alerting anthropologists to the “Twitter Meetup” at a restaurant near the hotel.  “Ethnographic Terminilia” to a party at Du Mois Gallery (up...

While looking for the European journal, Anthropos , I stumbled across another Anthropos --this one an anthropologically-informed RPG start-up comprised of a PhD student in anthropology (Calvin Johns) and a linguistics/ literature Ph.D. (Travis Rinehart).  It looks like they'll be releasing "Early Dark" soon--although I can't tell whether it will get any kind of distribution or whether it will be strictly print-on-demand (POD).  It's a typical, table-top RPG, but with the anthropological twist. What does it mean to have an anthropologically informed RPG?  In a July interview with Park Cooper (posted on the Comics Bulletin column,  " The Park and Bob Show "),  Rinehart describes their goal as creating "a world that as accurately as possible represents an anthropologically correct vision of human reality (besides magick)," while Johns adds that "We take influence from cultures traditionally demonized, feminized, stereotyped or homogenized i...