Relational Spaces: An Earthly Installation (original) (raw)
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Relational Space: An Earthly Installation
Cultural Anthropology, 2015
Anthropology off the Earth opens to new questions and futures for our disciplinary project and reach, while at the same time compelling revisits to classic sites of anthropological inquiry and critique. Taking as a given that human labor and imagination are neither limitable to, nor severable from, terrestrial-scapes of knowledge and practice, we argue that conceptually and materially working with outer space offers a unique opportunity to engage inter/disciplinary questions cross many scales: with technologies of inter-being connections and disconnections, with approaches to what counts as nature and culture, and with questions concerning the often-invisible force fields of agency and structures of power.
When we were approached to curate an anthropological opening about life above Earth, we asked ourselves: What if we think about this piece as a mockup installation, made to scale, pointing to particular and also to general values (Strathern 2004), exposing anthropological questions, concepts, and debates to the environments of outer space and space-on-Earth, a piece not anchored or stratified, but zooming in and out, coming and going from Earth, multisited from the start? Continuing along these lines: What if we think about Earth as itself an exhibit to the cosmic, a performative complex, exceptional (as far as we know) in the universe? Of course, the conventional anthropological response to exceptionalism is to historicize and contextualize the object. But thinking with whole Earth, in particular, presents us with a problem-and a provocation-in regard to context since, until recently, human attachments to the planet's surface have been the ultimate grounds of their actions, ideas, and relations, as well as of anthropologists' analyses of these.
Space Colonization and Exonationalism: On the Future of Humanity and Anthropology
Humans, 2022
First anthropology became unbound from “the village”, then from the single site, and gradually from the physical site altogether. As humans resume their push into space, anthropology is set to become unbound from the earth itself. This essay considers what the discipline has offered and can offer toward understanding the present and future of space colonization. It begins by examining the surprisingly long and productive history of anthropology’s engagement with the subject, going back at least to the 1950s. Then it surveys current analysis of law, sovereignty, and nationalism in space, which largely imagines law and identity in off-earth settlements as more-or-less direct extensions or transfers of earth law and identity; in other words, space settlers will remain affiliated with and loyal to their source countries (or companies). However, taking seriously the analogy of terran migration and colonialism, where colonies developed distinct and separatist identities, the essay predicts the emergence of exonationalism, in which over generations colonists will invent new identities and shift their affiliations to their non-terran homes and ultimately seek independence from the earth. The essay concludes with reflections on how the settlement of space, still a distant goal, will reshape our definition of the human and therefore the practice of anthropology as the science of human diversity.
Lineages and Advancements in Material Culture Studies, 2020
The anthropological study of extraterrestrial settings might seem novel and exotic. However, this chapter proposes that the methodological tool kit available to social scientists for the empirical study of such contexts has a well-established genealogy, informed and developed by recent innovations in the ethnographic study of social media and their attendant communities. These studies in social media have challenged what is traditionally known within anthropology as the 'field' (Miller and Manadiou 2012; Beualieu 2010; Zhao 2003), and the methodological challenges of an extraterrestrial ethnography allow us to examine what happens to some of our fundamental categories of analysis in the social sciences. To date, our understanding of fundamental concepts that underpin the social sciencessuch as transcendence, kinship, materiality, architecture, sovereignty, and the body-have been mostly conceived in terrestrially bound terms of Earth's gravity (see Gorman 2009c; Gorman and Walsh [forthcoming]), and even the concept of 'fieldwork' as it has been enshrined in the discipline is a distinctive artefact of terrestrial geometries of time and space. However, the International Space Station (ISS) has, for twenty years at the time of writing, been a home for humans that orbits the planet every ninety minutes in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) (Figure 2.1). This unique extraterrestrial society has received little attention within mainstream anthropology and material culture studies with notable exceptions such as Gorman's work on the archaeology of gravity (Gorman 2009c) and Gorman's recent and innovative archaeological approaches for the study of the ISS proposed with Justin Walsh (Walsh and Gorman 2020 and Gorman and Walsh forthcoming). 1 The ISS is a vibrant nexus of constant processes of calibration, coordination, and attunement that brings realms of experience into novel relations of entanglement (Hodder 2012 and Reno 2018) at unexpected scales and degrees of intimacy that have yet to be fully understood. This chapter outlines what the ISS is as a nexus and field of ethnographic study, and it proposes a methodological approach that draws upon the model of 'armchair anthropology,' reimagining it in a multi-sited, distributed, and space-age research context.
The Institute of Advanced Studies welcomes applications in response to this Call for Papers for a conference entitled 'Towards an Anthropology of Space: Orientating Cosmological Futures Conference' to be held on 18 September 2017. The deadline for applications is 22 May 2017. An epochal ‘move to space’ (Olivier 2015) has been articulated by various commentators as a crucial historical turn for all mankind, from Sputnik, through the Apollo missions to the recent realigning of NASA’s primary mission from Space Exploration to Space Settlement (Augustine Commission 2009). The effect of images of Earth from Space has produced ‘globe talk’ (Lazier 2011:606) where horizons of social worlds are now planetary in scale. These universalising rhetorics nonetheless also hide the hegemony of normative frames of reference used to define humanity’s ‘final frontier’, along with the concept of ‘humanity’ itself. David Valentine (2012) describes how Space demarks a spatial edge used to distinguish the limits of the globe, which can be both revealed and transcended by techno-science. Space exploration then, is able to act as an ‘empty signifier’ (Ibid) holding the promise of a spatial fix to the future of humanity whilst simultaneously delimiting this same future as it masks the endurance of the forms of relations it claims to transcend. As Debbora Battaglia suggests, the figure of the extra-terrestrial is a symptom of failures to critically understanding the conditions of social life (2005:9), perhaps symptomatic of an inability to conceive of an adequate ‘constitutive outside’ (Butler 1993), which is often a euphemism for a political or social ‘other’. The binary that extra-terrestrial implies may thus also be contested ethnographically. For example, Suzanne Blier (1987) has observed how dwellings of the Batammaliba track the passage of celestial ancestors through various light apertures whilst Lisa Messeri (2016) notes how Mongolian shamans have been visiting space for many years. Authors such as Alice Gorman (2005), Peter Redfield (2002) and others note how the local world of Space Centres, rocket launch sites or telescopes assume ‘translocal’, often neo-colonial, dreams (Redfield 2002:808) effacing local concerns. And whilst Soviets and Americans positioned Space as a location to enact utopian futures, different kinds of utopian ideological expansions may also occur through modern space narratives in places such as Ghana, China and Brazil. What can we make of the new space race ethnographically? How would the consideration of relations between earth and off-earth life enable a fruitful theoretical development of social science enquiry? And, ultimately, in what ways can Anthropology think through the political, the material and the transcendent dimensions of an epochal turn to Space? In this workshop we will investigate the heuristic devices used in the creation of new forms of connectedness and separation that a relation with the extra-terrestrial could enable. Please submit abstracts of 300 words for papers of 15-20 minutes in length by 22/05/2017 to Dr David Jeevendrampillai (david.jeevendrampillai.10@ucl.ac.uk) and Dr Matan Shapiro (shapirom@post.bgu.ac.il). We welcome a variety of approaches to the ‘move to space’ but particularly welcome those which consider the theological/cosmological, the material and bodily, and the political. Initially we plan to have three sessions along these lines with a senior respondent in each and a roundtable at the end of the day. We aim to work the papers into a special issue journal.
The Anthropology of Empty Spaces
Qualitative sociology, 1999
We would like to tell an anthropologic story about how we see reality and how we feel about it, with no intention to generalize our reflections. Our version of anthropology is intentionally self-reflexive and self-reflective. This text is a narrative study of the feelings of anthropologists out in the field. The anthropologic frame of mind is a certain openness of the mind of the researcher/observer of social reality (Czarniawska-Joerges 1992). On the one hand, it means the openness to new realities and meanings, and on the other, a constant need to problematize, a refusal to take anything for granted, to treat things as obvious and familiar. The researcher makes use of her or his curiosity, the ability to be surprised by what she or he observes, even if it is 'just' the everyday world. Our explorations concern an experience of space. It aims at investigating the space not belonging to anyone. While 'anthropologically' moving around different organizations, we suddenly realized that we were part of stories of the space we were moving in. Areas of poetic emptiness can be experienced, often in the physical sense, on the boundaries and inside of organizations.
The Anthropology of Empty Spaces Anthropology as a State of Mind
We would like to tell an anthropologic story about how we see reality and how we feel about it, with no intention to generalize our ree ections. Our version of anthropology is intentionally self-ree exive and self-ree ective. is text is a narrative study of the feelings of anthropologists out in the eld. e anthropologic frame of mind is a certain openness of the mind of the researcher/ observer of social reality (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1992). On the one hand, it means the openness to new realities and meanings, and on the other – a constant need to problematize, a refusal to take anything for granted, to treat things as obvious and familiar. e researcher makes use of her or his curiosity, the ability to be surprised by what she or he observes, even if it is " just " the everyday world. Our explorations concern an experience of space. It aims at investigating the space not belonging to anyone. While " anthropologically " moving around dii erent organizations, we suddenly realized that we were part of stories of the space we were moving in. Areas of poetic emptiness can be experienced, often in the physical sense, on the boundaries and inside of organizations. Article published (1999) in Qualitative Sociology 22/1: 37-50. e familiar spaces we are used to moving through teem with domesticated meanings. Other, exotic spaces carry abstract meanings unconnected to our everyday ones. And in between lies the unnoticed, the empty spaces unworthy of consideration. is paper speaks about such unclaimed areas we encounter in our roles of organizational anthropologists as we try to make sense of the spatiality of the eld. We do it through narration. e space we perceive through our own feelings and the stories we write become a kind of
Planetary Conversation: A Multidisciplinary Discussion about Ethnography and the Planetary
Prace Etnograficzne, 2022
In May 2022, a multidisciplinary, international and intergenerational group of scholars met for a “Planetary conversation”. The event was organised by the members of the ARIES (Anthropological Research into the Imaginaries and Exploration of Space) project at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. The aim of the workshop was to discuss the potentials that a planetary perspective can open up as well as the challenges that it may pose for anthropology and global politics more broadly