Exploring Ethnography of Outer Space
Methods and Perspectives
- 248 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Exploring Ethnography of Outer Space
Methods and Perspectives
About this book
This book explores new methods and perspectives in the anthropology of outer space. For the past ten years, scholarship of outer space has grown significantly in the social sciences. Now, an international community of anthropologists is starting to produce significant contributions to this work. This is pushing the conversations around the future of humanity, technology, and outer space beyond the realm of speculative theory into concrete challenges to established norms within anthropology. Each chapter in this volume introduces a unique take on what constitutes an ethnographic field in anthropology. They signal a reimagination of the central concept for the discipline and offer a timely meditation on the shift in anthropology's understanding of fieldwork from its inception until now. The volume consists of 11 ethnographic chapters, plus an introduction by the editors, and two invited responses. Each of the main body chapters presents a distinct approach to situating outer space empirically on Earth. By bringing together emerging and established scholars, this book ultimately posits that an anthropological approach to outer space requires creative approaches to ethnography that are no longer exclusively premised on a co-presence with the people under study. A primer of innovative ethnographies and an ideal companion to courses on methods, this volume will provide students with a body of accessible, contemporary work on futurisms and outer space. In addition, this book will serve as a snapshot of a moment in ethnographically innovative anthropology that will be relevant to a wider academic audience through its exegesis of new methods for the study of distributed communities.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Endorsement
- Half-Title Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Transcendence, bodies, and estranged labour in outer space: The astronaut’s contribution to a general theory of hierarchy
- 3 Anthropologists in outer space: Science fiction, infrastructure, comparison
- 4 Imaginaries of outer space from Africa: Astronomy infrastructure in South Africa and Madagascar
- 5 Museums, meteorites, and portals: Tracing the imperial logics of trans-planetary resource extractivism
- 6 Of stars and wheat: Making sense of the cosmos in a regional museum of cosmonautics
- 7 From Mexico to the Moon: (Outer)spatialising ethnography
- 8 Are we still anthropologists if we go to space using only our imaginations?
- 9 Terraforming a field site: Reflections on crafting knowledge on Mars
- 10 Composing the cosmos: Tuning into multiplicities with Thai Buddhist concepts
- 11 Divining South Korea’s space age through Korean shamanism and astrology (Myŏngni)
- 12 Space intentionally left blank
- 13 Methodological sensibilities in outer spaces
- 14 … a response
- Index