collins sail on! sail on! (science fiction studies v30 2003)

180 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 30 (2003)

Samuel Gerald Collins

Sail On! Sail On!: Anthropology, Science Fiction, and theEnticing Future

"Then there is the future," said the Very Young Man. "Just think! One might investall of one's money, leave it to accumulate at interest and hurry on ahead!"

"To discover a society," said I, "erected on a strictly communitarian basis.""Of all the wild extravagant theories!" began the Psychologist.

—H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (6)

Into the Tim^ Machine. In 1978, Margaret Mead, empathizing with theconcerns of the 60s' counterculture, pointed to a grave deficiency in the scienceof anthropology: "Anthropology has to date made very meager contributions toman's developing concem with the future" ("Contribution" 3). Two decadeslater, the American Anthropological Association began awarding an annual prizefor "Anticipatory Anthropology" in order to ameliorate this shortcoming, whatRobert Textor (who sponsored the award and for whom it is named) called thediscipline's "tempocentrism"—i.e., its concem only "with the past, theethnographic present, and the actual present" (2). Mead's and Textor'saccusations seem entirely justified: the "future" isn't usually thought of asanthropology's purview. In fact, anthropology's closest disciplinary neighborwithin the humanities is often thought to be history. As archaeologists orphysical anthropologists, we may study a fossil record, a historical record, oran archaeological record; as cultural anthropologists, we may study contempo-rary society, but we do so—until comparatively recently—with one methodologi-cal foot squarely planted in historicism. Franz Boas's "culture history," forexample, called for the reconstruction of cultural development through analysesof the diffusion of cultural elements.^

But this emphasis has led to a number of problems involving the wayanthropology approaches its "objects" of study. By studying people who are, bydefinition, located in an other time, anthropologists have contributed to achronopolitical domination of "the other," consigning less developed societiesto the status of "primitives" temporally removed from the capitalism, colonial-ism, and imperialism affecting the rest of the world's peoples—all the whilethose very forces are wreaking havoc in the lives of these putatively isolatedcultures. As Johannes Fabian argues in Time and the Other, the "[s]ystematicstudy of 'primitive' tribes began first in the hope of utilizing them as a kind oftime-machine, a peep into our own historic past, as providing closer evidenceabout the early links in the great Series" that led to modem Westem civilization(39). As early as the 1950s, critical anthropologists called for this "timemachine" to be dismantled, for anthropologists to consider their interlocutors ascontemporary peoples, albeit marginalized and often powerless ones. EricWolfs celebrated book Europe and the People Without History was theculmination of this critical tradition, a powerful call to see traditional societiesas enmeshed in the same historical processes as our own. But these arguments

ANTHROPOLOGY, SF, AND THE ENTICING FUTURE 181

Still raise the question of whether anthropology must always only "peep into ourhistoric past."

In An Englishman Looks at the World, H.G. Wells wrote that "the creationof Utopias—and their exhaustive criticism—is the proper and distinctive methodof sociology" (205). Like sociology, nineteenth-century anthropology was neverfar from Utopian speculation.^ As Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out, the tropesof the "savage" and the "Utopian" arose together in the Westem imaginary, asconceptions of the Utopian future were dialectically generated via changing ideasof the "savage" past. And in the midst of Social Darwinism and increasinglyelaborate forms of eugenics, many anthropologists felt compelled to speculateon the future of the races. As the dedicated monogenicist (i.e., believer in thesingular origin of humans), Alfred Russel Wallace, prophesied in the smashingfmale to an 1864 Anthropological Society paper: "While his extemal form willprobably ever remain unchanged, ... [mankind's] mental constitution maycontinue to advance and inq)rove till the world is again inhabited by a singlehomogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior to the noblestspecimens of existing humanity" (qtd. in Oppenheim 311). Wallace's Utopianspeculations were echoed by scores of anthropologists—Eamest Hooton andCarleton S. Coon being, perhaps, the last of these—who were, like him,anxiously anticipating the Spencerian teleology of the species.^

It was not until the twentieth century that cultural anthropologists wouldaccede to a resolutely synchronic "ethnographic present" disdainful ofnineteenth-century evolutionism on the one hand, and Utopian (or dystopian)speculation on the other. But that does not mean that anthropologists gave uptheir purchase on the future. In fact, I would suggest that the opposite is tme:anthropological research in the "present" is enabled by a relationship withhistorically specific futures. The history of those relationships has never beenpart of the "ethnographer-as-hero" mythos that anthropologists tell of themselves(with the help of Susan Sontag'*); yet this work may demarcate both what andhow anthropologists know.

In the twenty-first century, laying open these subcutaneous relationships hasnever been more important. Subject to the time compressions of advancedcapitalism, much of our contemporary horizon seems ioprecede into the future;from the perspective of a public that only tenuously differentiates betweenimage-laden spectacle and reality, we are already living in the future. As hasoften been noted, the role of science fiction in all of this seems less as anextrapolative genre than as part of the collective image factory, swappingcultural gestalts with corporations and politicians around an axis mundi ofadvanced capitalism.^ But what is the status of anthropology in this process?How can a discipline still popularly associated with the salvage of traditionsurvive in what Michael Fischer has called a "proleptic" future? It is morerelevant than ever to refiect critically on anthropology's temporal perambula-tions.

The following essay addresses anthropology's persistent amnesia about itsfuture work.^ In what follows, I reconstmct some of the major strands in thehistory of anthropology from World War II to the the present by drawing on


connections and relationships between anthropology and science fiction. To me,this era seems especially significant: anthropologists and science fiction writershave never been so close. I should say at the outset that anthropology is notscience fiction; yet anthropologists have long been interested in sf—and to saythis is not to impugn anthropology's credibility, but merely to contextualizeanthropology in its own contemporaneity. Nor is this a critique of anthropologi-cal science fiction; while I reference many works of sf that have been consideredin some way anthropological, I hardly think it appropriate to fault sf writers fornot being anthropologists. (The same generosity, alas, cannot be extended toanthropologists who dip into the techniques of sf.)

But while this is an essay largely critical of a certain strain of anthropologicalthought, I nevertheless believe that there is, in the intertexts of anthropology andscience fiction, a good deal of potential. If, as I argue, anthropology has nochoice but to engage the future, then perhaps understanding the ways this hashappened in the past will open up new possibilities for altemative futures. In theend, it is the unexamined use of future work in anthropology that leads not onlyto the "tempocentric" reproduction of the here-and-now in our visions of whatwill be but also to a circumscribed, flattened present infiected with gloomy,immanent futures. By examining technologies of future work in anthropology,I hope to evoke the possibility of an emergent discourse no longer mired in thetempocentrisms of die past.

Search the Sky: Cyhemetics and Functionalism. Science fiction's "GoldenAge" started, apocryphally, in 1937 with John W. Can^)bell's assumption of theeditorship of Astounding Science Fiction, It was Campbell who inaugiu'ated thecareers of sf titans Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Theodore Sturgeon, andwho pressured these writers to abjure Gemback-inspired "scientifictions" oozingwith futuristic geegaws in favor of more believable worlds. As Leon Stoverreminds us, "Extravagant fiction today ... cold fact tomorrow" may have beenHugo Gemsback's recipe for a nascent genre (471), but science fiction wasgradually attracting a more sophisticated readership, one demanding—in thewords of Fredric Jameson—a whole "representational experience" (94).Beginning in the 1950s, more self-consciously anthropological (and sociological)science fiction began to appear, no doubt driven in part by the growingpopularization of these discourses with the US reading public. It was during thispostwar period that anthropologists Chad Oliver (first published 1950) andWilliam Tenn (a.k.a. Philip Klass, first published 1946) carved niches forthemselves.^ By the 1960s, science fiction writers were expected to create, in thewords of Gardner Dozois, "a future society as a real, self-consistent, andorganic thing""(14; emphasis in original). This "Space Anthropology," asRaymond Williams charmingly termed it, utilized sf to "fmd what are essentiallynew tribes, and new patterns of living" (360).

The fullest realization of Williams's "Space Anthropology" came with theemergence of a new generation of writers in the 1960s, particularly Ursula K.Le Guin. As the daughter of one of the founders of US anthropology, AlfredKroeber, Le Guin was particularly well-positioned to incorporate anthropologi-


cal insights into what was, in her case, genuine world-building—although it'sdoubtful that her father would have agreed with her that he "studied real culturesand I make them up—in a way, it's the same thing" (qtd. in Brigg 16).Nonetheless, her HAINISH CYCLE is a densely textured anthropology, unfoldingthrough a cycle of novels and stories and actually populated by severalanthropologists and ethnologists. The cosmology of the series revolves aroundthe "seeding" of multiple worlds by human colonists and elaborates on thecultural and physical attributes of these erstwhile Hainish colonies. TheGethenians of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), for example, with theirambisexuality/androgyny on a planet noted for its harsh, unyielding climate, areculturally very different from the "bisexual" anthropologist, Genly Ai, whostudies them. In a classic statement of the cultural relativism underlying modemanthropology, Le Guin writes: "When you meet a Gethenian you cannot andmust not do what a bisexual normally does, which is to cast him in the role ofMan or Woman, while adopting towards him a corresponding role dependent onyour expectations of persons of the same or the opposite sex" {Left Hand 94),

Le Guin's careful evocation of the intricate interdependency of cosmogony,ecology, and culture on Gethen finds its conceptual rationale, within the genre,in an oft-reprinted essay by Poul Anderson on "The Creation of ImaginaryWorlds":

Whatever value the writer chooses, let him ponder how it will determine thecourse of the year, the size and character of climatic zones, the development oflife and civilizations.... If Earth did travel upright, thus having no seasons, wewould probably never see migratory birds across the sky. One suspects therewould be no clear cycle of birth and death of vegetation either. Then what formwould agriculture have taken? Society? Religion? (128)

Anderson is urging would-be sf writers to create functionally interdependent,ecologically consistent worlds in their fiction. As I have argued in my essay"Imagining Gender," this "organic" linkage of environment and culture in 1960santhropological sf was very much bound up with a postwar cybemetic-functionalist understanding of society.

Functionalism, insofar as the term has any appellative use, describes ageneral tum from diachronic, evolutionary models in social and culturalanthropology to a synchronic understanding of culture. The person most oftencredited with establishing a functionalist paradigm within the field, BronislawMalinowski, focused on the interrelationship of institutions and practices withinsociety and culture rather than the (usually specious) comparison ofdecontextualized elements between cultures.^ Following on the insights ofJohann Herder and Emile Durkheim, Malinowski, in his classic 1922 studyArgonauts of the Westem Pacific, sought to show how a single set of culturalpractices (the kula) imbricated economics, politics, and religion (among otherthings) simultaneously and how all of these varied institutions related to eachother as a functional whole. Later so-called "stmctural functionalists" such asA.R. Radcliffe-Brown would emphasize the contributions of culture to thegeneral maintenance of social equilibrium.

184 SCIENCE nCnON STUDIES, VOLUME 30 (2003)

Cybemetics, according to its founding father Norbert Wiener, combinedphilosophy, mathematics, engineering, and information science into "the fieldof control and communication theory, whether in machines or in animals" (11).Its impressive interdisciplinarity stemmed from the key insight—novel at thetime—that all manner of actions performed by humans, animals, or machinescould be described as the transmission and processing of infonnation. Byunleashing this hugely productive metaphor, one could describe equally thearchitecture of Artificial Intelligence, of the human nervous system, or of agovernment bureaucracy as a formal network subject to feedback and entropy.In anthropology, as Miriam Rodin et al. have recounted, cybemetics andfunctionalism would later combine in a general "systems" approach emphasizingthe interrelationship of culture, economy, society, and the environment as a"bounded set of variables" within "a typology of systems stmctures—closed,open, hierarchical, decomposable, purposive" (748).

What in hindsight has been classed as "anthropological science fiction"hinges upon an affinity with systems diinking in anthropology. Le Guin's goalsare very much consonant with a particular kind of mid-twentieth centuryanthropology comparing cultures in a "natural laboratory." Her HAINISH CYCLE,

detailing the cultural and historical divergence of worlds originally "seeded" byHain but developing independently, as well as her EARTHSEA series, unfoldingacross separate island cultures, offer so many "laboratories" in which the authorcan work, introducing various changes in physiology, in climate, in culture, and(functionally) measuring the feedback of changes in one system on all the others.As Le Guin herself has remarked of her "experiment" in The Left Hand ofDarkness:

The subject of my experiment, then, was something like this: Because of ourlifelong social conditioning, it is hard for us to see clearly what, besides purelyphysiological form and function, truly differentiates men and women. Are therereal differences in temperament, capacity, talent, psychic processes., etc.? If so,what are they? Only comparative ethnology offers, so far, any solid evidence onthe matter, and the evidence is incomplete and often contradictory. (Dancing 10)

As Elizabeth Cummins has shown, Le Guin continues to experiment with theboundaries between science fiction and anthropology, interpolating the formsand conventions of ethnography into her fictions in a way, perhaps, ultimatelytransformative of both. ̂ But does it also work the other way? Does anthropologyinterpolate the forms and conventions of science fiction?

Enter Margaret Mead. While her early work is often classed with the"Culture and Personality" school of Ruth Benedict or Edward Sapir, which (asits name implies) focuses on links between cultural forms and personalitystmctures. Mead began edging towards functionalist perspectives early on,particularly after she went to Washington, D.C. to add anthropological expertiseto the "war effort" by "studying culture at a distance. "^° By the end of the war,she was a committed social engineer, eager to apply the insights of anthropologyto the emergent postwar order. As she put it in 1942: "We [anthropologists] cancontribute the practicality, the insistence that the job be done scientifically, on


an engineering basis, insisting that we must know what the materials are—humanbeings of diverse cultures, human cultures of different designs, human societiesof different constitution—out of which we plan to build" (249). She was one ofthe founding attendees—along with her husband, Gregory Bateson—of alandniark series of seminars on cybemetics held by the Joseph MacyFoundation*^ thereafter, she became an indefatigable—and, as Micaela diLeonardo points out, occasionally reactionary—booster of an interdisciplinary,government-supported anthropology committed to social change.

Mead's general goal was the application of systems theory—especially thecybemetic model of feedback loops—to the establishment of just govemance andthe development of democratic institutions. Interestingly, Wiener himself wasnot sanguine that such a project could succeed:

Much as I sympathize with their [social scientists'] sense of the urgency of thesituation, and as much as I hope that they and other competent workers will takeup problems of this sort... I can share neither their feeling that this field has thefirst claim on my attention, nor their hopefulness that sufficient progress can beregistered in this direction to have an appreciable therapeutic effect in the presentdiseases of society.... Thus the human sciences are very poor testing grounds fora new mathematical technique. (24)

His view that the methods of cybemetics would be lost on the "humansciences"—including anthropology—was, however, not a deterrent to Mead'senergetic prescriptions for society's ills.

Mead was, moreover, able to imbue the functionalism of the day with atenuous, liberal progressivism that allowed her to constmct "future cultures" outof the diagnosed imperfections of the past. By the 1970s, Mead was writingunapologetically about creating "new cultures," proclaiming that "the future isnow": "What we are reporting is a very complicated new process of anthropo-logical activity. We are in a period of invention, of dealing with many conceptsthat we never had to consider before, and recognizing that one of the tasks ofanthropology is culture building" ("Contribution" 272). Although she occasion-ally indulged in excoriations of science fiction for its factual lapses,'^ herbiographer Phyllis Grosskurth has claimed that her avid reading of sf was her"only form of relaxation" (76); and by 1970, Mead was publicly confabulatingwith Arthur C. Clarke and Alvin Toffier in a discussion of Stanley Kubrick'sfihn 2007.- A Space Odyssey {""2001, Sci-fi or Man's Future?"). Evidentlycomfortable with the language of sf, her imagined futures were infiected withher own special concerns regarding education and the family. In her 1978 essay"The Contribution of Anthropology to the Science of the Future," she waxedeloquent about building new cultures in space colonies.^^

It is not an exaggeration to say that Mead was one of the founders—alongwith military think tanks and Herman Kahn—of futurology itself.*'* But whatkinds of futures did she envision? Is it possible to engineer cultures out of thebits and pieces of past beliefs and institutions? What assumptions must we makein order to grasp culture as a whole and thus subject it to our (enlightened)manipulations? Mead's own future work—and her fiinctionalist views of human

186 SCIENCE nCTION STUDIES, VOLUME 30 (2003)

society and the role of anthropology—influenced anthropologists throughout the1970s.

When Worlds Collide: Anthropology Turns to Science Fiction. The firstanthropologist to use science fiction in the classroom was undoubtedly ChadOliver, who appears to have utilized some of his own writings in his seminar onethnography and science fiction during the late 1950s. Second among anthropol-ogists was probably Leon Stover, who taught "social science fiction" coursesfrom 1965 at Illinois Institute of Technology.*^ Their work has been followed upby a few score "anthropology and science fiction" courses in the US andCanada, a trend that has sometimes erroneously been attributed to thepostmodem tum in anthropological thought during the 1980s.^^ These coursesgenerally rely on some of the more functionalist sf classics of the 1960s—LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Frank Herbert's Dime (1965)—and earlyUtopian writings such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915).

The first published anthropology-science fiction collaborative volume wasApeman. Spaceman, a 1968 anthology of mostly Golden Age sf that wasarranged according to co-editor Stover's sometimes eccentric interpretations ofanthropology's "subfields." Its suggestive cover illustration portrayed a heavy-browed Homo neanderthalensis wistfully looking on while a spaceship alightedin the distance. Collaborating with Harry Harrison (another protege of John W.Campbell), Stover attempted to link past, present, and future into a universalistanthropology. Stover's future, like Mead's, was a succession of stablecybemetic/functionalist systems: "The present convergence of social change toanother state of adjustment will require a higher consciousness of self in societythan ever was called for in the achievement of a stable pattem of life builtaround earlier systems of technology" ("Afterword" 381).

The first official recognition of science fiction in anthropology had to waituntil 1970, when Arthur Harkins and Margoroh Maruyama organized anAmerican Anthropological Association panel on "cultural futuristics."Additionally, beginning in 1973, Maruyama and Harkins began sponsoring anessay contest on "cultural altematives," the results of which were published inan anthology. Cultures Beyond the Earth: The Role of Anthropology in OuterSpace. The titles of the prize-winning essays suggest the intellectual territorytraversed by this nascent "cultural futuristics": "Toward an ExtraterrestrialAnthropology," "Terra-Lune: A Frontier City-State," "First Contact withNonhuman Cultures: Anthropology in the Space Age," and "The Contact Groupand a Nonhuman Extraterrestrial Culture." As Robert J. Miller has suggested,cultural futuristics was split, even at its inception, into (at least) two opposingcamps, one speculating on the vicissitudes of alien contact, and the other on thelogistics of extraterrestrial colonization (34, 36). Reed Riner—another founderof future studies in anthropology—sees the division as between policy-drivenstudies on the one hand, and light-hearted speculation on the other ("DoingFutures" 314). It was Maniyama's more policy-oriented "extraterrestrialanthropology" that seems, however, to have survived into successive AmericanAnthropological Association conferences. His announcement for a 1975 panel.


"Future Cultures: Imaginable Alternatives for Terrestrial and ExtraterrestrialCommunities," is a good index of this strand of cultural fiituristics: "In the eraof extraterrestrial communities, we will have hitherto unknown cultural options.In such communities many of the constraints which restrict life on earth areremoved.... We will be in a position to first invent new cultural patterns andthen choose material conditions and community design to fit the desired culturalpattem" ("Notice" 13).

The consonance of Mamyama's program with Mead's future work isremarkable. Both tmst technocratic expertise to constmct future culturalpatterns; both display remarkable confidence in a discipline that has neverarrived at any consensus over what culture is or how it is supposed to work.*^Mamyama's prolific writings seem to have outpaced anthropology, however,and he was soon working exclusively within die more instrumentalist, policy-oriented futuristic circles, as consistent with his appointment at UCLA'sGraduate School of Management.

The more ludic, speculative dimensions of cultural futuristics eventuallycoalesced in 1982 with the establishment of the joumal Cultural FuturesResearch, itself a combination of two earlier periodicals, ANTHRO-TECH: AJoumal of Speculative Anthropology (1976-82) and Cultural and EducationalFutures (1979-1982). CFRs editor, the aforementioned Reed Riner, stressed theinterdisciplinary quality of the joumal, which, he believed, answered "the needto foster increased dialogue among social scientists, futurists and science fictionwriters/users, cognizant that we are all educators" ("Editorial" 3). Indeed,articles during the joumal's two-year run included applied anthropology, culturalstudies of then-emergent information technology, and regular contributions fromsf novelist M.A. Foster.*^

The most ambitious project to come out of Cultural Futures Research wasJim Funaro's CONTACT!, an annual conference bringing sf writers togetherwith anthropologists, artists, and scientists. At the first meeting in 1982,anthropologists Robert Tyzzer, Reed Riner, and Paul Bohannan joined with sfauthor C.J. Cherryh in the "Bateson Project," a role-playing game pattemedafter Dungeons and Dragons. In the game, one team adopted the role of ahuman colony 5,0(X) years in the future, while the other played a non-human,extraterrestrial culture. The Bateson Project unfolded around the moment of firstcontact, with each team extemporaneously improvising culturally consistentresponses to the other. The Bateson Project—which, like CONTACT!, is stillan annual event—is interesting for several reasons, not the least of which is thefact that many anthropologists seem to fmd this sf role-playing germane to theirscholarly work. As Bohannan refiected after his 1982 session:

The importance of all this to anthropology should be evident: it gives us a chanceto dream up cultures—even non-human cultures. A number of things becomeevident as you take part in this exercise: first of all, you'd better get the physicsof your environment right—only if you know that can you see the range ofadaptations necessary.... You can also discover in creating a culture that if itdoesn't all hang together, Malinowski-fashion, it falls apart. ("Anthropology"5-6)


However useful it may have been for CONTACT! participants to build,"Malinowski-fashion," in space and time, grasping cultures as functionallyinterrelated wholes has become less and less tenable to anthropologists workingin the present.

From the 1930s imtil its demise in the 1970s, functionalism, in its manymanifestations, came under increasing criticism for its reactionary politics.Often utilized by governments in designing "democratizing" interventions intosocial-political life, functionalism could adopt an unabashedly authoritarian tone:"Culture must ensure the continuity of social life by providing techniques forinhibiting individual tendencies which might interfere with cooperation and forthe suppression or elimination of individuals whose conduct is anti-social"(Gregg and Williams 605).

Early functionalists were, indeed, cheerleaders for homeostasis, gestur-ing—through their emphasis on functional equilibrium—towards a society "free"of dissent and resistance. Later anthropological developments in cybemetics andsystems theory would address these biases by focusing on more open systems,"not as they maintain equilibrium, but as they refiect the adaptive needs ofpurposive human actors" (Rodin et al. 748). Despite such ideological correc-tions, however, there are several assumptions common to functionalist/cybemetic theorizing that, taken together, tend to stress cultural uniformity andhomogenization: 1) that anthropologists can apprehend the absolute boundariesof cultures in relation to one another and can create "pure" anthropologicalobjects for study; 2) that grasping intra-cultural relationships is more inq)ortantthan tracing those between or outside cultures; and 3) that anthropologists canpredict—and thereby shape—the course of cultural change through theapplication of systems thinking. As Jonathan Friedman sums up this functionalistparadigm: "Nature and culture become a homogeneous whole in which it isassumed, as a matter of principle, that specific social institutions functionprimarily to maintain the stability of the larger environment" (466; emphasis inoriginal). So what are the consequences of these sorts of assun:q)tions?

As postwar independence movements flared up in the colonial dependenciesof Europe and the United States, culminating (for the US) in the quagmire ofVietnam, the question of anthropology's understanding of the world took on aspecial urgency: government agencies were quite interested in an anthropologicalapproach that emphasized themes of social "stability" and in anthropologistswhose analyses were free of condemnations of colonialism and imperialism.^^As anthropology's unflappable reformer, Eric Wolf, pointedly asked in 1974:

Where, in our present-day anthropological literature, are the comprehensivestudies of the slave trade, the fiir trade, of colonial expansion, of forced andvoluntary acculturation, of rebellion and accommodation in the modem world,which would provide us with the intellectual grid needed to order the massivedata we now possess on individual societies and cultures engulfed by thesephenomena? ("American Anthropologists" 31)

A world imagined as "billiard ball" cultures, each a self-contained laboratoryof dynamic systems, was, at the very least, naive in a world where cultures were


deeply (if not painfully) interrelated and, more seriously, was politicallyquiescent in a world transformed by 500 years of European colonialism.Engineering cultures in space as bounded homeostatic entities can have quiteserious consequences in die present-day world, as Wolf warns: "Names thusbecome things, and things marked with an X can become targets of war"{Europe 7).

Anthropologists as Bad Writers. The winning papers in Harkins and Mamya-ma's 1973 contest for fictional accounts of "cultural alternatives" demonstratethe limits of the functionalist imagination. Dorothy L. Keur's and Russell LaDue's "Univaria" is a case in point, endorsing as it does a Utopian Great Societyabounding with technological fixes and a benevolent, Keynesian state devotedto solving all social problems. The mise-en-scene for this altemative future is ahistory classroom in the twenty-furst century, where children and teachercompare their present to a gravely fiawed past. Precociously (futuristically?)bright middle-school students lead the discussion; "Kurt" begins:

"Everyone in Univaria can be sure of a living wage. Those who lose their jobs,or are for any reason out of work, still get that basic unit of income. In the latetwentieth century it would have been about $5000 a year."

"But not like what they used to call welfare," said Ruth, breaking into thediscussion for the first time. "Everyone gets it, but they have to work for it. Onwhatever government project is in progress nearby."

"And if they refuse?" asked the teacher."No one has refused," Ruth answered. "But if they do, the law says they will

be deported. We have this arrangement with several of the undeveloped countriesto accept our citizens." (597-98)

H.L. Lefferts, who actually introduced this story into his anthropologyclassroom, reports that students found it, predictably, "old," "dull," and(interestingly) "ethnocentric"—i.e., premised on a US-style apotheosis oftechnocratic progress (630). Anthropologists, having unleashed their imagina-tions in the creation of "new patterns of living," succeeded only in turning outpale evocations of one myopic vision of the present. But if anthropologists don'tnecessarily make good science fiction writers, does that make them badanthropologists?

Paul Bohannan, reflecting on a lifetime of anthropological research, haswritten of an encounter with sf author Larry Niven:

Larry Niven once told me that a science-fiction writer has to know two disci-plines—anthropology and physics. And, he noted, you can finesse the physics.In fiction, a writer can merely declare cultural changes to have occurred on somedistant planet or in some alternate reality. Go ahead—it's "only" fiction: changethe family form or the production processes on the Planet of Oxymoron and seewhat happens to everything else! ("It's Been" 135)

But is it ever "only" fiction? When anthropologists imagine culture on the"Planet of Oxymoron," what happens to Planet Earth?

In the wake of substantial critiques of anthropology's colonialist commit-ments, its relegation of the cultural Other to the exotic past of the "savage slot,"


many anthropologists, taking their cues from reformers such as Joan Vincent,Talal Asad, Eric Wolf, and William Roseberry, have worked to representcultures in an interactive context of global political economy and to cultivatewhat Johannes Fabian has termed "coevalness"—i.e., construing other peoplesas part of our own contenq)oraneity. But while we have, in our moments ofreflexivity, problematized past and present, we often leave, as Bohannansuggests, our constructions of iht future unexamined. Is this because anthropol-ogy—as a primarily descriptive endeavor—doesn't depend on the future? I havesuggested just the opposite: to paraphrase Clifford Geertz, anthropology issuspended in teleologies we ourselves have spun. Our versions of life now areinescapably infiected by how we think life is going to be. The foregoing hassuggested that future work in anthropology is the other side to its allochronicdeployment of the "savage slot" and that, furthermore, piercing the veil ofideological allochronies, as Fabian urges us to do, requires that we interrogateanthropological futures as much as we do anthropological pasts.

Prolepsis and Cyborg Anthropology: Anthropologists Look to the ImmanentFuture. During the 1980s and 1990s, social theory began to adopt an almostapocalyptic tone, heralding a dizzying profusion of "ends"— the "end ofhistory" (Francis Fukuyama), the "end of work" (Jeremy Rifkin), the end of thenation-state (Arjun Appadurai)—from which new con^lexes of power,knowledge, and identity were seen as continuously emerging. Anthropologyitself seemed to have moved into a world "beyond culture" (in the words ofAkhil Gupta and James Ferguson) in a way that portended a full-blownepistemological crisis for the field. For Michael Herzfeld, this crisis was theepochal transformation of anthropology's "object" of study by new infonnationtechnologies: even the most "primitive" of peoples were now linked via "thecommunications superhighway" and "the myriad national and intemationalagencies that assist and confound people's everyday lives" (6). A number ofanthropologists responded to this "crisis" by concentrating their analyses on sitesof cultural emergence—2i notable reversal, since the discipline, at least in theUnited States, had begun with "salvage" projects, the reconstruction of culturesthought to have almost disappeared. Anthropologists of late modernity, as thisloosely assorted group of theorists and practitioners might be called, have begunto deal withpre-constructions, analyses of cultural configurations on the cuspof appearance, a method Michael Fischer has identified as "prolepsis" (245).

Calling upon anthropologists to produce descriptive ethnographies ofdiscourses, institutions, and modes of being in the throes of birth, Fischer linksanthropological prolepsis with the new technology of cyberspace, affirming theemergent "hypertext" of the near-future over the obstinate physicality of thepresent "text." In his encyclopedic review of "cyberanthropology" in the late-1980s and early 1990s, Arturo Escobar hits on multiple sites of this cyberspatialemergence: "a transition to a new postcorporeal stage," " new possiblities forpotent articulations between humans, nature and machines," a "new malleabilityof nature," and "a hypothesized transition to a postscriptural society." Even theanthropologists themselves are emergent beings, their projects occupying a


shadowy half-life between extant political economies and the pleasures anddangers of the imminent future ("Welcome" 216).

In studies of globalization specifically, anthropologists—very much in thespirit of cyberpimk science fiction, wifli which their work was sometimesarticulated—have posited a variety of transitional and virtual "spaces" todescribe wider ambits of circiilating capital and commodities that impingevariously on the more place-bound localities that were the former objects ofdisciplinary analysis. Transcending what Herzfeld has called "microscopic"analyses of localized place has not meant so much taking on "global" formsdirectly—e. g., multinational corporations, multilateral donors, neo-imperialisms—but rather postulating "notional" spaces ambiguously mediatingbetween "the global" and "the local." As Michael Keamey writes, globalization"entails a shift from two-dimensional Euclidean space with its centers andperipheries and sharp boundaries, to a multidimensional global space withunbounded, often discontinuous and interpenetrating sub-spaces" (548). Butwhat exactly are these new, fantastic, non-Euclidean topologies, and how dothey "correct" the supposedly parochial foci of pre-globalization anthropology?For his part, Appadurai heralds a proliferation of "ethnoscapes, technoscapes,fmanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes" (11), while Marc Auge defends theconcept of "non-places," anonymous interactions of people with "textualizedworlds" carefully emptied of their multiplex social relationships. Moreconcretely, James Boon has undertaken an ethnographic study of "Showbiz," aninformation system emanating from virtualized corporate capital and influencingglobal cultures in diverse ways. These various liminal "scapes" and "spaces"of late-modernist anthropology are generally designed to mediate between twoequally improbable social conditions: a state of total cultural homogenization(the McDonaldization thesis) and a distributed terrain of complete culturalheterogeneity (the "billiard ball" model of the committed functionalist).

Partly as a response to these shifts of emphasis within the field, the early1990s saw a tum towards "cyborg anthropology," beginning with a 1992American Anthropological Association panel organized by Sara Williams, GaryLee Downey, and Joseph Dumit. As its name implies, cyborg anthropologyplays, often quite overtly, upon popular images of cyborgs in science fiction,linking up as well with Donna Haraway's infiuential 1985 essay "A Manifestofor Cyborgs," where we are all revealed as already cyborg constmcts. Buildingon the "strong programme" of the Sociology of Science Knowledge(SSK)—which demonstrates, through microsociologies of the processes ofscientific research, that science is also cultural (i.e., constituted by andconstitutive of identity, power, and social relations)^—cyborg anthropologytmmps that insight, insisting that humans, machines, "the scientific," and "thecultural" are hybrid borders regulated by institutions and power, but shotthrough with transgressions enabled (in part) by the cultural interpretationstendered by cyborg anthropologists themselves. The result has been an extremelyfertile output of anthropological studies into science and identity, whetherfocusing on modes of reproductive technology (Gay Becker, Marilyn Strathem),the institutions of scientific knowledge (Sharon Traweek, Paul Rabinow, Hugh


Gusterson), or the basic constitution of Self and Other (Sara Williams, StefanHelmreich).

The politics of cyborg anthropology involves interventions in emerging sitesof knowledge and power. This explicit "future work" gives cyborg anthropol-ogy, according to Gary Downey and Joseph Dumit, a critical edge in a time ofrevolutionary science: "Starting out with emergence as a question is ... valuablebecause, in addition to asking what is new on the horizon, it suggests thatcontemporary practices are unfinished, ongoing, continuously maintained, andsomething in which one's own practices can potentially intervene" (9-10). StefanHelmreich's recent ethnography, Silicon Second Nature, for example, exploresthe emergence of artificial life—i.e., computer simulations of biologicalcomplexity that under certain conditions can be construed as meeting the criteriafor organic animation. Throughout, Helmreich elaborates on the biases—whathe calls "life-as-we-think-it-is"—inherent in scientists's conceptions of thefuture, of "life-as-it-could-be" (13). By critiquing the strain of masculinistSocial Darwinism latent in the technoscientific work of the Sante Fe Institute,Helmreich hopes to affect future change by catalyzing the development of anArtificial Life program grounded in a more communitarian "autopoesis" or infeminist/queer theory. In other words, by extrapolating from present configura-tions of knowledge and power to an imagined future, Helmreich is able tocritique the present course of scientific research.

Anthropologies of late modernity—of which cyborg anthropology is perhapsthe most visible example—are predicated on an imaginative reflex that can seizeupon the ramifications of emergent technologies, institutions, and selves in anextrapolated future. But if the power of this anthropology emanates from itsimagined temporal distance from the present, that "f\iture work," as I've beencalling it, can also be deeply problematic. As Sara Williams writes:

The practice of cyborg anthropology does not escape being a mode of knowledgeproduction. Rather, such a practice remains (perhaps necessarily) involved in (1)the violent proliferation of fetish objects and fetishizing desires and (2) thereproduction of properties and governmentalities through which some channelsof proliferation are rendered legitimate and others illegitimate. ("EthnographicFetishism" 167)

Cyborg anthropology often seems quite taken with cyberpunkish visions ofposthuman possibility, with the high-tech fantasies circulating throughoutpopular cyberculture. And one must ask whether this focus on sites ofemergence that have already been fetishized by advertising and other forms ofcorporate propaganda is the best possible way to mount a politics of the future.Is tfiis tmly a critical intervention, or does cyborg anthropology altematelycondemn and covet the shiny surfaces of digital culture? Are its critiques-cum-celebrations of cyborg possibility merely sublated into a future that is unwit-tingly helping to realize?

Like the cybemetic functionalists before them, anthropologists of latemodernity utilize the future as a critical foil to describe, interrogate, and changethe present. But just as anthropological invocations of the (traditional, savage)past have been inextricably embedded in power and knowledge configurationsin the present, so, too, anthropological futures are imbricated with the fears anddesires that make up anthropology's disciplinary unconscious.


Conclusions: The Future of the Future in Anthropology. In the final pagesof his marvelous introductory textbook. The Discovery of Humanity (1981),Chad Oliver—science fiction's most famous anthropologist—elaborates adistinctly anthropological-utopian vision:

There is room here for many lifeways. The Earth of tomorrow need not be theEarth of today. It does not have to be a plastic anthill smothered in a uniformculture. It will be technologically possible and the record shows that we have aconsiderable aptitude for dealing with technological problems.... We could havea green Earth again, an Earth free of pollution, an Earth that could be the settingfor a thousand experimental lifeways. We could have an Earth on which werecognized our identity as a species, an Earth where racism and mad wars ofself-destruction could not exist. (387)

Oliver's projected future had, of course, much in common with the prognostica-tions of his contemporaries: the eventual colonization of space, the establishmentof a world government, and the inevitability of US hegemony. Nevertheless,Oliver believed that diversity—and here he meant much more than a blandmulticulturalism—was as vital to our human future as any technological advance,that alterity was not some atavistic relic of a "tribal" past giving way to anincreasingly uniform, global culture, but was rather die precondition for atenable, workable future.

To be sure, anthropologists will continue to engage the future, and thatengagement will, no doubt, share some affinities with coeval future work inscience fiction and futurology. That said, anthropologists owe it to themselvesand to others engaged in future work to articulate distinctly anthropologicalfutures challenging bland affirmations of the status quo and evoking somethingother than etiolated echoes of the present. We will not, however, fmd thosefutures on hermetic "islands of history"—in the words of Marshall Sahlins—butin an engagement with the differences, resistances, and revolutions thatcharacterize contemporary life on the margins and in the interstices of power.At the end of his scathing critique of regimes of development, Arturo Escobarwrites:

At the bottom of the investigation of alternatives lies the sheer fact of culturaldifference. Cultural differences embody—for better or for worse, this is relevantto the politics of research and intervention—possibilities for transforming thepolitics of representation, that is, for transforming social life itself. Out of hybridor minority cultural situations might emerge other ways of building economies,of dealing with basic needs, of coming together into social groups. {Encountering225)

Escobar's challenge to imagine a "development" apart from the minous calculusof modernization theory can be put to anthropology as a whole. What would afuture work prefaced on genuine difference look like? What, if anything, wouldit share with Golden-Age stalwarts such as Isaac Asimov and Robert A.Heinlein, not to mention with functionalist-humanists like Le Guin or theposthumanist dreams of cyberpunk? It is probably too soon to say—certainly toosoon to circumscribe that future in the preoccupations of the present.

194 SCIENCE HCTION STUDIES, VOLUME 30 (2003)

NOTESPortions of this paper were presented at the 2(XX) American Ethnological Society

meeting in Tampa, Florida. The author would like to thank the editors of this specialissue of SFS, Sheryl Hamilton, Neil Gerlach, and Rob Latham, along with theanonymous reviewers, for their insightful comments on the manuscript. My title is takenfrom a 1952 short story by Philip Jos6 Farmer.

1. See the discussion in Margaret Mead, "Apprenticeship Under Boas" (38).2. See Morgan for historical notes on nineteenth-century intersections of anthropol-

ogy, evolutionary thought, and Utopia.3. For an even more recent example, see Dixon's patently recidivistic Man After

Man: An Anthropology of the Future,4. See Sontag's essay on Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Anthropologist as Hero."5. Gerlach and Hamilton discuss some of these capitalist appropriations of the future.6. Samuels, for example, seems quite unaware that anthropologists have ever had an

abiding interest in the future.7. Over the years, there have been a significant number of science fiction writers

with substantial training or advanced degrees in anthropology, among them VladimirBogoraz, Jacquetta Hawkes, Sterling Lanier, W. Michael and Kathleen Gear, ChinaMieville, and Kurt Vonnegut.

8. Stocking has become a standard text in discussions of this period in anthropology.9. See, for example, Le Guin's Alwcrys Coming Home (1985) for what Cummins

takes to be an even more sophisticated meditation on anthropology.10. See Mead and Metraux for a full account of the study of culture "at a distance."11. For discussions of the Macy seminars, see Heim and Hayles.12. In her memoir Blackberry Winter, for example. Mead chides her younger sister,

Priscilla, for using "science fiction and formulas of dissent and assent" against the restofthe family (89).

13. Sara Williams sees this as an anticipation of what would become, by the 1990s,"cyborg anthropology" ("Perhaps" 379).

14. A selection of her papers on futurology, edited by Robert Textor, is due to bereleased by Berghahn Books in 2003.

15. Jack Williamson finds Stover's work formative for the teaching of science fictionas a whole (33).

16. Noteworthy courses include "Science Fiction and Anthropology" at theUniversity of Waterloo, "Anthropology and Science Fiction" at Carleton University, andFarrer's honors introductory course on anthropology at the University of Califomia inChico (see her "Honors Anthropology and the Four Rs").

17. As Kroeber and Kluckhohn demonstrated decades ago, there has never inanthropology been any consensus over just what culture means and how it works.

18. Foster's sf novels, notably The Gameplayers ofZan (1979), hearken back toearlier, racialized concerns with the future of humanity, updated in the context of geneticengineering and inflected by the author's abiding interest in anthropological linguistics.

19. Horowitz describes the fate of one such imperialist project, the CIA's ProjectCamelot ofthe mid-1960s.

20. SSK is also sometimes referred to as the "Edinburgh School" because of itsassociation with the Science Studies unit at the University of Edinburgh; for a keystatement of SSK's "strong programme," see Bloor, Barnes, and Henry.

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ABSTRACTAnthropologists have long been interested in the future and, as a result, anthropology andscience fiction share certain understandings about culture and society. Rather thanconcentrate on anthropological science fiction, this essay looks to the ways professionalanthropologists have utilized sf in the years following World War II; it critiques thecybernetic-functional ist assumptions that underlie their visions of possible futures. Byconstructing "the future" as a rationalization of contemporary trends, anthropologistshave projected highly conservative visions based on stability and homeostasis—visionsthat are inimical to radical change. Still, the historical intersection of anthropology andsf holds a great deal of potential. By examining assumptions about the future that governwork in the present, anthropologists have the opportunity to develop genuine altemativesrather than futuristic capitulations to the historical status quo.

collins sail on! sail on! (science fiction studies v30 2003)

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