The special issue “Experiments in Thinking across Worlds” (2019) of NatureCulture was born, among other things, out of discontent with the presumed boundaries between the anthropological and the fictional. Why is anthropology traditionally interested in some forms of fiction but steers away from others? Why does a myth sound more anthropological than, for instance, a science fiction novel? What would be making the difference if there is one, between myths and legends and rather modern forms of fiction: would it be the contents, the creator, or the effect of the story in terms of how people relate to it? Do we take fiction seriously only if our interlocutors believe it to be the truth?
Setting out to do a special issue on sf and anthropology, we had numerous influences from science studies scholar Donna Haraway to sf authors, such as Ursula K. Le Guin. We also have been encouraged by the works of anthropologists including Stefan Helmreich (e.g. 2009), Lisa Messeri (2016), Debbora Battaglia (2006 Ed.), and so on. With an experimental setup in mind, the special issue welcomed novel ways of relating to science (or speculative) fiction. This essay compiles the many different ways the "transgressions" were done in this special issue.
DJH: "We need to develop a much thicker culture for the poetries and the sciences. I don't know how to do it, you don't know how to do it, we don't know how to do it. I read science fiction in part because some of the best storytellers are trying to do it."
UKL: "And it has leaked out marvelously from science fiction into respectability." (42'46'')
Ursula K. Le Guin: Panel Discussion with Donna Haraway and James Clifford, 5/8/14, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Santa Cruz, USA.
"In contrast to the normalized toxic masculinity and white supremacy in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, many members of the virtual reality (VR) community see it as a fresh site for media innovation where diverse people can imagine, build, and share new worlds. In these inclusive worlds, VR expands who can experience answers to questions like “what if I were the hero?” and “if only that were my home!” SF, in turn, presents an opportunity to imagine new worlds for VR, experimenting with who makes and uses it, and for what purposes. We consider SF stories told about VR in contemporary traditional media to be explorations of the VR community’s anti-racist and feminist imaginaries." (Brandt and Messeri 2019, 2)
"What might be gained by experimenting with both the conceptual and physical notions of the zone of indiscernibility in reading science fiction with anthropology? The following pursues this question through a close reading of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s (2015) recent science fiction novel Children of Time, in which the remnants of humanity packed into a generational “ark ship” must contend with a novel species and nature for the right to revive human civilization on a new planet. Tchaikovsky’s novel is an epic, multi-generational, and multispecies tale that I read as forging a conceptual zone of indiscernibility between science fiction and multispecies anthropology in a way that advances the political stakes of the latter. " (Fisch 2019, 51–52)
"The speakers in the endnotes are two time-travelling scholars writing from an unspecified far future, at a time when other beings rule the planet. They are using references from STS scholarship and SF that are more familiar, from our own time, in order to speak to us, even if the necessity to traverse multiple temporalities through simple language to express the Ant Network Theory (ANT) on occasion produces spatiotemporal anomalies."(Chattopadhyay and Bowker 2019, 26)