I just finished re-reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1976) in an old well-read family copy with the same cover illustration as the original first edition.
The book, part of what LeGuin does not call a “Hainish Cycle” though some readers do, is a series of stories set in an imaginary universe (or alternate/future history) where humans living on many worlds are beginning to establish relationships under guidence of the oldest inhabited world, Hain. LeGuin imagines that humans did not come from Earth originally, but were seeded as colonists on Earth and other planets by the human population on Hain. Genetic experiments resulted in populations of humans with different evolutionary characteristics. The Word for World is Forest takes place on Athshe, where the humans are furry, green, about 1 meter tall, and can dream while they are awake. The Athshean word for “world” is Athshe, which is also the word for “forest.”
The Althsheans live in tribal bands within the forests of their world. Colonists from Earth arrive and begin cutting down trees, mining, building settlements, and enslaving the indigenous Althshean people. There is no cultural framework for understanding this kind of violence and the story revolves around how the Althsheans develop a response based on their distinct culture, worldview, and practices.
There are a few alien words in the story in addition to the word for world/forest. One, sha’ab, is the Athshean word that means both “translator” and “god.”
Reading the Hain books out of order, I’m now starting The Dispossessed (1974) and came across a footnote defining an alien kinship term. This got me thinking about Xenolinguistics. In the case of LeGuin’s Hain books, she is not explaining an actual alien language but instead a designed language she has created for her imaginary universe – like Star Trek’s Klingon, or Tolkien’s Elvish.
Reading about such things online, I happened across a Xenolinguistics course syllabus from 2001, taught by Sheri Wells-Jensen at Bowling Green State University and found that Wells-Jensen participated in the SETI Institute’s November 2014 workshop “Communicating Across The Cosmos.”
Thinking around this idea of communication with Extraterrestrial life, I come back to the question of communication here on Earth. We are surrounded by non-human animal and plant life here on Earth, and have directed a good part of our scientific effort at understanding that life, but can we communicate with any of it? With any of them? The question of communication with life we may encounter in space will surely be assisted by increased efforts to communicate with life here on earth. There are efforts to this end, for example Denise Herzing’s work on The Wild Dolphin Project which approaches dolphins as ethnographic subjects to gather “information on the natural history of these dolphins, including dolphin behaviors, social structure, dolphin communication, and habitat.”
Ethnography of dolphins. Clearly we have multi-species ethnography emerging as a subfield in anthropology, and it often takes non-human animals seriously. But I sometimes still sense that there is a human exceptionalism built into much of it. There’s always a recognition of that exceptionalism, but in my view not enough effort to treat that exceptionalism as a serious problem. Why isn’t anthropology making more of an effort to study non-human animal culture as seriously as human culture? Why is communication with non-human animals left to biology and other fields? I continue to find it suprising that when the question of communication with Extraterrestrial life comes up, I frequently find psychologists having the discussion. At the SETI communication workshop, psychologist Albert A. Harrison presented on “Speaking for Earth: Projecting Cultural Values Across Deep Space and Time.” The only social scientist currently employed at SETI is psychologist Douglas Vakoch who serves as “Director of Interstellar Message Composition.” I don’t bring these examples up to cast any doubt at all on these excellent scholars qualifications, skill, or ability in the matter, but instead to ask: Where is anthropology?
If any discipline thinks of itself as dedicated to the question of “the other” – the matter of how to communicate across cultural difference, the question of what “the other” even is, and how that is constructed, and the issue of who speaks for humankind, it is certainly anthropology. Is this failure to engage with SETI simply a result of anthropologists not showing any interest?
As always it’s not ‘simply’ anything, and there is a history of engagement. NASA historian Steven J. Dick has written a history of anthropological involvement with the search for extraterrestrial intellegence (Dick 2006) in which he describes the limited engagement as part of the broader problem of bringing social sciences and humanities into SETI (Harrison et al. 2000). But why did it take a historian at NASA to document this involvement, to ask about it? Why aren’t anthropologists discussing this? Anthropology has engaged with space before and we are again now. In the 1970s, a series of symposia at the American Anthropological Association meetings brought scholars together across disciplines to discuss possible cultures of the future. In 1974, the organizers focused this annual symposium on the question of extraterrestrial communities. The resulting papers were collected in the book “Cultures Beyond the Earth: The Role of Anthropology in Outer Space” (Maruyama et al. 1975). In 2009, a call for anthropologists to take outer space seriously as a field site was revived with new theoretical and methodological approaches when David Valentine, Valerie Olson and Debbora Battaglia co-authored a commentary in Anthropology News titled “Encountering the Future: Anthropology and Outer Space” (Valentine et al. 2009). In 2012, anthropologists engaging with outer space presented their research in a panel titled “Alter(native) Visions of Futures and Outer Spaces” at the 2012 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco. (With the goal of adding to this list, I am currently co-organizing a panel on the anthropology of space for the 2015 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting.)
I suspect, however, the rare occurance of engagement between anthropology and space sciences are a result of two percieved problems with the anthropology of space: power and speculation.
The trend in anthropology for the last 40 years has been to ask questions about power – to look at inequality, uneven development, injustice, imperialism, colonialism. In part, this may be in the hopes of making amends for anthropology’s historical role in constructing racist ‘racial science,’ propping up empire, and serving as instruments of colonialism. On the second matter, speculation, anthropology has spent some professional energy battling the idea that it is an unscientific science – that qualitative research is not empirical, that the literary tone of contemporary ethnography is not overly reflexive, and such. These echoes of the universalist/particularist back and forths of enlightenment/counter-enlightenment debates about knowledge may have pushed Boas to classification as a way of understanding, led Geertz to defend anthropology through comparison with Physics and other so-called “hard sciences,” and led Lévi-Strauss to propose a structuralist periodic table of cultural elements. Today, this insecurity and discomfort with the ethnographic leads to de-funding of anthropology, to increasing focus on applied anthropology qua corporate marketing research, and repeats of past treacherous complicity with US military projects.
Despite this tension, space sciences often engage in a kind of informed speculation. This is especially the case in astrobiology, as I’ve written about previously, where informed speculation was also initially met with derision and a critique based on the fact that “this ‘science’ [of astrobiology] has yet to demonstrate that its subject matter exists” as Biologist George Gaylord Simpson argued in 1964.
Does the subject matter of xenolinguistics, of exo/xeno-anthropology exist? And can we speculate about how we might approach those “subjects” if we meet them? I wager most anthropologists would say no, we cannot. I disagree, and I think we can, in fact we must in order to prepare anthropology for human futures in space. LeGuin is an example of an anthropologist working outside the discipline, who has done this through speculative fiction (as are many sci-fi authors). But her speculation is, like astrobiology, informed – it isn’t conjecture without evidence but conjecture based on history, based on experience, and evidence.
When LeGuin writes about colonialism on Athshe, she is writing with knowledge of the history of human colonialism in hand. Xenolinguistics does the same when linguists construct languages, and when they explore possibilities of communication. Linguistsics has encountered and come to know new languages in the past. And psychologists like Vakoch and others do this when they imagine communication with extraterrestrial cultures. The key, and the role for anthropology here, is to use our experience to say: let us not make the same mistakes, commit the same violences, as we did in the past when we encountered new people, new languages, and new worlds. Anthropology can and must speak to this.
References
Dick, Steven J.
2006 Anthropology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: An Historical View. Anthropology Today 22(2): 3–7.
Harrison, Albert, John Billingham, Steven J. Dick, et al.
2000 The Role of the Social Sciences in SETI. In When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact. Allen Tough, ed. Pp. 71–85. Bellevue, Wash.: Foundation For the Future.
Maruyama, Magoroh, Arthur M. Harkins, and American Anthropological Association
1975 Cultures beyond the Earth: The Role of Anthropology in Outer Space. New York: Vintage Books.
Valentine, David, Valerie A. Olson, and Debbora Battaglia
2009 Encountering the Future: Anthropology and Outer Space. Anthropology News 50(9): 11–15.
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