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Samuel Gerald Collins Sail On! Sail On!: Anthropology, Science Fiction, and the Enticing Future
"Then there is the future," said the Very Young Man. "Just think! One might invest all 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 the concerns of the 60s' counterculture, pointed to a grave deficiency in the science of anthropology: "Anthropology has to date made very meager contributions to man's developing concem with the future" ("Contribution" 3). Two decades later, the American Anthropological Association began awarding an annual prize for "Anticipatory Anthropology" in order to ameliorate this shortcoming, what Robert Textor (who sponsored the award and for whom it is named) called the discipline's "tempocentrism"i.e., its concem only "with the past, the ethnographic present, and the actual present" (2). Mead's and Textor's accusations seem entirely justified: the "future" isn't usually thought of as anthropology's purview. In fact, anthropology's closest disciplinary neighbor within the humanities is often thought to be history. As archaeologists or physical anthropologists, we may study a fossil record, a historical record, or an archaeological record; as cultural anthropologists, we may study contemporary society, but we do sountil comparatively recentlywith one methodological foot squarely planted in historicism. Franz Boas's "culture history," for example, called for the reconstruction of cultural development through analyses of the diffusion of cultural elements.^ But this emphasis has led to a number of problems involving the way anthropology approaches its "objects" of study. By studying people who are, by definition, located in an other time, anthropologists have contributed to a chronopolitical domination of "the other," consigning less developed societies to the status of "primitives" temporally removed from the capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism affecting the rest of the world's peoplesall the while those very forces are wreaking havoc in the lives of these putatively isolated cultures. As Johannes Fabian argues in Time and the Other, the "[s]ystematic study of 'primitive' tribes began first in the hope of utilizing them as a kind of time-machine, a peep into our own historic past, as providing closer evidence about the early links in the great Series" that led to modem Westem civilization (39). As early as the 1950s, critical anthropologists called for this "time machine" to be dismantled, for anthropologists to consider their interlocutors as contemporary peoples, albeit marginalized and often powerless ones. Eric Wolfs celebrated book Europe and the People Without History was the culmination of this critical tradition, a powerful call to see traditional societies as enmeshed in the same historical processes as our own. But these arguments

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Still raise the question of whether anthropology must always only "peep into our historic past." In An Englishman Looks at the World, H.G. Wells wrote that "the creation of Utopiasand their exhaustive criticismis the proper and distinctive method of sociology" (205). Like sociology, nineteenth-century anthropology was never far from Utopian speculation.^ As Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out, the tropes of the "savage" and the "Utopian" arose together in the Westem imaginary, as conceptions of the Utopian future were dialectically generated via changing ideas of the "savage" past. And in the midst of Social Darwinism and increasingly elaborate forms of eugenics, many anthropologists felt compelled to speculate on the future of the races. As the dedicated monogenicist (i.e., believer in the singular origin of humans), Alfred Russel Wallace, prophesied in the smashing fmale to an 1864 Anthropological Society paper: "While his extemal form will probably ever remain unchanged, ... [mankind's] mental constitution may continue to advance and inq)rove till the world is again inhabited by a single homogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior to the noblest specimens of existing humanity" (qtd. in Oppenheim 311). Wallace's Utopian speculations were echoed by scores of anthropologistsEamest Hooton and Carleton S. Coon being, perhaps, the last of thesewho were, like him, anxiously anticipating the Spencerian teleology of the species.^ It was not until the twentieth century that cultural anthropologists would accede to a resolutely synchronic "ethnographic present" disdainful of nineteenth-century evolutionism on the one hand, and Utopian (or dystopian) speculation on the other. But that does not mean that anthropologists gave up their purchase on the future. In fact, I would suggest that the opposite is tme: anthropological research in the "present" is enabled by a relationship with historically specific futures. The history of those relationships has never been part of the "ethnographer-as-hero" mythos that anthropologists tell of themselves (with the help of Susan Sontag'*); yet this work may demarcate both what and how anthropologists know. In the twenty-first century, laying open these subcutaneous relationships has never been more important. Subject to the time compressions of advanced capitalism, much of our contemporary horizon seems ioprecede into the future; from the perspective of a public that only tenuously differentiates between image-laden spectacle and reality, we are already living in the future. As has often been noted, the role of science fiction in all of this seems less as an extrapolative genre than as part of the collective image factory, swapping cultural gestalts with corporations and politicians around an axis mundi of advanced capitalism.^ But what is the status of anthropology in this process? How can a discipline still popularly associated with the salvage of tradition survive in what Michael Fischer has called a "proleptic" future? It is more relevant than ever to refiect critically on anthropology's temporal perambulations. The following essay addresses anthropology's persistent amnesia about its future work.^ In what follows, I reconstmct some of the major strands in the history of anthropology from World War II to the the present by drawing on

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connections and relationships between anthropology and science fiction. To me, this era seems especially significant: anthropologists and science fiction writers have never been so close. I should say at the outset that anthropology is not science fiction; yet anthropologists have long been interested in sfand to say this is not to impugn anthropology's credibility, but merely to contextualize anthropology in its own contemporaneity. Nor is this a critique of anthropological science fiction; while I reference many works of sf that have been considered in some way anthropological, I hardly think it appropriate to fault sf writers for not being anthropologists. (The same generosity, alas, cannot be extended to anthropologists who dip into the techniques of sf.) But while this is an essay largely critical of a certain strain of anthropological thought, I nevertheless believe that there is, in the intertexts of anthropology and science fiction, a good deal of potential. If, as I argue, anthropology has no choice but to engage the future, then perhaps understanding the ways this has happened in the past will open up new possibilities for altemative futures. In the end, it is the unexamined use of future work in anthropology that leads not only to the "tempocentric" reproduction of the here-and-now in our visions of what will 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 the tempocentrisms of die past. Search the Sky: Cyhemetics and Functionalism. Science fiction's "Golden Age" started, apocryphally, in 1937 with John W. Can^)bell's assumption of the editorship of Astounding Science Fiction, It was Campbell who inaugiu'ated the careers of sf titans Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Theodore Sturgeon, and who pressured these writers to abjure Gemback-inspired "scientifictions" oozing with futuristic geegaws in favor of more believable worlds. As Leon Stover reminds us, "Extravagant fiction today ... cold fact tomorrow" may have been Hugo Gemsback's recipe for a nascent genre (471), but science fiction was gradually attracting a more sophisticated readership, one demandingin the words of Fredric Jamesona 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 growing popularization of these discourses with the US reading public. It was during this postwar period that anthropologists Chad Oliver (first published 1950) and William Tenn (a.k.a. Philip Klass, first published 1946) carved niches for themselves.^ By the 1960s, science fiction writers were expected to create, in the words of Gardner Dozois, "a future society as a real, self-consistent, and organic thing""(14; emphasis in original). This "Space Anthropology," as Raymond Williams charmingly termed it, utilized sf to "fmd what are essentially new tribes, and new patterns of living" (360). The fullest realization of Williams's "Space Anthropology" came with the emergence 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, Alfred Kroeber, Le Guin was particularly well-positioned to incorporate anthropologi-

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cal insights into what was, in her case, genuine world-buildingalthough it's doubtful that her father would have agreed with her that he "studied real cultures and I make them upin a way, it's the same thing" (qtd. in Brigg 16). Nonetheless, her HAINISH CYCLE is a densely textured anthropology, unfolding through a cycle of novels and stories and actually populated by several anthropologists and ethnologists. The cosmology of the series revolves around the "seeding" of multiple worlds by human colonists and elaborates on the cultural and physical attributes of these erstwhile Hainish colonies. The Gethenians of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), for example, with their ambisexuality/androgyny on a planet noted for its harsh, unyielding climate, are culturally very different from the "bisexual" anthropologist, Genly Ai, who studies them. In a classic statement of the cultural relativism underlying modem anthropology, Le Guin writes: "When you meet a Gethenian you cannot and must not do what a bisexual normally does, which is to cast him in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards him a corresponding role dependent on your 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 Imaginary Worlds": Whatever value the writer chooses, let him ponder how it will determine the course of the year, the size and character of climatic zones, the development of life and civilizations.... If Earth did travel upright, thus having no seasons, we would probably never see migratory birds across the sky. One suspects there would be no clear cycle of birth and death of vegetation either. Then what form would 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 1960s anthropological sf was very much bound up with a postwar cybemeticfunctionalist understanding of society. Functionalism, insofar as the term has any appellative use, describes a general tum from diachronic, evolutionary models in social and cultural anthropology to a synchronic understanding of culture. The person most often credited with establishing a functionalist paradigm within the field, Bronislaw Malinowski, focused on the interrelationship of institutions and practices within society and culture rather than the (usually specious) comparison of decontextualized elements between cultures.^ Following on the insights of Johann Herder and Emile Durkheim, Malinowski, in his classic 1922 study Argonauts of the Westem Pacific, sought to show how a single set of cultural practices (the kula) imbricated economics, politics, and religion (among other things) simultaneously and how all of these varied institutions related to each other as a functional whole. Later so-called "stmctural functionalists" such as A.R. Radcliffe-Brown would emphasize the contributions of culture to the general maintenance of social equilibrium.

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Cybemetics, according to its founding father Norbert Wiener, combined philosophy, mathematics, engineering, and information science into "the field of control and communication theory, whether in machines or in animals" (11). Its impressive interdisciplinarity stemmed from the key insightnovel at the timethat all manner of actions performed by humans, animals, or machines could be described as the transmission and processing of infonnation. By unleashing this hugely productive metaphor, one could describe equally the architecture of Artificial Intelligence, of the human nervous system, or of a government bureaucracy as a formal network subject to feedback and entropy. In anthropology, as Miriam Rodin et al. have recounted, cybemetics and functionalism would later combine in a general "systems" approach emphasizing the interrelationship of culture, economy, society, and the environment as a "bounded set of variables" within "a typology of systems stmcturesclosed, 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 goals are very much consonant with a particular kind of mid-twentieth century anthropology comparing cultures in a "natural laboratory." Her HAINISH CYCLE, detailing the cultural and historical divergence of worlds originally "seeded" by Hain but developing independently, as well as her EARTHSEA series, unfolding across separate island cultures, offer so many "laboratories" in which the author can 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 of Darkness: The subject of my experiment, then, was something like this: Because of our lifelong social conditioning, it is hard for us to see clearly what, besides purely physiological form and function, truly differentiates men and women. Are there real differences in temperament, capacity, talent, psychic processes., etc.? If so, what are they? Only comparative ethnology offers, so far, any solid evidence on the matter, and the evidence is incomplete and often contradictory. (Dancing 10) As Elizabeth Cummins has shown, Le Guin continues to experiment with the boundaries between science fiction and anthropology, interpolating the forms and conventions of ethnography into her fictions in a way, perhaps, ultimately transformative of both. ^ But does it also work the other way? Does anthropology interpolate 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 (as its name implies) focuses on links between cultural forms and personality stmctures. Mead began edging towards functionalist perspectives early on, particularly after she went to Washington, D.C. to add anthropological expertise to 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 anthropology to the emergent postwar order. As she put it in 1942: "We [anthropologists] can contribute the practicality, the insistence that the job be done scientifically, on

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an engineering basis, insisting that we must know what the materials arehuman beings of diverse cultures, human cultures of different designs, human societies of different constitutionout of which we plan to build" (249). She was one of the founding attendeesalong with her husband, Gregory Batesonof a landniark series of seminars on cybemetics held by the Joseph Macy Foundation*^ thereafter, she became an indefatigableand, as Micaela di Leonardo points out, occasionally reactionarybooster of an interdisciplinary, government-supported anthropology committed to social change. Mead's general goal was the application of systems theoryespecially the cybemetic model of feedback loopsto the establishment of just govemance and the development of democratic institutions. Interestingly, Wiener himself was not sanguine that such a project could succeed: Much as I sympathize with their [social scientists'] sense of the urgency of the situation, and as much as I hope that they and other competent workers will take up problems of this sort... I can share neither their feeling that this field has the first claim on my attention, nor their hopefulness that sufficient progress can be registered in this direction to have an appreciable therapeutic effect in the present diseases of society.... Thus the human sciences are very poor testing grounds for a new mathematical technique. (24) His view that the methods of cybemetics would be lost on the "human sciences"including anthropologywas, however, not a deterrent to Mead's energetic prescriptions for society's ills. Mead was, moreover, able to imbue the functionalism of the day with a tenuous, liberal progressivism that allowed her to constmct "future cultures" out of the diagnosed imperfections of the past. By the 1970s, Mead was writing unapologetically about creating "new cultures," proclaiming that "the future is now": "What we are reporting is a very complicated new process of anthropological activity. We are in a period of invention, of dealing with many concepts that we never had to consider before, and recognizing that one of the tasks of anthropology is culture building" ("Contribution" 272). Although she occasionally indulged in excoriations of science fiction for its factual lapses,'^ her biographer Phyllis Grosskurth has claimed that her avid reading of sf was her "only form of relaxation" (76); and by 1970, Mead was publicly confabulating with Arthur C. Clarke and Alvin Toffier in a discussion of Stanley Kubrick's fihn 2007.- A Space Odyssey {""2001, Sci-fi or Man's Future?"). Evidently comfortable with the language of sf, her imagined futures were infiected with her own special concerns regarding education and the family. In her 1978 essay "The Contribution of Anthropology to the Science of the Future," she waxed eloquent about building new cultures in space colonies.^^ It is not an exaggeration to say that Mead was one of the foundersalong with military think tanks and Herman Kahnof futurology itself.*'* But what kinds of futures did she envision? Is it possible to engineer cultures out of the bits and pieces of past beliefs and institutions? What assumptions must we make in order to grasp culture as a whole and thus subject it to our (enlightened) manipulations? Mead's own future workand her fiinctionalist views of human

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society and the role of anthropologyinfluenced anthropologists throughout the 1970s. When Worlds Collide: Anthropology Turns to Science Fiction. The first anthropologist to use science fiction in the classroom was undoubtedly Chad Oliver, who appears to have utilized some of his own writings in his seminar on ethnography and science fiction during the late 1950s. Second among anthropologists was probably Leon Stover, who taught "social science fiction" courses from 1965 at Illinois Institute of Technology.*^ Their work has been followed up by a few score "anthropology and science fiction" courses in the US and Canada, a trend that has sometimes erroneously been attributed to the postmodem tum in anthropological thought during the 1980s.^^ These courses generally rely on some of the more functionalist sf classics of the 1960sLe Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Frank Herbert's Dime (1965)and early Utopian writings such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915). The first published anthropology-science fiction collaborative volume was Apeman. Spaceman, a 1968 anthology of mostly Golden Age sf that was arranged according to co-editor Stover's sometimes eccentric interpretations of anthropology's "subfields." Its suggestive cover illustration portrayed a heavybrowed Homo neanderthalensis wistfully looking on while a spaceship alighted in the distance. Collaborating with Harry Harrison (another protege of John W. Campbell), Stover attempted to link past, present, and future into a universalist anthropology. Stover's future, like Mead's, was a succession of stable cybemetic/functionalist systems: "The present convergence of social change to another state of adjustment will require a higher consciousness of self in society than ever was called for in the achievement of a stable pattem of life built around earlier systems of technology" ("Afterword" 381). The first official recognition of science fiction in anthropology had to wait until 1970, when Arthur Harkins and Margoroh Maruyama organized an American Anthropological Association panel on "cultural futuristics." Additionally, beginning in 1973, Maruyama and Harkins began sponsoring an essay contest on "cultural altematives," the results of which were published in an anthology. Cultures Beyond the Earth: The Role of Anthropology in Outer Space. The titles of the prize-winning essays suggest the intellectual territory traversed by this nascent "cultural futuristics": "Toward an Extraterrestrial Anthropology," "Terra-Lune: A Frontier City-State," "First Contact with Nonhuman Cultures: Anthropology in the Space Age," and "The Contact Group and a Nonhuman Extraterrestrial Culture." As Robert J. Miller has suggested, cultural futuristics was split, even at its inception, into (at least) two opposing camps, one speculating on the vicissitudes of alien contact, and the other on the logistics of extraterrestrial colonization (34, 36). Reed Rineranother founder of future studies in anthropologysees the division as between policy-driven studies on the one hand, and light-hearted speculation on the other ("Doing Futures" 314). It was Maniyama's more policy-oriented "extraterrestrial anthropology" that seems, however, to have survived into successive American Anthropological Association conferences. His announcement for a 1975 panel.

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"Future Cultures: Imaginable Alternatives for Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Communities," is a good index of this strand of cultural fiituristics: "In the era of extraterrestrial communities, we will have hitherto unknown cultural options. In such communities many of the constraints which restrict life on earth are removed.... We will be in a position to first invent new cultural patterns and then choose material conditions and community design to fit the desired cultural pattem" ("Notice" 13). The consonance of Mamyama's program with Mead's future work is remarkable. Both tmst technocratic expertise to constmct future cultural patterns; both display remarkable confidence in a discipline that has never arrived 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, policyoriented futuristic circles, as consistent with his appointment at UCLA's Graduate School of Management. The more ludic, speculative dimensions of cultural futuristics eventually coalesced in 1982 with the establishment of the joumal Cultural Futures Research, itself a combination of two earlier periodicals, ANTHRO-TECH: A Joumal of Speculative Anthropology (1976-82) and Cultural and Educational Futures (1979-1982). CFRs editor, the aforementioned Reed Riner, stressed the interdisciplinary quality of the joumal, which, he believed, answered "the need to foster increased dialogue among social scientists, futurists and science fiction writers/users, cognizant that we are all educators" ("Editorial" 3). Indeed, articles during the joumal's two-year run included applied anthropology, cultural studies of then-emergent information technology, and regular contributions from sf novelist M.A. Foster.*^ The most ambitious project to come out of Cultural Futures Research was Jim Funaro's CONTACT!, an annual conference bringing sf writers together with anthropologists, artists, and scientists. At the first meeting in 1982, anthropologists Robert Tyzzer, Reed Riner, and Paul Bohannan joined with sf author C.J. Cherryh in the "Bateson Project," a role-playing game pattemed after Dungeons and Dragons. In the game, one team adopted the role of a human 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 first contact, with each team extemporaneously improvising culturally consistent responses to the other. The Bateson Projectwhich, like CONTACT!, is still an annual eventis interesting for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that many anthropologists seem to fmd this sf role-playing germane to their scholarly work. As Bohannan refiected after his 1982 session: The importance of all this to anthropology should be evident: it gives us a chance to dream up cultureseven non-human cultures. A number of things become evident as you take part in this exercise:firstof all, you'd better get the physics of your environment rightonly if you know that can you see the range of adaptations necessary.... You can also discover in creating a culture that if it doesn't all hang together, Malinowski-fashion, it falls apart. ("Anthropology" 5-6)

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However useful it may have been for CONTACT! participants to build, "Malinowski-fashion," in space and time, grasping cultures as functionally interrelated wholes has become less and less tenable to anthropologists working in the present. From the 1930s imtil its demise in the 1970s, functionalism, in its many manifestations, came under increasing criticism for its reactionary politics. Often utilized by governments in designing "democratizing" interventions into social-political life, functionalism could adopt an unabashedly authoritarian tone: "Culture must ensure the continuity of social life by providing techniques for inhibiting individual tendencies which might interfere with cooperation and for the suppression or elimination of individuals whose conduct is anti-social" (Gregg and Williams 605). Early functionalists were, indeed, cheerleaders for homeostasis, gesturingthrough their emphasis on functional equilibriumtowards a society "free" of dissent and resistance. Later anthropological developments in cybemetics and systems theory would address these biases by focusing on more open systems, "not as they maintain equilibrium, but as they refiect the adaptive needs of purposive human actors" (Rodin et al. 748). Despite such ideological corrections, however, there are several assumptions common to functionalist/ cybemetic theorizing that, taken together, tend to stress cultural uniformity and homogenization: 1) that anthropologists can apprehend the absolute boundaries of cultures in relation to one another and can create "pure" anthropological objects for study; 2) that grasping intra-cultural relationships is more inq)ortant than tracing those between or outside cultures; and 3) that anthropologists can predictand thereby shapethe course of cultural change through the application of systems thinking. As Jonathan Friedman sums up this functionalist paradigm: "Nature and culture become a homogeneous whole in which it is assumed, as a matter of principle, that specific social institutions function primarily to maintain the stability of the larger environment" (466; emphasis in original). So what are the consequences of these sorts of assun:q)tions? As postwar independence movements flared up in the colonial dependencies of Europe and the United States, culminating (for the US) in the quagmire of Vietnam, the question of anthropology's understanding of the world took on a special urgency: government agencies were quite interested in an anthropological approach that emphasized themes of social "stability" and in anthropologists whose 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 comprehensive studies of the slave trade, the fiir trade, of colonial expansion, of forced and voluntary acculturation, of rebellion and accommodation in the modem world, which would provide us with the intellectual grid needed to order the massive data we now possess on individual societies and cultures engulfed by these phenomena? ("American Anthropologists" 31) A world imagined as "billiard ball" cultures, each a self-contained laboratory of dynamic systems, was, at the very least, naive in a world where cultures were

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deeply (if not painfully) interrelated and, more seriously, was politically quiescent in a world transformed by 500 years of European colonialism. Engineering cultures in space as bounded homeostatic entities can have quite serious consequences in die present-day world, as Wolf warns: "Names thus become things, and things marked with an X can become targets of war" {Europe 7). Anthropologists as Bad Writers. The winning papers in Harkins and Mamyama's 1973 contest for fictional accounts of "cultural alternatives" demonstrate the limits of the functionalist imagination. Dorothy L. Keur's and Russell La Due's "Univaria" is a case in point, endorsing as it does a Utopian Great Society abounding with technological fixes and a benevolent, Keynesian state devoted to solving all social problems. The mise-en-scene for this altemative future is a history classroom in the twenty-furst century, where children and teacher compare 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 late twentieth century it would have been about $5000 a year." "But not like what they used to call welfare," said Ruth, breaking into the discussion for the first time. "Everyone gets it, but they have to work for it. On whatever 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 countries to accept our citizens." (597-98) H.L. Lefferts, who actually introduced this story into his anthropology classroom, reports that students found it, predictably, "old," "dull," and (interestingly) "ethnocentric"i.e., premised on a US-style apotheosis of technocratic progress (630). Anthropologists, having unleashed their imaginations in the creation of "new patterns of living," succeeded only in turning out pale evocations of one myopic vision of the present. But if anthropologists don't necessarily make good science fiction writers, does that make them bad anthropologists? Paul Bohannan, reflecting on a lifetime of anthropological research, has written of an encounter with sf author Larry Niven: Larry Niven once told me that a science-fiction writer has to know two disciplinesanthropology and physics. And, he noted, you can finesse the physics. In fiction, a writer can merely declare cultural changes to have occurred on some distant planet or in some alternate reality. Go aheadit's "only" fiction: change the family form or the production processes on the Planet of Oxymoron and see what 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 commitments, its relegation of the cultural Other to the exotic past of the "savage slot,"

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many anthropologists, taking their cues from reformers such as Joan Vincent, Talal Asad, Eric Wolf, and William Roseberry, have worked to represent cultures in an interactive context of global political economy and to cultivate what Johannes Fabian has termed "coevalness"i.e., construing other peoples as part of our own contenq)oraneity. But while we have, in our moments of reflexivity, problematized past and present, we often leave, as Bohannan suggests, our constructions of iht future unexamined. Is this because anthropologyas a primarily descriptive endeavordoesn't depend on the future? I have suggested just the opposite: to paraphrase Clifford Geertz, anthropology is suspended in teleologies we ourselves have spun. Our versions of life now are inescapably infiected by how we think life is going to be. The foregoing has suggested that future work in anthropology is the other side to its allochronic deployment of the "savage slot" and that, furthermore, piercing the veil of ideological allochronies, as Fabian urges us to do, requires that we interrogate anthropological futures as much as we do anthropological pasts. Prolepsis and Cyborg Anthropology: Anthropologists Look to the Immanent Future. During the 1980s and 1990s, social theory began to adopt an almost apocalyptic tone, heralding a dizzying profusion of "ends" the "end of history" (Francis Fukuyama), the "end of work" (Jeremy Rifkin), the end of the nation-state (Arjun Appadurai)from which new con^lexes of power, knowledge, and identity were seen as continuously emerging. Anthropology itself seemed to have moved into a world "beyond culture" (in the words of Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson) in a way that portended a full-blown epistemological crisis for the field. For Michael Herzfeld, this crisis was the epochal transformation of anthropology's "object" of study by new infonnation technologies: even the most "primitive" of peoples were now linked via "the communications superhighway" and "the myriad national and intemational agencies that assist and confound people's everyday lives" (6). A number of anthropologists responded to this "crisis" by concentrating their analyses on sites of cultural emergence2i notable reversal, since the discipline, at least in the United States, had begun with "salvage" projects, the reconstruction of cultures thought to have almost disappeared. Anthropologists of late modernity, as this loosely assorted group of theorists and practitioners might be called, have begun to deal withpre-constructions, analyses of cultural configurations on the cusp of appearance, a method Michael Fischer has identified as "prolepsis" (245). Calling upon anthropologists to produce descriptive ethnographies of discourses, institutions, and modes of being in the throes of birth, Fischer links anthropological prolepsis with the new technology of cyberspace, affirming the emergent "hypertext" of the near-future over the obstinate physicality of the present "text." In his encyclopedic review of "cyberanthropology" in the late1980s and early 1990s, Arturo Escobar hits on multiple sites of this cyberspatial emergence: "a transition to a new postcorporeal stage," " new possiblities for potent articulations between humans, nature and machines," a "new malleability of nature," and "a hypothesized transition to a postscriptural society." Even the anthropologists themselves are emergent beings, their projects occupying a

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shadowy half-life between extant political economies and the pleasures and dangers of the imminent future ("Welcome" 216). In studies of globalization specifically, anthropologistsvery much in the spirit of cyberpimk science fiction, wifli which their work was sometimes articulatedhave posited a variety of transitional and virtual "spaces" to describe wider ambits of circiilating capital and commodities that impinge variously on the more place-bound localities that were the former objects of disciplinary analysis. Transcending what Herzfeld has called "microscopic" analyses of localized place has not meant so much taking on "global" forms directlye. g., multinational corporations, multilateral donors, neoimperialismsbut rather postulating "notional" spaces ambiguously mediating between "the global" and "the local." As Michael Keamey writes, globalization "entails a shift from two-dimensional Euclidean space with its centers and peripheries and sharp boundaries, to a multidimensional global space with unbounded, often discontinuous and interpenetrating sub-spaces" (548). But what exactly are these new, fantastic, non-Euclidean topologies, and how do they "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 the concept of "non-places," anonymous interactions of people with "textualized worlds" carefully emptied of their multiplex social relationships. More concretely, James Boon has undertaken an ethnographic study of "Showbiz," an information system emanating from virtualized corporate capital and influencing global cultures in diverse ways. These various liminal "scapes" and "spaces" of late-modernist anthropology are generally designed to mediate between two equally improbable social conditions: a state of total cultural homogenization (the McDonaldization thesis) and a distributed terrain of complete cultural heterogeneity (the "billiard ball" model of the committed functionalist). Partly as a response to these shifts of emphasis within the field, the early 1990s saw a tum towards "cyborg anthropology," beginning with a 1992 American Anthropological Association panel organized by Sara Williams, Gary Lee Downey, and Joseph Dumit. As its name implies, cyborg anthropology plays, often quite overtly, upon popular images of cyborgs in science fiction, linking up as well with Donna Haraway's infiuential 1985 essay "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," where we are all revealed as already cyborg constmcts. Building on the "strong programme" of the Sociology of Science Knowledge (SSK)which demonstrates, through microsociologies of the processes of scientific research, that science is also cultural (i.e., constituted by and constitutive of identity, power, and social relations)^cyborg anthropology tmmps that insight, insisting that humans, machines, "the scientific," and "the cultural" are hybrid borders regulated by institutions and power, but shot through with transgressions enabled (in part) by the cultural interpretations tendered by cyborg anthropologists themselves. The result has been an extremely fertile output of anthropological studies into science and identity, whether focusing on modes of reproductive technology (Gay Becker, Marilyn Strathem), the institutions of scientific knowledge (Sharon Traweek, Paul Rabinow, Hugh

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Gusterson), or the basic constitution of Self and Other (Sara Williams, Stefan Helmreich). The politics of cyborg anthropology involves interventions in emerging sites of knowledge and power. This explicit "future work" gives cyborg anthropology, according to Gary Downey and Joseph Dumit, a critical edge in a time of revolutionary science: "Starting out with emergence as a question is ... valuable because, in addition to asking what is new on the horizon, it suggests that contemporary practices are unfinished, ongoing, continuously maintained, and something in which one's own practices can potentially intervene" (9-10). Stefan Helmreich's recent ethnography, Silicon Second Nature, for example, explores the emergence of artificial lifei.e., computer simulations of biological complexity that under certain conditions can be construed as meeting the criteria for organic animation. Throughout, Helmreich elaborates on the biaseswhat he calls "life-as-we-think-it-is"inherent in scientists's conceptions of the future, of "life-as-it-could-be" (13). By critiquing the strain of masculinist Social Darwinism latent in the technoscientific work of the Sante Fe Institute, Helmreich hopes to affect future change by catalyzing the development of an Artificial Life program grounded in a more communitarian "autopoesis" or in feminist/queer theory. In other words, by extrapolating from present configurations of knowledge and power to an imagined future, Helmreich is able to critique the present course of scientific research. Anthropologies of late modernityof which cyborg anthropology is perhaps the most visible exampleare predicated on an imaginative reflex that can seize upon the ramifications of emergent technologies, institutions, and selves in an extrapolated future. But if the power of this anthropology emanates from its imagined temporal distance from the present, that "f\iture work," as I've been calling it, can also be deeply problematic. As Sara Williams writes: The practice of cyborg anthropology does not escape being a mode of knowledge production. Rather, such a practice remains (perhaps necessarily) involved in (1) the violent proliferation of fetish objects and fetishizing desires and (2) the reproduction of properties and governmentalities through which some channels of proliferation are rendered legitimate and others illegitimate. ("Ethnographic Fetishism" 167) Cyborg anthropology often seems quite taken with cyberpunkish visions of posthuman possibility, with the high-tech fantasies circulating throughout popular cyberculture. And one must ask whether this focus on sites of emergence that have already been fetishized by advertising and other forms of corporate propaganda is the best possible way to mount a politics of the future. Is tfiis tmly a critical intervention, or does cyborg anthropology altemately condemn and covet the shiny surfaces of digital culture? Are its critiques-cumcelebrations of cyborg possibility merely sublated into a future that is unwittingly helping to realize? Like the cybemetic functionalists before them, anthropologists of late modernity utilize the future as a critical foil to describe, interrogate, and change the present. But just as anthropological invocations of the (traditional, savage) past have been inextricably embedded in power and knowledge configurations in the present, so, too, anthropological futures are imbricated with the fears and desires that make up anthropology's disciplinary unconscious.

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Conclusions: The Future of the Future in Anthropology. In the final pages of his marvelous introductory textbook. The Discovery of Humanity (1981), Chad Oliverscience fiction's most famous anthropologistelaborates a distinctly anthropological-utopian vision: There is room here for many lifeways. The Earth of tomorrow need not be the Earth of today. It does not have to be a plastic anthill smothered in a uniform culture. It will be technologically possible and the record shows that we have a considerable aptitude for dealing with technological problems.... We could have a green Earth again, an Earth free of pollution, an Earth that could be the setting for a thousand experimental lifeways. We could have an Earth on which we recognized our identity as a species, an Earth where racism and mad wars of self-destruction could not exist. (387) Oliver's projected future had, of course, much in common with the prognostications of his contemporaries: the eventual colonization of space, the establishment of a world government, and the inevitability of US hegemony. Nevertheless, Oliver believed that diversityand here he meant much more than a bland multiculturalismwas as vital to our human future as any technological advance, that alterity was not some atavistic relic of a "tribal" past giving way to an increasingly uniform, global culture, but was rather die precondition for a tenable, workable future. To be sure, anthropologists will continue to engage the future, and that engagement will, no doubt, share some affinities with coeval future work in science fiction and futurology. That said, anthropologists owe it to themselves and to others engaged in future work to articulate distinctly anthropological futures challenging bland affirmations of the status quo and evoking something other than etiolated echoes of the present. We will not, however, fmd those futures on hermetic "islands of history"in the words of Marshall Sahlinsbut in an engagement with the differences, resistances, and revolutions that characterize contemporary life on the margins and in the interstices of power. At the end of his scathing critique of regimes of development, Arturo Escobar writes: At the bottom of the investigation of alternatives lies the sheer fact of cultural difference. Cultural differences embodyfor better or for worse, this is relevant to the politics of research and interventionpossibilities for transforming the politics of representation, that is, for transforming social life itself. Out of hybrid or minority cultural situations might emerge other ways of building economies, of dealing with basic needs, of coming together into social groups. {Encountering 225) Escobar's challenge to imagine a "development" apart from the minous calculus of modernization theory can be put to anthropology as a whole. What would a future work prefaced on genuine difference look like? What, if anything, would it share with Golden-Age stalwarts such as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, not to mention with functionalist-humanists like Le Guin or the posthumanist dreams of cyberpunk? It is probably too soon to saycertainly too soon to circumscribe that future in the preoccupations of the present.

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NOTES Portions 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 special issue of SFS, Sheryl Hamilton, Neil Gerlach, and Rob Latham, along with the anonymous reviewers, for their insightful comments on the manuscript. My title is taken from 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 anthropology, 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 Vladimir Bogoraz, Jacquetta Hawkes, Sterling Lanier, W. Michael and Kathleen Gear, China Mieville, 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 rest ofthe 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 be released by Berghahn Books in 2003. 15. Jack Williamson finds Stover's work formative for the teaching of science fiction as a whole (33). 16. Noteworthy courses include "Science Fiction and Anthropology" at the University of Waterloo, "Anthropology and Science Fiction" at Carleton University, and Farrer's honors introductory course on anthropology at the University of Califomia in Chico (see her "Honors Anthropology and the Four Rs"). 17. As Kroeber and Kluckhohn demonstrated decades ago, there has never in anthropology been any consensus over just what culture means and how it works. 18. Foster's sf novels, notably The Gameplayers ofZan (1979), hearken back to earlier, racialized concerns with the future of humanity, updated in the context of genetic engineering and inflected by the author's abiding interest in anthropological linguistics. 19. Horowitz describes the fate of one such imperialist project, the CIA's Project Camelot ofthe mid-1960s. 20. SSK is also sometimes referred to as the "Edinburgh School" because of its association with the Science Studies unit at the University of Edinburgh; for a key statement of SSK's "strong programme," see Bloor, Barnes, and Henry. WORKS CITED Anderson, Poul. "The Creation of Imaginary Worlds." Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Gardner Dozois, etal. New York: St. Martin's, 1991. 105-28.

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of Difference." Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Ed. Gupta and Ferguson. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. 33-51. Gusterson, Hugh. Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End ofthe Cold War. Berkeley: U California P, 1996. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybemetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1999. Heim, Steve J. The Cybemetics Group. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991. Helmreich, Stefan. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artifical Ufe in a Digital World. Berkeley: U California P, 1998. Herzfeld, Michael. Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society. New York: Blackwell, 2001. Hooton, Earnest. Twilight of Man. NY: Putnam's Sons, 1939. Horowitz, Irving L., ed. The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1974. Jameson, Fredric. "Critical Agendas." SFS 17:1 (March 1990): 93-102. Kearney, Michael. "The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism." Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 547-65. Keur, Dorothy, and Russell LaDue. "Univaria." Cultures of the Future. Ed. Margoroh Maruyama and Arthur Harkins. Chicago: Mouton, 1978. 593-612. Kroeber, A.L., and Cylde Kluckhohn. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. New York: Cambridge UP, 1952. Lefferts, H.L. "The State of Anthropology Today: A Comment." Cultures ofthe Future. Ed. Margoroh Maruyama and Arthur Harkins. Chicago: Mouton, 1978. 692-631. Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace, 1969. . Dancing at the Edge ofthe World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove, 1989. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts ofthe Westem Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. New York: Dutton, 1961. Maruyama, Magoroh. "Notice." Anthropology Newsletter 16:8 (1975): 13. and Arthur Harkins, eds. Cultures Beyond the Earth: The Role of Anthropology in Outer Space. New York: Vintage, 1975. Mead, Margaret . And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America. New York: Morrow, 1942. . "Apprenticeship Under Boas." The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth. Ed. Walter Goldschmidt. Washington, D . C : American Anthropological Association, 1959. 29-45. . Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: Morrow, 1972. The Contribution of Anthropology to the Science ofthe Future." Cultures of the Future. Ed. Margoroh Maruyama and Arthur Harkins. Chicago: Mouton, 1978. 3-6. and Rhoda Metraux, eds. 1953. The Study of Culture at a Distance. New York: Berghahn, 2000. Miller, Robert J. "Techno-Topics." Cultural Futures Research 7:4 (1983): 34,36-1-. Morgan, Chris. Future Man: The Further Evolution ofthe Human Race. New York: Irving, 1980. Oliver, Chad. The Discovery of Humanity: An Introduction to Anthropology. New York: Harper, 1981. Oppenheim, Janet. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914. New York: Cambridge UP, 1985.

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ABSTRACT Anthropologists have long been interested in the future and, as a result, anthropology and science fiction share certain understandings about culture and society. Rather than concentrate on anthropological science fiction, this essay looks to the ways professional anthropologists have utilized sf in the years following World War II; it critiques the cybernetic-functional ist assumptions that underlie their visions of possible futures. By constructing "the future" as a rationalization of contemporary trends, anthropologists have projected highly conservative visions based on stability and homeostasisvisions that are inimical to radical change. Still, the historical intersection of anthropology and sf holds a great deal of potential. By examining assumptions about the future that govern work in the present, anthropologists have the opportunity to develop genuine altematives rather than futuristic capitulations to the historical status quo.