Extreme: Limits and Horizons in the Once and Future Cosmos

Abstract

This paper introduces a special collection of Anthropological Quarterly for examining “the extreme” in contemporary modernity. Drawing upon sites of political, scientific, and economic engagement that source specifically to the extraterrestrial, we argue that the figure of the extreme shapes an analytic of limits and ever-opening horizons—epistemological and physical—provoking new understandings of humanness, environment, temporality, and of inter-species life as we think we understand it, here on Earth. It follows that this framework is not restricted to the environment of outer space: the analytic of the extreme, which is broadly salient in contemporary imagination and social practice, opens to examination of how all modern subjects are capable of upending modernity’s everyday spaces and timelines. The assembled papers cohere around this commitment. Coming in from very different angles, each seriously considers the possibility of outcomes not anticipated by analytic or vernacular explanatory frameworks, while refusing to commit anthropologists to the dangers of prognostication.

Decolonizing Encounters of the Third Kind: Alternative Futuring in Native Science Fiction Film

“…Furthermore, scholarship on Native science fiction will be able to draw from and creatively contribute not only to established anthropological scholarship on science fiction and the future (Collins , ; Slusser and Rabkin ; Stover ), but also to recent anthropological engagements with virtual worlds and sociality (Boellstorff ), outer space and the extreme (Valentine et al. ), and inconceivably radical worlds (Povinelli ).…”

The “Adaptive Management” of a New Nature along the Southern English Coastline

“…"Edgework" is here the work of keeping sea / land, nature / culture, Britain / EU, personal / public distinctions in place--to maintain "one's sense of an ordered existence" (Lyng 1990: 857). Thinking about this as a question of shifting edges, rather than fixed dichotomies also allows me to explore a wider discussion of the idea of "extremes" (Valentine et al 2012) and the limits to which people are willing to risk their homes for the right to implement their particular vision of where the edge should be.…”

“…As Lyng suggests, such "edgework involves […] a general ability to maintain control of a situation that verges on total chaos" (Lyng 1990: 871). "What can be felt as well as intuited" (Valentine, Olson, Battaglia 2012: 1011 by local residents and engineers alike is a fear of being on the edge of an extreme recalibration of nature / culture, us / them. Indeed, a fear of some "externality" extending in our midst is both a physical and a political fear that haunts this landscape on the edge.…”

Relational Space: An Earthly Installation

“…They move us beyond exceptionalist Cold War narratives of (white) settlers on the frontier, or beyond U.S. American fears of Soviets (or nowadays, China or India) out to conquer the solar system. They ask for more than critiques of “the right stuff” posturing of American cowboy astronaut individualism, of the “New Soviet Man” (Gerovich ) embodied by cosmonaut hero archetypes or, in more recent times, of corporatism (Launius ) and “capitalism in space” (Valentine ). In doing so, an encounter with the different natures of space reveals how people might model human‐machine relations in ways demanded by space, and thus foreground the creative excess of curiosity and innovation.…”

“…That said, terrestrially life-threatening outer space is physically and socially connected with terrestrial spaces and extends anthropological research environments. Anthropologists have examined how socially remote space-based technologies shape earthly spatial and environmental politics (Redfield 2000;Lahsen 2004); how cosmos, universe, and exoplanets become experienced as places in astronomical and geological sciences (Messeri 2011;Hoeppe 2012;Valentine 2012); how asteroids, comets, and space weather become targets for environmental regulation and global political-ecological action (Olson 2012); and how multinational plans for cleaning up and establishing accountability for orbital debris in an increasingly polluted low-Earth orbit produce new innovations around notions of property, pollution, and agency (Battaglia 2014b;Rand 2014). Taken together, these examples point to the bonding agents that intertwine and strengthen between the environmental and ecological problems of Earth and space infrastructure building.…”