Ursula Le Guin’s Speculative Anthropology: Thick Description, Historicity and Science Fiction

Abstract

This article argues that Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction is a form of ‘speculative anthropology’ that reconciles thick description and historicity. Like Clifford Geertz’s ethnographic writings, Le Guin’s science fiction utilises thick description to place the reader within unfamiliar social worlds rendered with extraordinary phenomenological fluency. At the same time, by incorporating social antagonisms, cultural contestation, and historical contingency, Le Guin never allows thick description to neutralise historicity. Rather, by combining the two and exploring their interplay, Le Guin establishes a critical relation between her imagined worlds and the reader’s own historical moment. This enables her to both counter Fredric Jameson’s influential criticism of her work – the charge of ‘world reduction’ – and point to ungrasped utopian possibilities within the present. Le Guin’s speculative anthropology thus combines the strengths while overcoming some of the limitations of both Geertz’s thick-descriptive method and Jameson’s theory of the science fiction genre.

The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality

“…It further explores how colonial and postcolonial dynamics, nationalism, and migration have led to adoptions of certain forms of masculinities and their racialization. When reflecting on how anthropologists have approached what it means to be a man and how an in-group of "real men" is forged in a given context, Scheibelhofer and Monterescu rely primarily on the "major" works (e.g., Bourdieu 2001;Connell 1995;Herdt 1981;Herzfeld 1985). But they also disturb this rendering, by bringing in queer scholarship, the influence of which is less commonly acknowledged in anthropological accounts of masculinities.…”

“…Speculative fiction has emerged as an important avenue for unleashing the imagination to devise future visions of social justice in the context of ruination. As part of the repertoire of the "arts of living on a damaged planet" (Tsing et al 2017), speculative fiction not only is tied to an apocalyptic anthropology (Wolf-Mayer 2019), but rather, reanimates horizons of contestation of power regimes and enriches the ongoing engagement of feminist and queer anthropology with science fiction and the work of interplanetary anthropologists such as the writer Ursula Le Guin (Pandian 2018; see also Davison-Vecchione and Seeger 2021). Sanabria draws on feminist and queer anthropological theorizing to recast the critical unpacking of the naturalization of gender, sexuality, and reproduction.…”