Anthropology in Outerspaces

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How Are We Going to Live after Apocalypse?
How do "fringe" science/religious communities imagine human life after apocalypse? What can we learn from their sometimes dangerous, sometimes enlightening visions? And how do mainstream science and bioethical debate figure in the futurology of emerging religions?

In other words, what do people who believe—ardently and devotedly believe—in little green men have to tell us about our world today and the issues we face?

For Professor of Anthropology Debbora Battaglia, the tools and techniques of anthropology that have been applied for decades to indigenous or "foreign" societies can be applied with profound results to contemporary groups that share beliefs around topics from UFOs, crop circles, and alien technology to cloning, immortality, and time travel.

This interest is at the center of E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces (2006, Duke University Press), a collection of essays, edited by Battaglia, representing work by scholars who draw on social science, science studies, linguistics, popular and expressive culture, and social and intellectual history to explore extraterrestrial discourse.

Battaglia, whose work began in a more traditional vein—doing fieldwork on personhood with South Sea islanders off the coast of New Guinea—does not confine her scholarship to her office. She has immersed herself far from the mainstream to study firsthand the spiritual practices of emerging religions located on the outer edges of society.

In fact, her essay in E.T. Culture details her immersion in the Raëlian movement, which gained international notoriety in 2002 with claims that it had cloned the first human, Baby Eve.

"From outerspaces we gain perspective on a person's innerspaces in anxious times, and a view of planetized social networks that are charged with fear, but also with hope for the future of life on Earth. How Are We Going to Live after Apocalypse?"