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E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces E.T. CULTURE Duke University Press durham and london 2005 EDITED BY DEBBORA BATTAGLIA E.T.CULTURE Anthropology in Outerspaces © 2005 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by Erin Kirk New Typeset in Electra and Scala Sans by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed pageofthisbook. CONTENTS Editor’s Note vii Insiders’ Voices in Outerspaces 1 debbora battaglia Ufology as Anthropology: Race, Extraterrestrials, and the Occult 38 christopher f. roth Alien Tongues 94 david samuels The License: Poetics, Power, and the Uncanny 130 susan lepselter ‘‘For Those Who Are Not Afraid of the Future’’: Raëlian Clonehood in the Public Sphere 149 debbora battaglia vi Intertextual Enterprises: Writing Alternative Places and Meanings in the Contents Media Mixed Networks of Yugioh 180 mizuko ito Close Encounters of the Nth Kind: Becoming Sampled and the Mullis-ship Connection 200 richard doyle ‘‘Come on, people...we*are*thealiens.Weseem to be suffering from Host-Planet Rejection Syndrome’’: Liminal Illnesses, Structural Damnation, and Social Creativity 218 joseph dumit References 235 Contributors 263 Index 265 EDITOR’S NOTE This book is about how people find and relate to one another around the idea of extraterrestrial life and ufos. It is also a kind of artifact of that pro- cess. Most of those who have contributed chapters first came together at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, in a session on ‘‘The Anthropology of Outerspaces.’’ Inspired by imaginaries of contact with other worlds—which is of course likewise a signature theme of the discipline—our papers gave voice to subjects’ questions about what it means to be human in a universe of fabulously different entities and times of swarming informatic flows of unknown origin. While our approaches were methodologically, geopolitically, and even disciplinarily diverse, our presentations on that occasion converged at points where science, magic, and religion flowed into and through one another, unsettling their bound- aries and revealing the innerspaces of ‘‘alternative’’ seekers. The creativity of the moment proved to be contagious. In part owing to the attention of our discussants, Jodi Dean and Susan Harding, schol- ars in the audience afterwards offered papers of their own for publication in any future volume. Some others who had harbored an interest in extra- terrestrial discourse were persuaded to contribute new essays, off-center of their specialty fields, after hearing about the session. As the volume took viii shape, there emerged the contours of an e.t. orientation toward various Editor’s Note forms of visitation—including alien beings, technologies, and uncanny vision—and how these forms engaged primary concepts underpinning anthropological research: host and visitor, home and away, subjectivity and objectivity. Contributors showed how discussions and representations of otherworldly beings express concerns about racial and ethnic differences, the anxieties and fascination associated with modern technologies, and alienation from the inner workings of government. My opening chapter sketches out the themes of the volume, giving a view of the ‘‘galaxies of discourse’’ that constitute the ‘‘e.t. effect’’ in post- modernity. Purposefully ex-centric, the chapter invites the reader to move at ‘‘warp speed’’ across thematic spaces and to visit topographies in which later chapters dwell more deeply. Christopher Roth’s historical treatment of ‘‘Anthropology as Ufology’’ demonstrates how questions of Darwinian evolution were resisted by the Theosophical movement that, from the late nineteenth century, offered an alternative vision of human racial progress in mystical terms that continue to emerge as common referents of contemporary e.t. and ufo beliefs. In ‘‘Alien Tongues’’ David Samuels maps adventures of linguistic anthro- pology in space, from its historic intersection with the impassioned projects of communication with Mars in late-nineteenth-century French salons to the popular cult phenomenon of Klingon language conventions. Drawing on ethnography from Area 51, site of the first crash narratives of ufos in the Nevada desert, Susan Lepselter draws us into the lives of those who seek ‘‘license’’ to enter the realms of official culture for which the U.S. government’s secret Air Force x base and research zone stand as a reminder of hidden knowledge, and the inscrutable forces of the powers that be. My chapter on the Raëlian religion’s human cloning enterprise, based on its foundational notion that extraterrestrial scientists created life on Earth through advanced cloning technology, is an excursion through the online and offline ethnographic sites of faith-based science in the public sphere. Tracing the online and offline gaming community of young Yugioh players in Japan, Mimi Ito shows the importance of taking seriously inven- tive ‘‘child’s play’’ as action that subverts the values of mainstream Japa- nese society in significantly gendered practices, through print, cyber, and ix physically embodied imagery of alien hybrid entities. Editor’s Note Richard Doyle, venturing farther out, absorbs us in the rhetoric of alien dna and popular culture ‘‘sampling’’ technologies—of djs recombining recorded music or the sampling of dna by replicative science—that chal- lenge us to consider our densely postmodern planetary ‘‘mix’’ of cross- connecting entities alien to their species categories. Finally, Joseph Dumit grounds alien discourse in the half-joking inter- pretations of sufferers of diseases not officially recognized by official health care agencies—such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome—who speak derisively of ‘‘Host Planet Rejection Syndrome’’ in their online chats and of being zapped of strength by off-world agents hidden from view. This volume, then, itself ‘‘samples’’ cultural sites of off-world agency— interrogating the poetics and politics of power, its visibility and transpar- ency, and the liberation from everyday social constraints that people seek through creative action, in the name of the extraterrestrial. Taken col- lectively as a collage of creative humanness ‘‘designed’’ here on Terra, it shows that we have much to learn from such de-exoticized subjects’ points of view. Insiders’ Voices in Outerspaces DEBBORA BATTAGLIA In these pages you are invited to enter the outerspaces of extraterrestrial culture, as a realm of social inquiry. Where this journey leads is perhaps unexpected, especially for the discourse of alien beings and unidentified flying objects. For the fact is that, far from fields of exotic Otherness— the space of technomarvels and weird entities, epic enterprises, and terrors unrecognizable in their ‘‘structures of feeling’’—we find ourselves instead 1 in the presence of an extraterrestrial uncannily familiar and concrete. It is the image on a cell phone or a backpack, the toy in the window that glows in a child’s room, the lead character of a blockbuster film, a teen- ager dressed for Halloween, the saucer-shaped café on a desert skyline. This deep familiarity is, to quote Gregory Bateson’s definition of informa- tion, the ‘‘difference that makes a difference’’ to how we approach extra- terrestrial (e.t.) culture as lived experience. For it connects us to sci-fi as sci-fact and reveals factuality itself to be cultural at the core—and some- thing we may opt to take on faith. Particularly in these insecure times, when information of unknown origin enters our living spaces as a matter of course, and often unbidden, the idea that diversely inhabited worlds contribute in mysterious ways to life’s ambiguous messages and contingen- 2 cies is not so strange. That extraterrestrial life could figure in this socially 2 cosmic mix is something that a third of North Americans believe (Gallop Debbora Poll 2000). Battaglia Thus, the National Geographic Channel can broadcast Alien Contact (2004) to a mainstream television audience already primed to hear that ‘‘astronomers and astrophysicists and other real scientists—not just nut cases—believe that extraterrestrial life is not preposterous, not possible, but probable’’ (Heffernan 2004). Notable aerospace engineers, among them the director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phe- nomena (nicap Unit-3) and the director of the Mutual ufo Network (mufon), can produce book-length manuscripts about the close encoun- ters of astronauts and others claiming that ‘‘ETs are here! and have been for thousands of years’’ (personal communication). While it is not the pur- pose of this book’s contributors to interrogate the truth value of such claims or of the documents circulating as evidence in spheres of public culture, we hope to show that there is much to be learned about what it means to be human at particular historical moments by admitting a de-exoticized alien into our ethnoscapes and into the light of anthropology’s most searching disciplinary questions. Galaxies of Discourse A striking feature of the idea of the extraterrestrial is the extent to which conventionally distinct fields of knowledge cross-connect, collide, or pass through one another under its influence. For ‘‘insider’’ and more detached researchers alike, these galaxies of discourse reconfigure how we relate magic, science, and religion in contemporary practice and, often to actors unaware of this, in terms recalling the science spirituality of times puta- tively more mystical. The ‘‘e.t. effect’’ of social discourse is in this sense
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