Buchli, V; (2020) Extra-terrestrial Methods: Towards an ethnography of the ISS. In: Carroll, T and Walton, S and Walford, A, (eds.) Lineages and advancements in material culture studies: perspectives from UCL anthropology. (pp. 17-32). Routledge: Oxford, UK.

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Abstract

The anthropological study of extraterrestrial settings might seem novel and exotic. However, this chapter proposes that the methodological tool kit available to social scientists for the empirical study of multi-sited, distributed, and space-age research contexts has a well-established genealogy, informed and developed by recent innovations in the ethnographic study of social media and their attendant communities. The International Space Station (ISS) is the longest-lasting extant extraterrestrial society in Low Earth Orbit. As it is a place of dwelling, not just scientific discovery, any anthropological study of the ISS must focus on the quotidian and material dimensions of the ISS and its bodily and material techniques, re-examining traditional empirical assumptions within the innovative conditions of new polymedia environments in which the ISS is situated. A central element in the question of an extraterrestrial methodology is the means by which various forms of terrestrial and extraterrestrial attunement converge to produce novel realm of human habitation and its expanded and expanding ‘field’ of co-presence.

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