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Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Experimental Futures) Paperback – September 9, 2016
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length248 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDuke University Press Books
- Publication dateSeptember 9, 2016
- Dimensions6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100822362031
- ISBN-13978-0822362036
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Review
"Placing Outer Space is a welcome addition to the literature on planetary science. Not only has Messeri achieved what has eluded so many writers—putting humans at the center of the account—she has also succeeded in crafting a compelling narrative of discovery."―Matthew Shindell, Physics Today
"Messeri’s book is an excellent addition to both the increasing scholarship concerning the cosmos in science and technology studies and the resurgent field of outer space anthropology. Her thorough analysis of place-making practices by an often insulated community is accompanied by her vivid and absorbing ethnographic writing. Placing Outer Space is an excellent example of academic writing that is supremely beneficial and accessible to both the academy and the public"―Taylor R. Genovese, LSE Review of Books
"Messeri is to be commended for crafting an engaging account that is fully accessible to an outside audience. Her beautiful ethnographic narrative and clear applications of theory make her readers feel comfortable. . . . For anthropologists attempting to pen a scholarly monograph that engages both the broader public and the community they study, this is a worthy example."―Janet Vertesi, American Anthropologist
"Lisa Messeri's spirit of adventurous ethnographic contact carries the day, delivering new insights into off-Earth explorations by experts and amateurs alike. In bringing us, up close, to those engaged in fashioning new home worlds and remapping the cosmos, Messeri urges us to follow the future making. That enterprise is in good hands."―Debbora Battaglia, American Ethnologist
"A thoughtful investigation of planetary science. . . . Students of the history of science and astronomy will find many new ideas here that are worth pondering."―Maria Lane, Journal of Anthropological Research
"A first-rate example of ethnographic research into the epistemological frameworks that shape the work of astronomers engaged in planetary science. Messeri has produced a superb discussion of how scientists move the unfamiliar into the realm of the familiar."―John W. Traphagan, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Flyboy 2
The Greg Tate Reader
By Greg TateDuke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Greg TateAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6203-6
Contents
Introduction: Lust, of All Things (Black),1. The Black Male Show,
2. She Laughing Mean and Impressive Too,
3. Hello Darknuss My Old Meme,
4. Screenings,
5. Race, Sex, Politricks, and Belles Lettres,
Sources,
Index,
CHAPTER 1
The Black Male Show
Amiri Baraka
1934–2014
I think about a time when I will be relaxed. When flames and non-specific passions wear themselves away. And my eyes and hands and mind can turn and soften and my songs will be softer and lightly weight the air. — AMIRI BARAKA
Nabokov told us that all a writer has to leave behind is his or her style. Amiri Baraka made the reading populace deal with a rowdy, robust gang of style. Miles Davis (whose powers of concentration, condensation, and cool Baraka emulated in his poetics) once said he only had use for musicians who could play a style — stone-cold-bold originals. Originality, like style, is generally what's left after artists eliminate all excess from their repertoire — all the corny stuff that seems better suited for somebody else.
Born October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, Everett Leroi Jones shed hosts of styles, skins, friends, foes, and belief systems on the way to becoming Amiri Baraka, the iconic legend of literary and political lore. Like Miles, he got beaten bloody upside the head by upsouth redneck cops for being a model of uppity nigra defiance. Like Miles, Baraka walked away with brains, cojones, and swagger intact ... intensified, even.
I'm Everett LeRoi Jones thirty years old. A Black nigger in the universe. A longer breath singer, would-be dancer, strong from years of fantasy and study.
LeRoi Jones is the byline the world first came to know him by (simultaneously) as a poet, jazz critic, playwright, essayist, and fiction writer. As Langston Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad notes, Baraka and Hughes are the only writers in the Black American canon to distinguish themselves in four genres of writing: poetry, fiction, drama, and the essay. (Ntozake Shange belongs on that list too in our humble — more fodder for diatribes to come.)
Every writer can tell you about the one book that changed their life, changed their mind, made becoming a writer a fait accompli. For this writer here, that book was Baraka's Black Music. His Blues People is standard reading for anyone wanting to know the history and socio-cultural-political significance of The Music to The Struggle, but Black Music is The One by freedom-swing musicologist Baraka that turned your boyee out. Made him leap overnight from being a fourteen-year-old Marvel Comics / sci-fi nerd to a precocious warrior nerd for the cause of freakishly-rad jazz improv.
Black Music introduced superheroic otherworldly entities calling themselves Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Pharoah Sanders. And did so deploying a style that was as incandescent, indelible, and whiplash smarting as the music itself. Laid down like grammatical law in Black Music is the mandate that music journalism seem as possessed by furies as The Music. Count this reporter among those writers who owe their adult vocation to being swept up by Baraka's elegant prose juju at a tender, volatile age.
The fledgling career of LeRoi Jones became noteworthy in 1959 with publication of his chapbook, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, which contains the poem of the same name now known as a much-anthologized classic. In a scant eighteen lines, a gothic young Jones parses dissonant melody from his sorrows and hallucinations, confesses alienated harmony with everyday chaos, then achieves spiritual renewal observing the mysteries of infant curiosity.
At that moment, Euro-American poetry and fiction was being resuscitated by the bebop-inspired artistic offspring of the so-called Black Mountain and Beat Generations; Jones, then ensconced in Gotham's East Village, swiftly bonded with the inner circle (Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, et al.) via books or bars. Jumped onboard their drunken boat like 'twas lifesaver, barnacled onto their methods and milieu until they became his own.
Jones arrived in the East Village as a refugee of the U.S. Air Force and of Howard University — where he served time with homecoming queen Toni Morrison, studied the blues with Sterling Brown, sociology with E. Franklin Frazier, and Dante's Inferno with the great Afro-Classicist Nathan Scott. (Bombardier training was his metier in the Air Force, or the "Error Farce" in Jonesology.) Soon after arriving on the Lower East Side he became betrothed to the former Hettie Cohen, also a poet, and within scant years also became the father of two darling daughters, Kellie and Lisa — who rolling stonishly gained stepsister Dominique DiPrima in this period.
By the time Preface was published, Jones had become a promising fixture of the Village's modern art–damaged bohemia. Hardly content simply hobnobbing with the Beats' pale male star chamber, the energetic and ambitious Jones read, wrote, and edited like a fiend, thought very deeply upon all things poetical, personal, and darkly sonorous, and while sipping cocktails, dashed off his own jazz and come-what-may-tales accordingly.
This proto-fly-brother in the ointment also devoted as much time as humanly possible going out to hear music of the great Black modernists who further ignited his literary passions — John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor. These giants, among others, would provoke him to conjure his two aforementioned seminal classics of Black musicology, Blues People and Black Music.
By 1965, a barely thirty-years-old Jones had published the five now-canonical works that would forevermore ensure his presence on Africana syllabi across the land and guarantee his dramatic works would become mainstays of off-Broadway and regional theater well into the twenty-first century: Blues People (once again, church sez Amen); The System of Dante's Hell (a broken-beat fictive odyssey through his childhood, adolescence, and young manhood); The Dead Lecturer, his rapturously mordant second volume of death-obsessed née death-defying poems; Home, a book of cultural essays and belles lettres; and that first bevy of earth-scorching plays — Dutchman, The Toilet, and The Slave.
In 1959, the year twenty-five-year-old Jones published his Suicide Note, a thirty-three-year-old Fidel Castro and a thirty-one-year-old Che Guevara took over Havana with a rebel army that overturned the U.S.-supported and Mafia-friendly Batista regime. In 1961, Jones accepts an invitation to join a delegation of upstart American artists for a visit to postrevolutionary Cuba. In Havana he gets to rap with Castro and Guevara. The Cuba voyage, essayed on in Home, documents Jones's slow turn away from poetic disengagement with tings politique. This gradual 180 will later be propelled into r/evolutionary overdrive by the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965.
That catastrophic event will provoke Jones's 1966 exodus from the East Village (and his young family) up to Harlem for race-man/race-manic repurposing and action. Treating the denouement of Ellison's Invisible Man like personal prologue, Jones, having made the Village his underground asylum, tunnels his way out of existentialism, emerges more upright than a Pithecanthropus erectus atop the manholes of Lenox Ave, declares himself learned in the ways of Western men and his own 'groidal Self, and thereupon screams his right to be Blacker Than Thou like a postgraduate King Kong.
MLK and the civil rights movement had never moved Jones the way Malcolm X had. But that movement, or at least a young firebrand faction led by Stokely Carmichael, also began moving X-ward around '66 — demanding civil rights now get down with some Black Power. In the years between 1965 and 1972, Jones will come under the sway of Kwanzaa creator Maulana Karenga, who'll compel an epochal name change: Imamu Amiri Baraka (rough translation: the Wise Beloved Prince).
He shall also wed the woman who'll become his forty-five-year life partner, Amina Baraka, with whom he'll embark on parenting six additions to the Baraka line — Ras, Shani (Rest In Power), Obalaji, Amiri Jr., Ahi, and Jones. He shall also transmogrify from heady Beat ingénue to the Father of the Black Arts Movement. Other milestone works of poetry, drama, fiction, and music criticism quickly follow — Black Magic Poetry, Black Fire, Tales of the Out and the Gone, Black Music, A Black Mass, Slave Ship. He'll take to the stage and read poems or direct plays with the same jazz vanguard peers he'd written so exquisitely about earlier: Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Sunny Murray, Milford Graves.
In 1966 Harlem, he'll obtain government funding (made available to stave off an eastward migration of L.A.'s 1965 Watts uprising) to produce street concerts featuring Ayler, Graves, and Sun Ra's Cosmo-Drama Intergalactic Myth-Science Arkestra. Returning to Newark in 1967, he'll form a performance group commune, Spirit House Movers; during Newark's riotous uprising of that year, he'll be held captive by a giddy gaggle of cops intent on killing him under the jail before Jean-Paul Sartre intervenes from Paris. (Another French, Marxist cultural icon, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, will later show up at Spirit House more in pursuit of irony than comradery.) Later in court, a Newark judge and DA will attempt to convict Baraka of inciting a riot with a poem.
By 1968, Baraka had become a resolute Kawaida-principles-following, Black cultural nationalist. The demands of all this newness meant rallying, conferencing, speechifying, etc. became as central to Baraka's existence as the more lyrical aspects of his production. His writing didn't go cold unattended (quite the opposite), but his writing career, as such, became enmeshed if not subordinate to his political fervor.
Since some of the fervor was expended in verbally assaulting pink-skinned people in general, and occasionally Jews in particular, those in the commercial American publishing industry who fit those descriptions, or were empathetic to same, saw fit not to publish any new books by Baraka for another three decades. (Trust that Baraka's literary executors will soon discover piles of manuscripts, as the man never stopped writing as prolifically as you or I exhale.)
The Black Arts Movement that Baraka godfathered (in ways alleged by some former da cap enforcers to be as Corleonean, and even Caligulan, as Conceptual) transformed the relationship between Black American society and its poets, painters, dancers, novelists, and serious musicians. It challenged Black artists to be more accessible and engaged with grassroots folk; it raised esthetic, political, and historical consciousness within Black America, bourgeoisie and working class alike.
The Movement also fostered radioactive waves of self-love, ethnic pride, tribal bonds, and identity. Some commentators (like this reporter) believe Baraka's rhetorically excessive brand of hypernationalism, while not faultless re charges of Jew baiting and whitey-hating, was a necessary countersupremacist corrective: the centuries of self-loathing that legal forms of American racism had imposed on folk of African descent required extreme countermeasures.
Say this for Baraka — he gave back to redneck racism as good and as bad as he got. Mama Tate, who maintained a friendship with the Barakas for decades, always liked to say, "Ooh, that man has a wicked tongue. Glad he never put that tongue on me!" A now dearly departed DC coworker, Harlee Little, described Baraka as a "word magician" capable of casting linguistic spells on his enemies liable to hurt them bad. To Baraka, once a rabid fan of Mandrake the Magician, Black Arts had a meaning and purpose beyond the obvious — that of deposing pale-skinned demonic forces with poetic conjuration.
Some Baraka admirers, colleagues, cronies, and debunkers (like the Black Panthers) found the cultural aspects of his nationalism a tad too cultish and indulgent in pseudo-African pageantry for their taste. The Movement's near-blind idolatry of all things Black as more beautiful than anything produced by the pink man got parodied by genius Black comic minds like Richard Pryor and George Clinton as soon as they felt safe.
Yet without the precedent and rage of the Black Arts Movement, it's doubtful that various Ivy League schools, and even many HBCU's, would've gotten pressured by students to either create African American studies programs or die. Many currently employed Black professors/celebrity-intellectuals at upper-echelon schools wouldn't have jobs today, nor would such cultural touchstones as Soul Train, BET, Essence, the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Program, or the Alvin Ailey Company have found the funding or the audience to exist.
Black Arts branded blackness in ways market-savvy, capitalist America could understand. Baraka's own poetic dynamism also gave rise to the generation of Black Arts poets who would ultimately lend hip-hop its tongue-lashing voice — David Henderson, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Amus Mor, Jayne Cortez, the Last Poets, Carolyn Rodgers, Mari Evans, Gil Scott-Heron. The equation is simple: no Black Arts Movement, no lyrical precedents for Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, Nas, Wu-Tang Clan, Mos Def, Kanye, or Jay Z. Without Baraka's Black Arts Movement there'd have been no radicalizing or modernizing lyrical precedents for hip-hop's streetwise poesy to build upon.
As the sixties became the seventies, those on the front lines of that ongoing Power Move we euphemistically call the Struggle (notably Baraka's Congress for African People, the Black Panthers, Young Lords, etc.) raised the stakes by guiding their radical vision and agenda more concertedly toward seizing electoral power in urban America — rallying hard to see that Black faces got voted into high urban mayoral places. The former goal led to the first National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, circa 1972, which Baraka was instrumental in organizing and rousing with a speech (one Mama Tate, who was there, still remembers with passion).
Within two years, the grassroots folk of Newark, Gary, Oakland, Detroit, and DC had their first Black mayors and congress people. That moment's political vanguard also aligned themselves with national liberation movements in Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria, Palestine, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. The turn toward identifying with the revolutions being waged by other peoples of color around the globe resurrected the inclinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in this regard.
In 1974, though, Baraka made a swift left turn away from being Mr. Super Pro-Black to becoming an avowed Communist. (Under Baraka's fast-moving, ideology-switching hand, the Congress of African People eventually became the Revolutionary Communist League [Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse-tung Thought], which later merged with some Pan-Asian, Chicano-Latino socialists to become the League of Revolutionary Struggle.)
The suddenness of Baraka's move struck some devotees like an ambush in the night; other less invested Black radicals considered these exotic switcheroos hilariously routine for the mercurial Baraka. Many position papers and sloganeering poems soon followed, as did epiphanic apologies for early acts of anti-Semitism by Baraka's younger, class-struggle-clueless self. Our man also declared himself to be an anti-Zionist. In 2003 this distinction didn't dissuade New Jersey governor Jim Greever from attempting to snatch back Baraka's Poet Laureate of New Jersey title after he dropped his incendiary take on 9/11, "Somebody Blew Up America." This bromide insinuates that various and sundry forces — George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Ariel Sharon, the CIA, state of Israel — all knew the attack on the Towers was imminent, and took pains to ensure that all of Israel's WTC-employed folk avoided the workplace that horrific day. From the meshuggenah, our takeaway was that anyone who thought Amiri Baraka couldn't still Set It Off didn't know who they were dealing with.
By 1980, Baraka had merged forces with the multicultural League of Revolutionary Struggle, while back in the post–civil rights money jungle, the radical wing of Black American intellects had begun to come in from the cold at spots like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and Columbia. Other old cells, like surviving members of the Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground who'd held tight to paramilitary dreams of plotting the Fall of America, got either killed or captured and sentenced to supermax federal prisons for forever and a day. For his part, Baraka would spend the next twenty-five years teaching literature at SUNY Stony Brook, with short stints at SUNY Buffalo, Rutgers, and his alma mater, Columbia University, along the way.
Baraka's changes in political philosophy never took him far from The People or The Music he loved or from prolific writing. He returned to music writing, a vital gumbo published as Digging a few years back contains definitive, up close and personal writing on the only two figures, musical or otherwise, who Baraka ever insinuated intimidated him in print: Nina Simone and Abbey Lincoln.
The Barakas' family home in Newark became legendary in the eighties and nineties among younger artists and intellectuals of the funk and hip-hop generations for the generous, open verbal jam sessions convened there. At these, one might walk in (as my drummer friend J. T. Lewis did) and find yourself irrevocably immersed in hours-long conversations with "Nikki Giovanni, Ishmael Reed, Sundiata (RIP), and Harry Belafonte all under one roof."
(Continues...)Excerpted from Flyboy 2 by Greg Tate. Copyright © 2016 Greg Tate. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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- Paperback : 248 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0822362031
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Bringing space down to Earth
An “anthropology off the Earth” therefore seems like the obvious next step for the discipline when humanity has entered the space age. And indeed, outer space is no longer the exclusive domain of what is usually designated as “hard” science. Today supposedly “messier” or “softer” sciences play an increasing role, exerting significant influence on how the extraterrestrial is portrayed and understood. A growing number of researchers in the social sciences and the humanities have begun to focus on the wider universe and how it is apprehended by modern cosmology. Call it the “four S”: social studies of space science. What unites these efforts is that the many surprises you may encounter “out there” also tell us something about ourselves, here on this planet. Space science gives us access to something that surpasses humanity and yet simultaneously contains it. Astronomy doesn’t stand apart from more earthly pursuits. The quest for an Earth-like planet not only promises a better understanding of places elsewhere in our galaxy but also provides a mirror for examining terrestrial relations from a different perspective. Anthropology can contribute to bringing space science down to Earth by its firm grounding in participant observation, its twin process of familiarization and alienation, and its attention to dimensions that are not spontaneously considered by space scientists: inequalities of gender, class, and ethnicity; legacies of colonial and imperial approaches; and terrestrial understandings of nation and nationalism. In a time of post-colonialism, gender equality, and trans-border flows, we must resist the language of “colonization,” “manned” missions, and “frontiers.”
I first used Placing Outer Space as a primer in space and planetary science. Before completing her PhD in MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society, Lisa Messeri took a Bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering, and is deeply familiar with the environment in which she immersed herself for her fieldwork. Focusing on planetary scientists as the main target of her ethnographic study, she describes the practices and techniques that allow them to transform planets from abstract objects into places full of meanings and considered from the point of view of potential habitability. Her knowledge of planetary science vastly exceeds the few nuggets I retained from junior high school and teenage readings. I was reminded that there used to be water on Mars, and that the Moon and the Earth were once one and the same. I knew about gravitational pull and orbiting ellipses that make planets dance around the Sun in a well-designed choreography. I had to update some basic facts such as the list of planets in the solar system: apparently, Pluto is no longer a planet (says who?, asks Messeri in a 2010 article.) I had vaguely heard of the existence of planets outside the solar system, but I was surprised to learn that the first detection of an extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star only happened in 1995. Before that, exoplanets were a conjecture deduced from statistical reasoning: considering the almost infinite number of stars in the universe, it is only logical that some may have planets orbiting them. By the same token, scientist also deduce the existence of Earth-like planets, and conjecture that a fraction of these planets can also support life. Some physicists speculate on the number of inhabited planets in the universe, and make a probabilistic argument about the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations that may be able to communicate with us (this is called the Drake equation and was first proposed in 1961.)
Finding exoplanets
These dreams and speculations, what Messeri calls the “planetary imagination,” have always animated space research. What is new with modern planetary science is that now these theoretical musings can be backed by hard numbers and observations. Scientist have embarked on a quest to find Earth-like worlds and environments that may be conducive to life on other planets. This is an almost impossible task: Lisa Messeri compares it to spotting a firefly with a searchlight when you are in the East Coast and the searchlight is in California. And yet, since the detection of the first exoplanet in 1995, more than a thousand exoplanets have been confirmed at the time of Messeri’s writing. A more recent estimate indicates that more than 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered and are considered “confirmed.” However, there are thousands of other “candidate” exoplanet detections that require further observations in order to say for sure whether or not the exoplanet is real. Messeri explains us how this detection and confirmation process works. Telescopes collect starlight and measure how the flux or energy output of a star changes over time. Applying several filters, and separating signal from noise, astronomers are able to detect a U-shaped dip in the light curve: this is the signature of an exoplanet, the sign that a planet has passed in front of a star and has blocked a minuscule fraction of the star’s light. Further tinkering with the data allows the researcher to estimate the distance of the planet from the star and its approximate mass and density. These measures will tell you whether this planet is “habitable,” whether it is made from solid rock and able to sustain water. Based on spectrum data, you can even speculate about the existence of an atmosphere and its temperature. But for the moment, finding and describing an exoplanet is as much a work of science as an art of persuasion: you have to convince colleagues that the squiggle in the data that you detect is indeed the signature of a celestial body. Young scientists-in-training have to learn how to see a stream of data as a planet, as a world. It is the ability to conjure worlds that reinforces the community of exoplanet astronomers. Their faith unites them in the pursuit of the holy grail: the discovery of a planet just like our own orbiting a star like the Sun.
Because of rapid advances in detection and computing technologies, almost all data are digital in observational astronomy nowadays. As a result, its practitioners have become more akin to number crunchers than skywatchers. As Messeri notes, “inspiration might strike while gazing up at the night sky, but the real work happens in front of a computer, and discourse is dominated by methods of data processing and analysis.” In daily conversations, the feeling of excitement comes not from speculating about habitable planets but from marveling over how “clean” the dataset looks. Exoplanet astronomy increasingly relies on space-based telescopes that beam large streams of big data back to Earth. But despite this transition to a remote model of observation, researchers still find it useful to travel regularly to observatories built on mountaintops in exotic locations. Messeri accompanies an exoplanet researcher and her PhD student to the Cerro-Tolol Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in central Chile. Habiting a mountain observatory, even on a temporary basis, is justified on several grounds. It anchors astronomers into the history of their discipline, as old observatories in lower altitudes are often turned into space museums. It is a rite of passage into the profession for aspiring researchers, and generates social interactions and face-to-face collaboration between members of the same epistemic community. It allows astronomers to tinker with the equipment and to interact with technicians. And as Messeri notes, “being at the observatory affords one of the few chances to remember and reconnect with the awesomeness of a dark sky.” Going to faraway places on top of mountains reminds astronomers that the ultimate goal of their quest is to inhabit another world. It is also, in a way, a voyage of conquest and annexation. In conversation with Peter Redfield’s Space in the Tropics, an ethnography on the French space program in French Guiana, the author explores how observatories are “situated in a landscape with multiple histories and ties to the local, even if there are actions (intentional or not) that seek to exclude the local.”
Earth-centrism and post-colonialism
Other aspects links exoplanetary science to a post-colonial enterprise. Finding an exoplanet is by definition an Earth-centered enterprise: an habitable planet is defined as a planet that offers an acceptable environment for human beings. The “habitable zone” circling a certain category of star is defined as a region in which a planet would receive neither too little nor too much heat, and where liquid water and an oxygen atmosphere could be sustained. Due to Earth-centrism and other speciesism bias, we cannot conceive of a place conducive to life that would be devoid of these elements. The vision of Mars as a terrain for exploration and discovery also remains clouded by an Earth-centric bias. In two chapters, Messeri describes how Mars scientists transform the Earth into a Martian kind of place by simulating habitat into extreme desert environments, and how they help to bring Mars down to Earth by mapping its rugged terrain with the help of satellites images and the pictures taken by the Rover missions. By stating that “humanity’s new frontier can only be on Mars,” the Mars Society, which funds the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert, is reinvigorating the rhetoric of exploration, the frontier, and colonization that reminds us of “how the West was won” and populations subjected to the logic of empires. In an age in which a proliferation of new space ventures look set to explore and exploit outer space in the interests of those who are capable of sponsoring such efforts, Messeri warns us about “the inherent hierarchies and exclusions that come with place-making practices.” But she also notes that space exploration, including commercial space flight and space tourism, is in a large part “orthogonal to profit,” and underscores that “the aim of this book is not to unpack the white, American, imperial subtext of invocations of exploration.” Taking the discourse of planetary scientist at face value, she prefers to insist on the moral element that comes with the perception of our place in the cosmos.
As noted earlier, anthropology, with its habit of making the unfamiliar familiar and of looking at our earthly condition from afar, is a welcome companion to space science and the quest for habitable planets. By positioning the Earth as one planet among many on which humans might be capable of living, social studies of outer space can help us to make sense of what it means to be on Earth. The planetary imagination is sustained by the effort to envisage what it is to be like in other worlds. The Mars mission in the Utah desert prepares astronauts to the condition humans could face in a Martian colony. Earth is being transformed into a laboratory of sorts, where scientists experiment with life on other planets. In the process, astronomy is becoming a fieldwork-based science, not unlike anthropology itself. Fieldwork is grounded in a notion that “being there” is a valuable and telling experience, and scientists trained in geology can pierce up a narrative about Mars based on the shapes of dried-up rivers, the tumbling of craters, and the presence of rock concretions. The 3D-mapping of Mars shows the Red Planet on a human scale and allows the user to “see like a rover” by navigating the landscape in an immersive experience similar to the one offered by Google Maps. These open-source maps and user-friendly interfaces assume and thus disseminate an inherent worthwhileness in studying other planets, and act as a recruiting and advocacy tool for NASA. Turning Mars into a place on Earth, and preparing to make an earthly place out of Mars, also helps us to understand our own planet in unfamiliar terms. Earth is literally made alien when seen from outer space, as in the famous Blue Marble image made from the Voyager-1 spacecraft that ushered a new ecological consciousness about the finite resources of our planet. As Messeri notes, “the most prominent legacies of the space age are not prolonged human presence in space and exploration of nearby planets but a new way to observe and study our own planet.” Similarly, the quest for an Earth-like planet is not driven by the hubris to conquer other worlds, but by the belief that humans will finally feel less cosmically alone.
Place-making and being out of place
Lisa Messeri’s distinct contribution in Placing Outer Space lies in her analysis of the role of place in planetary science and astronomy. Drawing from insights ranging from critical geography’s conceptualization of space as a social, historical, and political phenomenon, to Heidegger’s Heimatlosigkeit, she finds that place-making is central to the work of outer space scientists who transform infinite space into a definite place to be. As she argues, place “is not just a passive canvas on which action occurs but an active way of knowing worlds. Even when place is not self-evident, as perhaps with invisible exoplanets, it is nonetheless invoked and created in order to generate scientific knowledge.” Place transforms the geographically alien into the familiar, and helps us to imagine other planets as habitable worlds. Place is more than a given category; it is a way of knowing and of making sense. It involves the four processes of narrating, mapping, visualizing, and inhabiting that are used by scientists to imagine themselves in other worlds. The author sees an irony in the tension between the urge to see planets as places and the increasing sense of placelessness that we experience on Earth. Astronauts and space scientists increasingly spend time away from office or from home, turning a seat and a laptop in a conference venue or in an observatory into a working environment. The need to inhabit a physical space is declining just as the desire to detect a habitable planet is on the rise. With remote access to the Internet and data stocked in clouds, our mode of being seems increasingly disconnected from place. And yet, place is where we long to be, the destination that invites us to make ourselves at home, on Earth as it is in heaven.