On her book Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth
Cover Interview of June 24, 2018
In a nutshell
Into the Extreme offers an unusual look into the vast
domain of U.S. human spaceflight. I wrote it after doing years of fieldwork in its
workplaces that are off-limits to the public. Usually, social and historical
studies of human spaceflight focus on rocketry or international relation-building.
Instead, my exposure to the everyday work of sending people beyond Earth
prompted me to focus on the two basic cultural ideas that spaceflight depends
on and extends into the universe: “system” and “environment.”
These are humble everyday terms. But they are also
historically loaded concepts of relationality that have come to empower Western
thought, technical practice, and global interactions. The “system” concept emerged
as a theoretical organizing principle during the Enlightenment, when it became
clear to astronomers gazing through telescopes and biologists peering into
microscopes that it wasn’t just important to know what things are but
how they are interrelated. “System” became the official term for
designating parts in relation to kinds of wholes, and for presenting those
wholes as connected or separate from one another. “Environment” emerged in the
nineteenth century as a term with which to think about the exterior forces that
form systems.
Today, the “system” and “environment” concepts influence how
people speak about and question what is included or excluded from worlds that
matter: social, political, ecological. People speak of joining systems and
beating them; people love environments and fight over them. Spaceflight elaborates
and extends these concepts more intensively than most other types of social
practice. I did fieldwork for my book in sites where living systems are being
experimented on, artificial environments are being built, and far-off unEarthly
environments are being connected to U.S. institutions through modes of occupation
and remote sensing.
The book is therefore grounded in the anthropological
understanding that social groups have different ideas about how things are
connected. Such ideas can be extremely powerful but can also be completely
taken for granted. People may not question how such concepts are cultivated or
how they shape the worlds they live in. As an anthropologist, I have been
pursuing this question: What are some basic concepts of relatedness that
motivate thought, action, and power?
As a result, the chapters of the book engage a few key questions:
What can spaceflight practices and social activities teach us about these basic
relational ideas that inform diverse U.S. political perspectives, technical
practices, and imaginations of futures? Or about how experts control what
counts as “in” or “out” of relation? Or about how modern cosmologies get
produced? I attempt to answer these questions by taking the U.S. relationships with
the solar system as its object of study.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Into the Extreme offers an unusual look into the vast domain of U.S. human spaceflight. I wrote it after doing years of fieldwork in its workplaces that are off-limits to the public. Usually, social and historical studies of human spaceflight focus on rocketry or international relation-building. Instead, my exposure to the everyday work of sending people beyond Earth prompted me to focus on the two basic cultural ideas that spaceflight depends on and extends into the universe: “system” and “environment.”
These are humble everyday terms. But they are also historically loaded concepts of relationality that have come to empower Western thought, technical practice, and global interactions. The “system” concept emerged as a theoretical organizing principle during the Enlightenment, when it became clear to astronomers gazing through telescopes and biologists peering into microscopes that it wasn’t just important to know what things are but how they are interrelated. “System” became the official term for designating parts in relation to kinds of wholes, and for presenting those wholes as connected or separate from one another. “Environment” emerged in the nineteenth century as a term with which to think about the exterior forces that form systems.
Today, the “system” and “environment” concepts influence how people speak about and question what is included or excluded from worlds that matter: social, political, ecological. People speak of joining systems and beating them; people love environments and fight over them. Spaceflight elaborates and extends these concepts more intensively than most other types of social practice. I did fieldwork for my book in sites where living systems are being experimented on, artificial environments are being built, and far-off unEarthly environments are being connected to U.S. institutions through modes of occupation and remote sensing.
The book is therefore grounded in the anthropological understanding that social groups have different ideas about how things are connected. Such ideas can be extremely powerful but can also be completely taken for granted. People may not question how such concepts are cultivated or how they shape the worlds they live in. As an anthropologist, I have been pursuing this question: What are some basic concepts of relatedness that motivate thought, action, and power?
As a result, the chapters of the book engage a few key questions: What can spaceflight practices and social activities teach us about these basic relational ideas that inform diverse U.S. political perspectives, technical practices, and imaginations of futures? Or about how experts control what counts as “in” or “out” of relation? Or about how modern cosmologies get produced? I attempt to answer these questions by taking the U.S. relationships with the solar system as its object of study.