Istvan Praet – författare

What happens when contemporary space exploration outgrows Space Age modernity? In this volume, a collective of social scientists and humanities scholars provides an introduction to the emerging field of outer space studies. This is done by means of "otherwhere ethnography," richly detailed accounts of how space research and space enterprises are being rethought in an age where extraterrestrial exploration is no longer the monopoly of a handful of superpowers. While many off-Earth endeavours remain embedded within characteristically modern forms of thought--scientism, productivism, extractivism, (neo-)colonialism--there is also an emerging trend to move away from such ingrained conceptual frameworks. If one looks beyond the much-hyped projects of billionaire space gurus and their coterie of rocket-obsessed followers, one notices that Space Age modernity can also be thought otherwise, and that the very idea of "exploration" has already mutated into something else. Outer space studies can be envisaged as the antenna that seeks to capture this momentous, ongoing mutation.

The central purpose of this book is to help change the terms of the debate on animism, a classic theme in anthropology. It combines some of the finest ethnographic material currently available (including firsthand research on the Chachi of Ecuador) with an unusually broad geographic scope (the Americas, Asia, and Africa). Edward B. Tylor originally defined animism as the first phase in the development of religion. The heyday of cultural evolutionism may be over, but his basic conception is commonly assumed to remain valid in at least one respect: there is still a broad consensus that everything is alive within animism, or at least that more things are alive than a modern scientific observer would allow for (e.g., clouds, rivers, mountains) It is considered self-evident that animism is based on a kind of exaggeration: its adherents are presumed to impute life to this, that and the other in a remarkably generous manner. Against the prevailing consensus, this book argues that if animism has one outstanding feature, it is its peculiar restrictiveness. Animistic notions of life are astonishingly uniform across the globe, insofar as they are restricted rather than exaggerated. In the modern Western cosmology, life overlaps with the animate. Within animism, however, life is always conditional, and therefore tends to be limited to one’s kin, one’s pets and perhaps the plants in one’s garden. Thus it emerges that "our" modern biological concept of life is stranger than generally thought.