Martha Blassnigg – Towards an Anthropology of Space – 2005

This paper is a compilation of two presentations given at the 8th Leonardo/Olats Space and the Arts Workshop on the 16th of March and the First IAA International Conference: Impact of Space on Society on the 18th of March 2005 in Budapest.

The following paper proposes the application of methodologies from Cultural Anthropology to Space Science in order to deconstruct the cultural implications of space. For this suggestion, the author has chosen a case study of the spiritual perception of space in popular culture that often is been contrasted with the perception of space as scientific entity.(1)

The research for this paper emerges from a larger research project within Trans-technology Research at the University of Plymouth, which studies the philosophical aspects of science and technology and the history of popular arts. One of the author’s particular interests is to put technology back in touch with its human origins, ideas and original impulses, especially its spiritual aspects and metaphysical aspirations. The author’s thinking about putting Space Science back into the human domain began during her participation last year at the 7th Workshop on Space and the Arts Space: Science, Technology and the Arts, 18 – 21 May 2004, at the European Space Research and Technology Center (ESA-ESTEC) Noordwijk, The Netherlands, and subsequently emerged from the development of a project together with Michael Punt for the Mars-Patent site, the first planetary exhibition site on Mars by Claudia Reiche and Helene Oldenburg.(2)

To relate science and spirituality with one another may be unusual in the context of Space Science, yet is been practised through synergies in various scientific fields especially in recent years. Paul Feyerabend (1975), Mary Des Chene (1996) or Jojada Verrips (1997) among others proposed that mythological and scientific thinking does not contradict but compliment each other. In the foreground of these approaches the concept of the angel plays a crucial role in this paper, as it clearly refers to space exploration owing to the angels ability to move freely in space, and additionally to its capacities to move beyond time, which together provide an interface of our human desire to teleport into other dimensions and realms. In this sense the concept of the angel serves as pivot where not only popular culture and mythology intersect, but where art, spirituality and technology converge and seem to be able to form a trans-disciplinary dialogue.(3)

Outer space has often served as metonym for the unknown, and as Roger Malina and others have pointed out, more than 90% will remain that way, as the proverbial “dark matter” suggests. This may cause some discomfort, because mostly science deals with certainty in as much as it deals with what we think we can know, whereas for those concerns with spirit there is a long tradition of enjoying uncertainty. For example while a medieval anonymous mystical text speaks of the “Cloud of Unknowing”(4) , the mythological and spiritual imagination of outer space through out history has mostly been populated with the paranormal, and uncountable spiritual entities such as angels, deities, spirits, and more recently, aliens, UFO’s, titans, Cyborgs, and so on. ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’ (around 500 A.D.), a pagan philosopher, and the German nun Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) for example filled their heavenly visions with endless choirs and hierarchies of angels, which found entrance into the established institutionalised Christian belief. In seeming contrast to these rich visions, outer space shows itself as a vast darkness, cold and lacking in oxygen.(5) Paradoxically, this apparent disparity stimulates the popular imagination and enforces the belief in other worlds, life on other planets, and the coexistence of other dimensions and parallel universes.

The discrepancy and dichotomy between materiality and immateriality, between transcendence and immanence at first sight provokes a collision of two seemingly diverging worldviews. The scientific understanding of space and its spiritual perception seem to reaffirm the split between science and religion and ask for a reconciliation of two diverging versions or cosmologies of the same “thing”. The challenge is how we can understand space not as divergent concept but as a constellation of cosmologies?

In order to avoid the orthodox solutions which tend to synthesise, homogenise or atomise, or which often prioritize one view over another, the author instead suggests following contemporary innovative trans-disciplinary approaches, which give preference to dialogue and the valid existence of paradox and ambiguity, which retain both perspectives in their own rights and definitions. To do this with rigor we could turn to the scientific discipline of Cultural Anthropology to look for a possible solution. This is an especially viable strategy since the angel provides a useful concept in reference to the methodology of Cultural Anthropology, as it supersedes dichotomies and remains ambiguous, oscillating between proximity and distance.(6)

Anthropology can be defined as the study of human nature, human society, and human history.(7) It is a holistic and comparative scholarly discipline that aims to describe, in the broadest possible sense, what it means to be human. In contrast to Physical Anthropology, which concentrates on the biological study of human organisms, Cultural Anthropology in particular studies all kinds of cultural, economical, social and philosophical aspects of human life. The Cultural Anthropologist assembles empirical data and in contrast to social sciences, the fieldwork and participating observation extends over long periods of time while intellectually, emotionally and physically experiencing other peoples’ ways of life.

Cultural Anthropology has always dealt with the “unknown other” in different cultural contexts and offers methodologies to deal with the familiar unknown in its cultural construction and with the dynamics of difference. To simplify, two concepts of the “unknown” can be defined: one beyond the comprehension of knowledge and one as the familiar unknown. The familiar unknown is a cultural construction since it changes over time but remains the same entity and it outlines what we know we don’t know. Cultural Anthropology approaches the familiar unknown, experiencing a constant change or oscillation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between proximity and distance while aiming towards an emic (8)(embedded) view and perception.
As a rational scientific discipline Cultural Anthropology accommodates the coexistence of multiplicity and divergence and serves the understanding of human interaction with themselves and their environment. Since the 1950’s a rigorous revision of the discipline took place by a political and postcolonial deconstruction of its assumptions, following the impact of the cultural relativism in the US, founded by Franz Boas, which overturned the evolutionist perspective rooted in the 19th century thinking. The interpretative bias of the investigator has since become the key in Cultural Anthropology, an approach that goes back to Clifford Geertz (1973) who posed one crucial problematic in terms of self and other, asking the fundamental question: « How is it that other people’s creations can be so utterly their own and yet so deeply part of us? » The self/other dilemma for Geertz points to the necessity of interpretation which Marcus and Fischer (1986) refer to as « interpretive” anthropology. In this sense we understand now that what we see in the other is a reflection of our own active interpretation. It is a meditation on the fundamental difficulty of assimilating the native, emic point of view to the anthropologist’s sensuous perception, and therefore such investigation is as much about the investigator as the investigated and is based on interactive exchange and dialogue.

Before Cultural Anthropology gained its self-reflexivity during postcolonial deconstruction, the “unknown other” has been perceived as the exotic or “primitive”, according to the 19th century evolutionist theory. An evolutionist perspective defined “primitive cultures” as survivals of former civilizations and the cultural remainders as predecessors on an evolutionary scale where Western civilisation was ascribed to the top of the development. The self-reflexive shift within the discipline happened at the very moment when space exploration became a high profile topic of scientific research. Curiously early Space exploration revisits in a certain way the discoveries of the New Worlds in the 15th century and onwards (the New Worlds from where later the rockets were launched) in as much as the explorers story becomes the basis of the epistemology.(9) When early explorers discovered new territories they carried with them predetermined understandings of what would be unknown and prior to departure filled their scientific tool-bags accordingly.

Space Science, too, looks at other places on its own “domestic or local” terms. Outer space appears to be an alien place, while in reality we humans are the alien in space. In this sense, the case of Space exploration has become a rather unreconstructed version of how to deal with the “unknown other” in different cultural or planetary contexts, reflecting the observer’s perspective and ideology, often centred around a Western hegemonic, white male dominated point of view. We might ask, when searching for organic “life forms” in outer space, if scientists are handling a similar mindset and comparing their results with predetermined expectations according to familiar knowledge, juggling between closeness and distance, the familiar and unfamiliar.

In popular culture there seems to have been a shift of the unknown in space towards hostility, while at the same time contemporary Western spiritual movements attempt to recover the sublime unknown. Looking at popular culture since the age of space exploration, it is remarkable that, as outer space becomes more materially known, the “unknown other” displaces the indeterminate angel with the material and rather hostile form of the alien. Angels symptomatically fell to earth during the scientific exploration of outer space, and popular culture filled in with more material forms of the unknown others, the virtual form of otherness in the alien that could be seen as the rather unsophisticated raw model of the angel. While angels stand for the familiar and came closer to earth, aliens represent the unfamiliar and exist at both feared and desirable distance. Like aliens in popular imagination, angels serve as a portal between the familiar unknown and the absolute, sublime unknown. Angels open a door to the beautiful sublime, the unknown alien in contrast to the hostile unknown of the feared other.

This displacement of angels by aliens prompts some intriguing questions. For example, is the popular imagination of aliens pushing angels out of space? Have angels as entities become more material? If so, this could mean either that this gave space for aliens to inhabit outer space or it made them more visible in the dark deprived of the blending divine light of religiously dominated history. Or it is a question of a certain Zeitgeist wherein spirituality has become more immanent and popular?

In the context of the broader scheme of science, this problematic can be seen as analogous with questions surrounding the forces that hold the world together at the atomic level. For example what happens in the space between the nucleus and the electron? These spaces are deprived of any living entity but as far as popular imagination is concerned they could be filled with angels, aliens, satellites, avatars, and so on.(10) Popular culture often merges several explanations in a variety of hybrid forms: the alien becomes the hero (Terminator 1,2 and 3, E.T.), the Cyborg becomes human (Bicentennial Man), fallen angels become destroyers, alienated angelic invaders or usurpers (Prophecy), angels become Cyborgs and heroes (Macross, The Neon Genesis Evangelion). Such visions raise the question if in future there might be a time when humans will keep aliens as guardians in an interstellar society as for example in the movie Men in Black with portals to outer space?

From a Cultural Anthropologist’s point of view, (outer) space consists of a variety of perceptions of space in different cultural and historical contexts. In these parallel cosmologies, scientific facts and empirical data, mythologies, imaginary worlds and oral histories converge through a trans-disciplinary approach. Cultural Anthropologists are used to deal with proximity and distance, extreme self-reflection, the interchange of self and other, the familiar and unfamiliar, otherness and alterities, paradox and the incorporation of personal experience in their scientific field. Recently they also venture into new, contemporary domains such as cyber-anthropology, the study of humans in their interrelations with communications technology and Artificial Intelligence. Such epistemology could possibly create crucial links not only to lived experience and qualities of life in outer space embedded in cultural and social contexts, but most importantly incorporate factors based upon ancient knowledge and artistic expressionist systems, which more adequately know how to deal with the unknown and paradox by more intuitive and contemplative approaches. In the context of the space community, anthropologists might find themselves serving as interstellar agents, next to angelic messengers in their scientific shape to explore new spaces and dimensions of otherness.

Instead of concluding, the author’s intention is instead to open a portal into a treatment of an “Anthropology of Space”. As a point of departure, Cultural Anthropology offers an analytical method and a suggestive interface between space art and Space Science. In this context the author would like to suggest not to re-insert the material world into the ether of space as 19th century missionary explorers, but to think about the dynamics of difference, rather like the way in which artists use their sensibility and their relative familiarity in creating connections with the unknowable unknown. They are able to act as agents, translators or transmitters, similar to Cultural Anthropologists, in a dialogue between differing worlds and dimensions, an oscillation between proximity and distance. In this way, a trans-disciplinary enterprise will create portals for mythology and spiritual dimensions, or to put it more scientifically: extend our realms of consciousness – to release the spirit beyond the material form in the sense of life force, breath, soul, anime.

Literature:

Des Chene, Mary. (1996). Symbolic Anthropology. In: Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, ed. David Levinson and Melvin Ember, 1274-1278. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Feyerabend, Paul. (1975). Against Method. London: Verso.

Gage, John. (1993). Colour and Culture. Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. Singapore: Thames and Hudson.

Geertz, Clifford. (1973). The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books.

Marcus, G.E. and Fischer, M.J. (1986). Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Saxl, Fritz (1970). A Heritage of Images. A Selection of Lectures by Fritz Saxl. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, p. 21-26.

Schultz, Emily A. and Lavenda, Robert H. (1990). Cultural Anthropology. A Perspective on the Human Condition. (Second Edition) St. Paul: West Publishing Company.

Verrips, Jojada. (1997) In: Dagschrift: 365 jaar Universiteit van Amsterdam, p. 181

Websites:

http://www.mars-patent.org: the first planetary exhibition site on Mars by Claudia Reiche and Helene Oldenburg and the project DAO, “Design for Absolute Openness” at http://www.mars-patent.org/projects/absolute_openness/absolute_openness.htm

Cloud of Unknowing. (anonymous author) 14th century, around 1375. Six manuscriptes (on vellum and paper) of several more copies are kept in the British Museum. http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/c/cloud_of_unknowing.html

(1) – I am very grateful to Michael Punt for his helpful comments in the preparation for this paper.

(2) – This project is called DAO, “Design for Absolute Openness”. It is a virtual architecture that provides a zone of absolute quietness in the universe to serve as inert laboratory in which to conduct experiments that allow particular research into the very qualities that are at stake when dealing with extraordinary connections and other dimensions. The DAO is set on Mars where contrary to popular belief there has not yet been detected intelligent or semi-intelligent life. In the spirit of absolute openness the founders of this project would not be surprised to detect residual psychic interference in these experiments, for example angelic presence. If this is indeed the case the project will be redesigned in the knowledge that there is a psychic universe and the rest of the world will have to reconfigure its ideas about scientific reality. DAO is neither labelled as a scientific nor art project since all categories lie outside the interest of absolute openness.

Mars functions (and always has in history) as habitual site for the collision of two worldviews. What the authors of DAO had originally imagined, science has discovered in terms of the created name and the actual location of the DAO and Niger Valles at Mars longitude 93° East, latitude 32° South (see for example http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMVZF77ESD_0.html).

(3) – In my previous research for Cultural Anthropology I have studied the contemporary belief in angels outside any religious context amongst contemporary clairvoyants and artists in Vienna, and how these believes are been expressed in art and new media and relate to the cinematographic perception as multi-sensorial experience. In order to briefly introduce angels according to this research, their most obvious attribute lies in their reference to light, being perceived as light beings and emanating energy or forces. Their shapes and appearances are transitional and they are therefore less important than certain qualities that they emanate, such as the condition of love, communion and empathy, and the message that is being transmitted. Art-history has depicted angels as human figures with wings since the 6th century (Saxl, 1970) and therefore shaped our perception of the angelic image according to the theological canon of the historical period. In ancient Hebrew and Greek texts instead angels appear in human shape, often merely described with the analogy “like an angel”, while winged human depictions in various cultural contexts refer to either altered states of consciousness (shamans, etc.) or deities as for example in the case of the Chinese Dunhuang and the Japanese Asuka cave paintings, as Setsuko Ishiguro has shown with her Flying Deities Project at the workshop at ESA-ESTEC in Noordwijk in 2004.

In contemporary film, art and popular culture, angels again appear or reflect often rather human conditions than anything related to angelic qualities and they are mostly represented in terms of what they are not in contrast to human beings: they don’t have taste and can’t feel touch as in the movies Wings of Desire or City of Angels and once they start feeling desire (for love for example) they transform into humans. Hence contemporary art and popular imagination create angelic presences that have again become humanized on the one hand, and attributed with technological features on the other hand, appearing as Cyborgs as for example in Japanese Anime.

(4) – Cloud of Unknowing. (anonymous author) 14th century, around 1375. Six manuscripts (on vellum and paper) of several more copies are kept in the British Museum.

(5) – Darkness and void seem to contradict the imagination of divine light and the realms filled with heavenly creatures. Curiously, there is an old Jewish notion in the bible that God dwelt in ineffable darkness. This notion became Christianized in the sixth century in writings, probably by a Syrian monk, attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, according to whom “we posit intangible and invisible darkness of that light which is unapproachable because it so far exceeds the visible light”, and in a letter he writes: “The divine darkness is that ‘unapproachable light’ where God is said to live”. (Gage, 1993, p. 60)

(6) – As mentioned already in footnote 3, the transformative aspects of angelic images blurs the borderlines between angels and humans and emphasizes the ambiguity of the angelic concept inbetween dimensions and any applicable category. Hence angels are thought of genderless beings, their love is divine and supercedes physical and emotional bonding, and apart from the popular concept of fallen angels, they usually supercede the dichotomy of good and evil. Their conceptual flexibility allows them to become shape shifters; angels in the media often transform into humans or become Cyborgs, machines or other forms of alienation.

(7) – Schultz and Lavenda, 1990, p. 4.

(8) – Reference no longer available

(9) – We can think for example of the Apollo moon landing and its conspiracy that it may not really have happened but be a media hoax, or Marco Polo’s accounts from China, in some peoples opinion Polo has never set foot into China but his stories became legendary. Hereby the surpassed concepts of reality or truth become obliterated by the dynamics of popular cultural interpretation and reception.

(10) – In this place at the conference the author has presented a methodology from the discipline of art-history: a contemporary application of the idea of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne image gallery accompanied by a compilation of images on angels, space exploration and aliens, comprising images from a historical time span of a few hundred years. Due to constrains of space and the necessity of an accompanying visual presentation, this part of the conference presentation is been left out in this paper.

Some links from the original article are no longer valid. This text has been
revised in this respect by the publisher.