My contribution to a really interesting issue on science fiction and the future in Rivista di antropologia contemporanea (2023).
Abtsract:
Science fiction and anthropology are separate projects, each developing
according to its own logic, but there have been cross-hatchings where
they have met and influenced each other. The late Nineteenth century,
for example, saw both an anthropology and a science fiction in service
of colonialism and racism through unilinear evolutionary tropes. SF and
anthropology in the twentieth century, on the other hand, explored
different configurations of cultural relativism as ways of not only
understanding culture, but of exploring its future. The twenty-first
century has also been generative of crossings between SF and
anthropology, a «speculative anthropology» that promises to re-make both
