Combining anthropological scholarship, visual materials, speculative reflection, and interdisciplinary dialogue, the Off-Earth Atlas offers a new way of thinking about our own lives through and with outer space.
The Off-Earth Atlas is a guidebook to the extraterrestrial from a social science perspective. Bringing together forty entries by social scientists, anthropologists, artists, and interdisciplinary thinkers, the book explores how humans build social worlds in relation to the sciences, infrastructures, imaginaries, myths, and shifting presence of outer space. Inspired in part by the playful speculative spirit of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this book examines not only what humans do in space, but also how such endeavors transform the ways we inhabit and understand life on our own planet. It is precisely this movement of going “off-Earth”—and returning—that the collection seeks to capture.
As anthropologists, the editors are all, in different ways, concerned with how space—as physical realm, technical configuration, and conceptual category—shapes human meaning-making. What kinds of relationships are being formed with the moon, sun, stars, and planets? How does thinking about life on other planets, humans surviving beyond the limit of our atmosphere, mining the moon, or praying to the heavens, change our ideas of the human, spiritual, or material worlds we inhabit? The collection brings together diverse perspectives on territories, infrastructures, cosmologies, life, law, technology, art, and planetary futures. Rather than presenting outer space as distant or purely technical, the book argues that space is already deeply entangled with everyday social, political, ecological, and cultural life on Earth. The book will be relevant to those interested in outer space and to those who have never really thought about it.
