Ursula Le Guin’s Speculative Anthropology: Thick Description, Historicity and Science Fiction

Daniel Davison-Vecchione,Sean Seeger

doi:10.1177/02632764211051780

Daniel Davison-Vecchione, Sean Seeger

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211051780

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Abstract

This article argues that Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction is a form of ‘speculative anthropology’ that reconciles thick description and historicity. Like Clifford Geertz’s ethnographic writings, Le Guin’s science fiction utilises thick description to place the reader within unfamiliar social worlds rendered with extraordinary phenomenological fluency. At the same time, by incorporating social antagonisms, cultural contestation, and historical contingency, Le Guin never allows thick description to neutralise historicity. Rather, by combining the two and exploring their interplay, Le Guin establishes a critical relation between her imagined worlds and the reader’s own historical moment. This enables her to both counter Fredric Jameson’s influential criticism of her work – the charge of ‘world reduction’ – and point to ungrasped utopian possibilities within the present. Le Guin’s speculative anthropology thus combines the strengths while overcoming some of the limitations of both Geertz’s thick-descriptive method and Jameson’s theory of the science fiction genre.

Highlights

The intersection of science fiction studies with other areas of academic enquiry has proven a fertile one in recent years
In 2018, the Society for Cultural Anthropology commissioned a blog series on the theme of speculative anthropologies (Anderson et al, 2018). These intriguing suggestions by scholars from across the humanities and social sciences point to some of the many potential resonances between science fiction and the discipline of anthropology. Developing these ideas, Matthew Wolf-Meyer has authored a short monograph on anthropology and speculative fiction, drawing on a range of science fiction literature and film (Wolf-Meyer, 2019)
Wolf-Meyer draws attention to their shared focus: as he observes, ‘the questions anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have been pursuing since the nineteenth century have been motivating speculative fiction writers, from Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.G

Summary

Introduction

The intersection of science fiction studies with other areas of academic enquiry has proven a fertile one in recent years. The core of Jameson’s criticism is that in her major science fiction novels Le Guin is engaged in thought experiments which involve a drastic simplification of human life as we know it.

Results

Conclusion