Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the extent to which real worlds are created through imaginative narrative. I examine three kinds of narratives: the self narratives of village people, science fiction writing, and planetary ethnographies that consider how to live on other planets.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I consider the extent to which real worlds are created through imaginative narrative. I examine three kinds of narratives: the self narratives of village people in conditions of change, science fiction writing, and planetary ethnographies that consider how to live on other planets. While self narratives combine imagination, experience, traditional myths and wishful political statements, to create a new world on the demise of the old, they can also be interactive exercises that to some extent must cover up individual creativity, in order to avoid accusations of lying and self-aggrandizement.

By contrast, science fiction writing is imaginative fantasy by definition. Unsurprisingly, some anthropologists have turned to science fiction writing, while astrophysicists have undertaken 'earthly ethnographies of other worlds' (exoplanets). These genres give rise to questions of world building and specifically about the ability of humans to dwell in other spaces than earth:

• Consider the imagination, which does not bind us to earth or any reality (Casey's 'pure possibility'). We can make ourselves at home in any environment in which we can breathe, eat and drink.

• Consider how the self/person is created in societies on earth; through care, empathy, self-externalization; fine judgment exercised in opting for attachments to shed and which to retain in specific contexts (Latour, Stengers).

• Dwelling in space calls for a return to things themselves (metaphysics). Metaphysics is not tied to a concrete place on earth, but a virtual place in the intellect and the imagination.