Contribution short abstract:

Astrophysicists collaborate. Anthropologists collaborate, too, but differently. This presentation spotlights a Malagasy astrophysicist in the UK who is an interlocutor of a German anthropological project and shows how questions of familiarity and strangeness emerge.

Contribution long abstract:

For astrophysics, just like for anthropologists, collaboration with actors across the globe is crucial. From any one place on earth one can only see that part of the sky that is above the horizon. Earth itself (the “familiar”) is in the way for an omnidirectional view into outer space (the “strange”) and so astrophysicists collaborate with people taking measurements in other places around the globe. Similarly, anthropologists need to collaborate with others in encounters that are shaped by dialectics of strangeness and familiarity. In an anthropological project about astrophysics in Madagascar, Malagasy astrophysicists are both tied into their global community of astrophysicists as well as part of collaborative relations between the anthropologist and her “field.”

In this presentation, I focus on Mbola, a Malagasy astrophysicist pursuing her PhD in the UK. She and her colleagues both in Madagascar and in the UK understand astrophysics as a commons to which scientists from all corners of the world should be able to contribute. Despite numerous practical hurdles that she had to overcome (unequal preconditions, scarce funding opportunities, family expectations), her everyday collaborative activities at work enact this understanding of a global scientific community. Mbola also collaborates with me, an anthropologist from Germany working on astronomy in Madagascar. This latter collaboration necessarily looks very different and follows much more a relational model of interlocutor – researcher. In this presentation, I deliberately juxtapose these forms of collaboration and I ask how Mbola’s experience of astrophysical collaboration shapes our anthropological conversations about strangeness and familiarity.