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Paper Short Abstract:

In this paper I explore the alternative temporal and historical frames suggested by a contact group in Chile. I propose we look outside of anthropology, to astrophysics, for a heuristic that is generative of an anthropology that can bend spacetime.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper I explore my ethnography of a UFO contact group in Chile, Rahma, who insist that we exist in a sort of separate temporal frame from the “real” time of the universe. In this parallel existence we are working to save ourselves from imminent destruction; in the “real” time we have already destroyed ourselves. Some of the aliens that contact the followers of Rahma are descendants of the adolescents that we as humans sent on a space mission in our future to the star cluster of Alpha Centauri. The aliens are future versions of us, and at least some of them have both human and alien DNA, having come back to the past from our future world, which they call Earth 2. When we deal with time-travel, multiple existential dimensions, and alternate histories, we are looking not simply at different epistemologies for understanding one´s past and future, but ontological configurations that do not fit with normative anthropology´s reliance on ontological realism as a basis for history. We must therefore seek or invent an anthropology that looks outside of itself to make sense of such temporally plastic extremes. In this paper I propose we look at the physics of dark matter, one of the most speculative fields of current astrophysics, for a “heuristic” generative of a pluriversal anthropology. This comparison shows that even in a hard science, like physics, one must devise modes of understanding the effects of “invisibles”, so to speak, in ways other than the normatively representational.