Victor Buchli on Life in Low-Earth Orbit

Social Science Bites

As an anthropologist, Victor Buchli has one foot in the Neolithic past and another in the space-faring future. A professor of material culture at University College London, his research has taken him from excavations of the New Stone Age site at Çatalhöyük, Turkey to studies of the modern suburbs of London to examinations of life on -- and in service to -- the International Space Station.

It is in that later role, as principal investigator for a European Research Council-funded research project on the "Ethnography of an Extraterrestrial Society," that he visits the Social Science Bites podcast. He details for interviewer David Edmonds some of the things his team has learned from studying the teams -- both in space but more so those on Earth -- supporting the International Space Station.

Buchli describes, for example, the "overview effect." The occurs when which people seeing the Earth without the dotted lines and map coordinates that usually color their perceptions. "When you look down," he explains, "you don't see borders, you just see the earth in its totality, in a sense that produces a new kind of universalism."

He also reviews his own work on material culture, specifically examining how microgravity affects the creation of things. "It is the case within the social sciences, and particularly within anthropology, that gravity is just assumed. And so here we have an environment where suddenly this one single factor that controls absolutely everything that we do as humans on Earth is basically factored out. So how does that change our understanding of these human activities, these sorts of human institutions?"

Buchli has written extensively on material culture, serving as managing editor of the Journal of Material Culture, founding and managing editor of Home Cultures, and editor of 2002's The Material Culture Reader and the five-volume Material Culture: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences. Other books he's written include 1995's Interpreting Archaeology, 1999's An Archaeology of Socialism, and 2001's Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past.