NWO: Cultural Dynamics – Small programmes – Proposal
1. Project information
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The Future is Elsewhere: Towards a Comparative History of the Futurities of
the Digital (R)evolution
2. Summary
Every generation fosters its own conception of the future, just as these conceptions
change from place to place. Forms of the future (or ‘futurities’) build on specific
cultural heritages, but also “go global” by the spread of various narratives and
practices of communication technology. The “digital revolution” – still unfolding its
potential scripts, practices and networks since it began to emerge in the 1960s – is the
most recent of such historical transformations, and it has come to symbolize the
“new” intermediality and democratic accessibility of popular cultural performance.
This project attempts the multidisciplinary comparisons required to understand such a
global dynamic, by comparing such digital future(s) in Europe and North America,
East Asia and Southeast Asia, as they emerge in the history of two distinct genres of
technologically-driven futurities: “science fiction” and “development discourse”.
Both genres often find their technological futures elsewhere: in development
doctrines, in a different country, and, in science fiction, in outer space. Comparative
histories of such futurities will, we propose, indicate how digital intermediality has
both symbolized and facilitated the transfer of content from popular culture into
policy statements and vice versa in the period between 1945 and the new millenium.
3. Main applicant
Prof. Dr. Peter Pels (Leiden University)
4. Co-applicant
Prof. Dr. Chris Goto-Jones (Leiden University)
5. Thematic classification
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“Intermediality”: Science fiction and development discourse borrow
extensively from hegemonic imagery and from each other, but often in
different media: science fiction is marked by a convergence culture of film,
literature, graphic novels, video games, new media/internet and other
commercial products [figurines etc.], while development discourse mostly
finds it way into education policy and curricula, project plans, project reports,
and technological practice. The transition from post-1945 modernization
theories to post-1984 digital democracy, however, shows that there also is a
considerable convergence between SF and development discourse;
Science fiction and development are both instrumental in establishing new
canons of popular culture, mediating between popular techno-fashions and
hegemonic policy statements to generate widely shared symbolic alternatives;
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“Ownership” of the most persuasive account of the future is a strong resource
is achieving forms of in- and exclusion, and helps to determine hegemonic
definitions of global citizenship.
6. Previous and future submissions
A different version of this proposal was considered “subsidizable” during the first
round of the NWO Cultural Dynamics programme in October 2007, but only just
failed to clear the financial threshold of the programme. A sizeable part of the
research on Japanese science fiction has since then been funded through Prof. GotoJones acquisition of a VICI-grant from NWO. The third project’s senior researcher,
Bart Barendregt, will be co-applicant of a proposal with NWO-GW on Asian youth
culture in 2009.
7. Institutional setting
Leiden University:
• Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (Faculty of
Social and Behavioral Sciences)
• Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Department of Japan Studies (Faculty of
Humanities)
• Interfacultary Research Profile “Global Interactions”.
8. Period of funding
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1 March 2010- 28 February 2014
9. Composition of the research team
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Prof. Peter Pels (Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology):
“Towards an Historical Anthropology of (Cyberpunk) Science Fiction” (eerste
geldstroom and secondment for 2012-13)
Prof. Chris Goto-Jones (Japan Studies): “Beyond Utopia: the Political
Futurities of the Science Fictional Field of Japan” (eerste geldstroom and
VICI project “Beyond Utopia: New Politics, the Politics of Knowledge, and
the Science Fictional Field of Japan”, NWO-GW, 3 AIOs and 1 postdoc from
1-09-2009)
Dr. Marianne Maeckelbergh (Cultural Anthropology and Development
Sociology): advisor to first and second project (eerste geldstroom)
Dr. Bart Barendregt (Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology):
“Emerging Futurities in Muslim Southeast Asia: Science-Fantasy, digital
development, and the urge for moral technology” (eerste geldstroom)
AIO: “Emerging Futurities in Muslim Southeast Asia: Science-Fantasy, digital
development, and the urge for moral technology” (funded from “Cultural
Dynamics” programme)
Dr. Dorien Zandbergen (postdoc, Cultural Anthropology and Development
Sociology): “‘Stranger in a Strange Land’: Gender, Utopia and Digital
Education” (funded from “Cultural Dynamics” programme)
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Prof. dr. Shamsul AB (Director, Institute for Ethnic Studies (KITA), the
National University of Malaysia (UKM): co-supervisor of AIO.
10. Brief description of the proposed research
Conceptions of the future change over time, and differ from society to society. Such
forms of the future (Zukunftigkeiten or “futurities”; Koselleck 2004), however, have
rarely been studied comparatively. Despite the fact that the contrast of futurities has
been and is a defining feature of “progress” from Thomas Malthus to the Millenium
Development Goals, indispensable for modern historical self-consciousness
(Koselleck 2004), vital in global ideological struggles (Barbrook 2007), and necessary
to understand both hope and dejection in everyday life (Ferguson 1999), the history of
culturally different forms of the future has not been singled out for systematic
comparison. Futurologists try to predict developments on the basis of the status quo,
but rarely see the forms of prediction themselves as part of the problem. States and
international organizations feel more secure when they can claim to “own” an image
of the future, and thus legitimize policies and power (Barbrook 2007). Commercial
enterprises seem to be happier with a multiplicity of future scenarios to cope with the
vagaries of competitive markets. These secular and rationalist conceptions of the
future as “open” to planning and policy, however, are rarely explicitly compared with
the messianic or apocalyptic futurities of adherents to different spiritual and religious
movements (Harding 2000; Hansen 1999; Roy 2004). Finally, globally hegemonic
policy statements and visions of the future often fail to account for historical
singularities, such as the shattering events (the French Revolution, or the bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki) that have deeply transformed these societies’ imaginary
futures. Different futurities, in short, are pivotal in understanding how an increasingly
globalized world connects and differentiates places – not only for academics, but for
policymakers and brokers of popular culture and entertainment as well.
We propose to explore the dynamics of different futurities by zooming in on
the comparative history of a major transition: the shift from the post-1945
“International” or Atomic Age towards the “Global” or Digital Age heralded by the
coming of the twenty-first millennium. We propose that two main vehicles of secular
futurities current in this period – science fiction and development discourse – provide
a privileged insight into the changes in visions of the future that took place over this
period. On the one hand, science fiction and development discourse provide an
excellent field of comparison: they resemble each other in being predominantly based
in the secularist conception of progress we can find in developmentalism and
evolutionism, yet make use of a number of alternative futurities, such as the more
“messianic” temporalities of revolution, apocalypse and disaster, or miraculous
developmental “jumps forward” (Benjamin 1973; Stites 1989; Tatsumi 2000).
Moreover, since machines emerged as the measure of man (Adas 1989) both
discourses usually concentrate on technology: from their emergence in the first half of
the nineteenth century (Aldiss 1973; Cowen and Shenton 1996), they usually founded
a different future on the (mis-) application of techno-scientific innovations. Last but
definitely not least, both science fiction and development discourses share an
obsession with “otherness”: they often presume that the ownership of new technology
and the capacity to determine the future come jointly from “elsewhere”. The most
radical example of this is the comparison of the extraterrestrial visitors in Ufology (a
commercial religion of science fiction) with the airplane visits in New Guinean cargo
cults (Roth 2005) – but such examples can be multiplied.
However, science fiction and development also clearly differ in significant
respects, most conspicuously where the freedom of science fiction to articulate our
fantasies of disaster and apocalypse contrasts sharply with the constant need of
development discourse to assert the “future positive” – i.e. that development is
intrinsically desirable (Mosse 2005: 1). Apocalypse, indeed, generates good novels,
but bad political programmes (Richard Barbrook, personal communication) –
showing that the difference in social location of science fiction (in the market) and
development (in the [non-]governmental field) offers a comparative advantage.
On the other hand, comparing science fiction and development during the
slow shift from the Atomic to the Digital Age provides a unique set of temporal
changes by which to compare futurities. The process in which the large-scale
mechanical technologies of the “Golden Age” of 1950s science fiction were (at least
partly) superseded by the smaller, intimate and embodied digital technologies of post1984 cyberpunk science fiction (Sterling 1986; Pels 2009) was paralleled by the shift
in state imaginaries towards a future “digital revolution”. Scared by the Soviet Bloc’s
project of building a truly communist “Unified Information Network”, US American
researchers beat them to it, to reclaim symbolic “ownership” of the future – only to
find that the US state and big business had to confront the new “communism” of open
source networks, libertarian hackers and the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(Barbrook 2007). During the same period, developmentalist visions shifted from
state-engineered forms of “technological transfer” to “by-passing” and even
reforming the state through Western models of the market and civil society
(Geschiere 2008), while global social and political movements increasingly adopted
models offered by digital technologies to realize more democratic and “horizontal”
forms of social relationship, “prefiguring” future utopias in the here and now (Juris
2008; Maeckelbergh 2008).
This raises the question what conceptual forms underpin these changing
claims to own the future. In October 2007, the Japanese Minister for
Communications, Shuga Toshihide, announced that Japan would develop an entirely
new ‘internet’ by 2020, designed to replace the existing ‘American’ WorldWideWeb
and staking Japan’s claims to a share in the ownership of the global future. Different
digital futures, however, come from foreign countries in another sense, too: even the
word “cyberspace” was coined in US American science fiction in a Japanese guise (as
the “Ono-Sendai Cyberspace Seven” computer: Gibson 1986 [1982]), reflecting the
techno-Orientalist (東方主義電子藝術) trend to present East Asia as the “future
now” (Ueno Toshio, 1996). Developmentalism, too, can take digital technology as a
future from a different country: Kofi Annan’s November 2002 call to “Silicon
Valley” to generate the technologies that will allow other countries to “leapfrog”
several generations of technology and enter the information society “directly”
manifests an expectation – common in all “ICT4D” discourses - of technodeterministic “revolution” that in its unbridled optimism does not seem to differ from
some of the wilder Science Fantasy. Goto-Jones’ VICI project, starting in September
2009, will research these issues by its focus on the “political unconscious” of
futurities in the increasingly global popular culture of the science-fictional field of
Japan (anime, manga and videogames). The three projects proposed here are meant to
compare its findings with research in Europe and Southeast Asia.
Scientific relevance and methodology: This project charts as yet little-explored
terrain: we intend to take the study of development beyond the relatively narrow focus
on “developing countries” (but see Cowen & Shenton 1996; Rist 1997), and the study
of science fiction beyond literature into global popular culture (e.g. Suvin 1979; but
see Jameson 2005). Our interdisciplinary approach is built around three main research
paradigms: Firstly, to understand the global circulation of modern forms of the future
we need Koselleck’s (2004) historical methodology for reconnaitring the “futures
past” of European modernity by Begriffsgeschichte and political philosophy (as well
as the understanding of the romantic, tragic, ironic or other “metahistories” by which
such concepts are put in narrative order [White 1973]). Secondly, Barbrook’s
pioneering exploration of the political economy of Cold War digital futures, shows
these conceptual histories need to be embedded in global political economies
(Koselleck 2004: ch.5; Barbrook 2007). Thirdly, however, to counter Koselleck’s and
Barbrook’s overemphasis on the globally dominant futurities of Europe and North
America, Begriffsgeschichte and political economy need to be augmented by
perspectives on political ideology (see Jameson 2005) and the historical ethnography
of different modern futures borrowed from area studies and anthropology (as
represented by Ferguson’s [1999] study of popular culture and everyday life in a
Zambian mining town) – in our case, by an explicit comparison with Japanese and
Southeast Asian cases. This requires us to fall back on the innovative methodology
pioneered by Tsing, whose critique of “globalist” universal claims and their
“futurism” is based in an historical ethnography of the “frictions” of these claims with
the cultural categories of the specific times and places in which these claims have to
be realized (Tsing 2005; 2008). Tsing’s methodology is reflexive and will help us to
cope with the problem that history and social science rarely studied futurities
comparatively, because they defined themselves to a large extent by rejecting
prophecy in favor of their own rationalist futurity (Rosenberg and Harding 2005: 4).
Operationalisation: The main research questions of this proposal are the
following: 1.What forms of the future characterize post-1945 science fiction and
development and how do they differ? 2. How do these futurities change with the
advent of digital technology? Answers to the first question require the distinction
between the futurities of planning and policy, revolutionary (technological or
political) change, (natural and slow) evolution, and messianic and/or apocalyptic
change. These futurities take place, of course, in specific circumstances, and are, in
that respect, a reworking of the cultural heritage of their location, in both local,
national and global respects. The answers to the second question involve features
specifically associated with the coming of digital technology (small-scale
accessibility, personalized and multi-purpose use, interactivity, horizontal
networking). Each project in this proposal researches these issues via two main
groups of sources: developmentalist discourse, usually found in the policy documents
of governmental, educational and international organizations; and science fictional
popular culture, found in bestselling books, films and on the internet. Interestingly,
both developmentalist and science fictional discourses come together in world
exhibitions, and previous workshops held in the context of this research project
indicate that at least two of these can serve as a starting point for the historical
changes targeted: the New York Exhibition of 1964 (Barbrook 2007) and the Osaka
Expo of 1970 (Lockyer 2007). (For further details see the project descriptions.)
Projects, dissemination and valorization: The collaborations on which this
proposal builds arose from two previous projects (co-)funded by NWO: the
“cyberspace salvations” research project (www.cyberspacesalvations.nl) and the
Asiascape network for contemporary media in East Asia. Two workshops (“The
Futures of Digital Technology”, The Hague, 3/10/07; and “Asian Futures”, Oxford,
16/01/08) further solidified the international and extra-academic contacts established
in this network (see item 12 below). Goto-Jones’ VICI grant for “Beyond Utopia:
New Politics, the Politics of Knowledge, and the Science Fictional Field of Japan”
allows for extensive research focused on Japan (for more details, see the first project
description below). The three projects proposed here complement it by research on
Europe and North America and Southeast Asia. During the previous workshops,
collaborations with the Waag Society for Old and New Media, internet provider
XS4All, the Institute for Interactive Media of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, the
Rathenau Foundation, and the Stichting Toekomstbeeld der Techniek were initiated
and inform the set-up of this proposal. In addition, respresentatives from different
museums (the Sieboldhuis, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum Volkenkunde
Leiden, and Rijksmuseum voor Oudheden) either attended the workshop or have
indicated their interest in its findings on the future of digital technology. Apart from
the usual academic forms of dissemination (see item 14 below), we expect to discuss
the findings of the wider research network with the societal institutions named above
during further workshops and conferences, and work towards an exhibition on the
world-wide spread of the material culture of images of the future (most likely to be
hosted by Museum Volkenkunde and the Sieboldhuis in Leiden).
Project 1: Towards an Historical Anthropology of (Cyberpunk) Science Fiction
(Pels [secondment funded by NWO], in collaboration with Goto-Jones and his
VICI-researchers)
Research into the popular culture of the development of computer technology (in the
context of the “cyberspace salvations” project) has discovered an unexpectedly large
influence of Science Fantasy (encompassing both SF and Fantasy literature) on digital
engineers and through them, on the political and economic discussions that have
shaped global visions of digital development. A social history of Science Fantasy in
the second half of the twentieth century, however, is lacking. This project, to be
executed by a senior researcher, is meant to fill this gap and thereby allow for a more
systematic comparison of North American and European science fiction and
development discourse with similar research on Japan (in Goto-Jones’ VICI project)
and Southeast Asia (project 3). In literary, film and cultural studies, such a basis for
comparison is lacking because studies usually concentrate on the production side or
the meaning of cultural artifacts (e.g. Suvin 1979; Jameson 2005; Ross 1991; Sobchak
1987). Recent historical anthropological studies, however, show the need and
potential of the study of audience responses to these manifestations of popular culture,
to assess the extent to which the scripts of Science Fantasy become blueprints for
everyday spirituality and future expectations (Battaglia 2005; Rosenberg and Harding
2005), thus allowing for an assessment of how science fictional “media rituals” help
to establish hegemonic “categories” of the future (cf. Couldry 2003). A pilot
publication (Pels 2009) records the extent to which the “Golden Age” of science
fiction in the 1940s and 1950s mediated between the modernization and Cold War
development policies of the postwar USA and American popular culture, especially
by means of the both salvific and paranoid political expectations of Ufology in the
context of the threat of nuclear annilihation (see also Barbrook 2007; Roth 2005).
This project aims to (a) further develop a timeline and inventory of North
American and European science fiction during its development from the “Golden
Age” through the “New Wave” of the 1960s into “Cyberpunk” and “post-cyberpunk”
science fiction, and to (b) set these shifts in the literary and cinematic genres in the
context of audience responses to these manifestations of popular culture. The research
into the literary history of science fiction has by and large been completed; additional
research will be done in 2010 and 2011 into audience responses via interviews
arranged through bookshops specialized in SF and participant observation and
interviewing at Ufology conventions in the Netherlands, leading to a historical
ethnography of the reception of North American and European SF in this country
since the 1960s. Beyond the general questions outlined above, three particular
analytic foci will be employed: firstly, on the changing expectations of the social and
political role of communications (especially digital) technology in the shift from the
Dutch welfare state in the 1970s to the neo-liberal 1990s (a focus that will also be
worked out in the case study on digital education of project two, see below);
secondly, on the gender dimension of the reception of science fiction, with particular
emphasis placed on the reception of feminist SF and the “second wave” of female
emancipation in both popular culture and policy circles since the late 1960s (also to
connect up with project 2, see below); and thirdly, on the Dutch reception of the
extraordinary eruption of cinematic Science Fantasy in popular culture since the first
screening of “Star Wars” in 1977 – a phenomenon yet to be explained. The focus of
the project on audience response as such targets the intermediality of SF convergence
culture in the Netherlands.
In addition, the establishment of a timeline of popular cultural shifts from
“Atomic” technology (during the Golden Age of SF) towards cyberpunk (outlined in
Pels 2009) will allow for a more systematic comparison with, on the one hand, the
convergence of developmental state policies and science fiction in Japan, on the
publication of which Pels and Goto-Jones will work jointly in 2012 and 2013; and on
the other, with the decisive changes associated with digital technology in the history
of global social movements since the 1960s, studied by Dr. Marianne Maeckelbergh,
a fellow-researcher at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development
Sociology (Maeckelbergh 2008). This will allow for the further assessment and
comparison of the history of three transnational exchanges of futurities: between
North American and European (especially Dutch) images of the future (also in project
two, see below); between North American and Japanese images of the future; and
between Japanese visions of the future and their reception in Southeast Asia (see
project three, below).
Project 2: “‘Stranger in a strange land’: Gender, Utopia and Digital Education”
(Zandbergen; postdoc funded by NWO)
On their webpage, the feminist hackers of the Dutch “Genderchangers” quote the
nineteenth-century Afro-American abolitionist Harriet Tubman in order to express
their experience in the predominantly male hacker environment. “I had crossed the
line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a
stranger in a strange land.” (www.genderchangers.org). The Genderchangers feel
‘free’ because they have educated themselves in technology, but do not feel welcome
in the predominantly masculine technological country in which they have arrived.
Interestingly, Tubman’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” is also the title of “the most
famous Science Fantasy novel of all time” (Heinlein 1978 [1961]), which, among
other things, prefigured the libertarian future imagined by the Californian
counterculture that was later projected into the “Californian Ideology” that expected
digital technology to “bootstrap” society towards a future techno-libertarian ideal
(Barbrook & Cameron 1996). Both testify to the fact that those who arrive at the
frontier of (technological) utopia do not necessarily feel that they take part in its
dominant futures, and feel the need to express an alternative vision.
Earlier research (Zandbergen 2004; 2009) has shown that, while Californian
and Amsterdam hackers shared the trust in the beneficial effects of computer
technology vis-á-vis corporations and government, their trust in the determination of
the future by digital technology differed in significant ways. Some employees of
Dutch Internet provider XS4all met with strong resistance when they tried to integrate
the Californian engineer and science fiction writer Ray Kurzweil’s future vision about
the arrival of the Singularity - an event when computers and humans will have
merged to form a higher consciousness that will ‘penetrate into matter’ and cure
hunger, death, poverty and disease (Kurzweil 2005) – in their work. “Californian”
optimism is also received in Europe with deep suspicion of the digital “Big Brother”
derived from another major science fiction novel, George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour (2003 [1949]). This reaction is significantly inflected by gender differences, as
the Genderchangers show.
This project researches these differences by applying the general questions of
this proposal to two sets of sources: the science-fictionally informed visions of the
future perceived by Californian and Amsterdam hackers since the 1980s, and more
practical and policy-directed proposals for digital education in the Netherlands, both
with particular attention to the role of gender differences in the production and
realisation of these futurities. The first set of research materials has been gathered in
two previous projects that will be finished by 2010: they show that in both California
and Amsterdam, fantasies about the forms of Gnostic disembodiment basic to
Californian digital techno-libertarianism (see Davis 1998) are often criticized by
feminists such as the Genderchangers. Feminist and Virtual Worlds developer Brenda
Laurel complained that “men go to cyberspace to leave their bodies behind, whereas
women go there to find it” (personal communication, Santa Cruz, January 2006). This
emphasis on the body often goes together with feminist hackers’ emphasis on
computer hardware. Following Hayles (1996) and Butler (1993), we hypothesize that
this difference in emphasis arises from gender differences in popular techno-culture
that are rarely researched, but may have a decisive impact on policies aiming at
increasing the number of women in technical professions and education.
This dimension of popular culture and policy towards digital technology is
hardly researched, and we propose to do so by means of the second set of sources:
policy statements and educational practices towards digital education that especially
target women and girls. Initially, the materials needed for this additional research will
be gathered in consultation with contacts developed during the workshop on “The
Futures of Digital Technology” on 3 October 2007, with members from the Waag
Society for Old and New Media, the Technical University Eindhoven and the Institute
for Interactive Media of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam in particular (and, of course,
with the feminist hackers researched earlier); and by making use of previous research
into gender differences in education of our colleagues at the Institute for Education
and Child Studies at the Faculty for Social and Behavioral Sciences of the University
of Leiden. Because of the necessarily exploratory nature of this research, this will be
mostly based on qualitative research (semi-structured interviews with educators and
pupils, and participant observation in class).
As in the first project, significant comparisons can be expected from
discussions with experts on feminist movements and their relation to digital futures
elsewhere, and with Kotani Mari in Tokyo, and Marianne Maeckelbergh in Leiden in
particular.
Project 3: “Emerging futurities in Muslim Southeast Asia: Science fantasy,
digital development and the urge for moral technology” (Barendregt; AIO)
What is the future for Islam? While Western stereotypes often tend to reduce it to a
“backward” orientation, or an absence of futurity because fate seems to lie in the
hands of Allah, realities in Southeast Asia are fast catching up with these views. Only
recently, the Malaysian Astronomy and Islam Law Association discussed how
Muslim astronauts would have to orient themselves to Mecca and count prayer-times
when praying in outer space. Similarly, the Malaysian film Syukur 21 (”Gratitude for
the 21st century”), set in the year 2021, depicts a not too distant future where fastgrowing technology does not prevent Muslims from holding on to noble values like
faithfulness in God, love, and mutual respect. Not coincidentally, Syukur 21 follows
on the heels of a prestigious, state-run development campaign in Malaysia, Wawasan
2020 (”Vision 2020”), started by President Mahathir Mohammad in 1991 to advance
Malaysia to the status of world power, not least via prestigious information
technology projects. Wawasan 2020 was merely one of several Southeast Asian
countries’ huge information technology infrastructure projects: Indonesia’s nationwide Nusantara21, Singapore’s IT2000 and SingaporeONE, and the Malaysian
Multimedia Super Corridor all aimed at leapfrogging several developmental stages
straight into the 21st century. While most of these development projects experience
difficulties, their visions of the future are, as Syukur 21 demonstrates, very much alive
in popular culture.
Syukur 21 indicates different futurities associated with different countries:
developmental visions from Southeast Asian nation-states that imagine a technical
and economic leap forward are coupled to futures of a proud Islam claiming
ownership of a technological future that is usually associated with “the West”. These
futures are complementary in the sense that they are both depicted as lying just
around the corner. They are also contradictory because “bottom-up” Islamic youth
culture seems to move towards the post-national community of the “cyber-ummah”
that is ultimately located in Mecca, undermining the techno-nationalist projects
mentioned above. This project employs a senior and a junior researcher to explore the
nature and social conditions of these Islamic futures.
The senior researcher will mostly target the history of technological
developments from the top down, as manifested in (a) the techno-nationalist projects
in Southeast Asia mentioned above, and the new Malaysian twin IT-capitals
Cyberjaya and Putrajaya, and Indonesia’s Nusantara21 in particular, (b) the postnational imaginaries (and practices) that have developed in these two countries
through multinational telecom providers, including the building of an IT city in
Medina with Malaysian money, and the provision of mobile services for prayer and
the Hajj in Indonesia; (c) both national and international ICT for Development
(“ICT4D”) projects in Malaysia and Indonesia, that put mobile (phone) technology at
the forefront of development, but awkwardly shy away from committing themselves
to any religious vision of the future.
The junior researcher will target the bottom-up scenarios in Southeast Asia by
focusing on Islamic youth culture and its futures. This should be a separate PhD
project because it requires more sustained time for fieldwork than the top-down focus
in this project. The PhD-student will preferably be recruited from Malaysia and cosupervised by Prof. dr. Shamsul AB of the National University of Malaysia. Islamic
youth culture is particularly interesting, not only for the references to techno-national
futurities mentioned above, but above all for its current fusion of modern popular
culture (pop music, fashion, gadgetry) with religion and futurist thinking. It seems to
be oppositional in its strong fantasies of a post-national future, articulated in terms of
Southeast Asian leadership in the development of IT technology into a “cyberummah” – an Islamic variant of McLuhan’s “global village”. Coupled to pious
reinventions of pop music and fashion, Southeast Asian Islamic youth culture seems
to embody a spontaneous, “user-led” reaction to techno-nationalist development that,
in the process, devises its own uses for and fantasies about mobile digital technology,
as witnessed by, for example, widespread stories about “ghosts in the ‘phone”.
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Ferguson, J. (1999) Expectations of Modernity. Myths and Meanings of Modernity on the Zambian Copperbelt.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Geschiere, P.L. (ed. 2008) The World Bank’s Changing Discourse on Development, in Geschiere, P.L., B. Meyer
& P. Pels (eds.) Readings in Modernity in Africa. Bloomington/Oxford/Pretoria.
Gibson, William (1986 [1982]) Burning Chrome, in Burning Chrome. New York: Ace Books.
Hansen, Thomas Blom (1999) The Saffron Wave: Hindu Nationalism and Democracy in Modern India. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Hayles, K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: Chicago UP.
Heinlein, Robert (1978 [1961]) Stranger in a Strange Land. London: New English Library.
Iwabuchi, Koichi (2002), Recentering Globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Jameson, Fredric (2005) Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso.
Juris, J. (2008) Networking Futures: the Movements against Corporate Globalization. Durham: Duke.
Koselleck, Reinhart (2004) Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia.
小谷 真理 , KOTANI Mari (2001/8), サイボーグ・フェミニズム
(Cyborg Feminism). Tokyo: 増補版版
小谷 真理 , KOTANI Mari (1994/2001), 女性状無意識(テクノガイネーシス)—女性 SF 論序説 (TechnoGynesis: The Political Unconscious of Feminist SF). Tokyo: 勁草書房
Kurzweil, Ray (2005) The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin Group.
Lockyer, A. (2007) The Logic of Spectacle, ca. 1970, Art History 30 (4): 571-589.
Maeckelbergh, M. (2008) Decentralized Network Democracy. Brighton: PhD-thesis University of Sussex.
McLuhan, Marshall (1964) Understanding Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Mosse, David (2005) Cultivating Development. An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. London: Pluto.
岡田斗司夫, OKADA Toshio (1996), オタク学入門 (An introduction to otaku-ology). Tokyo: 新潮社
Orwell, George (2003 [1949]) Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books.
Pels, P. (2009) Amazing Stories: How Science Fiction Sacralizes the Secular, in J. Stolow (ed.) Deus in Machina.
New York: Fordham University Press (in press).
Rist, G. (1997) The History of Development from Western Origins to Global Faith. London: Zed Books.
Rosenberg, Daniel & Susan Harding (eds. 2005) Histories of the Future. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Ross, A. (1991) Strange Weather. London: Verso.
Roth, Christopher (2005) Ufology as Anthropology: Race Extraterrestrials and the Occult, in D. Battaglia (ed.)
E.T. Culture. Anthropology in Outerspaces, 38-93. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Roy, Olivier (2005) Globalized Islam. New York: Columbia University Press.
Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism. Harmondsworth; Penguin.
Sobchak, V. (1987) Screening Space. The American Science Fiction Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers (2nd ed.).
Sterling, Bruce (1986) Introduction, in B. Sterling (ed.), Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York;
Arbor House.
Stites, Richard (1989) Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution.
New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Suvin, Darko (1979) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
巽 孝之, TATSUMI Takayuki (2000),日本 SF 論争史 (A History of SF Controversies in Japan). Tokyo: 勁草書
房
TATSUMI Takayuki (2006), Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2005) Friction. An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton UP.
---- (2008) The Global Situation, in J.X. Inda & R. Rosaldo (eds.) The Anthropology of Globalisation. Oxford.
上野俊哉, UENO Toshio (1996), 人工自然論—サイボーグ政治学に向けて (A Theory of Artificial Nature:
Towards a Politics of Cyborgs). Tokyo: 勁草書房
White, Hayden (1973) Metahistory The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns
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Zandbergen, Dorien (2009) Techno-Transcendentalism in Silicon Valley, in J. Stolow (ed.) Deus in Machina. New
York: Fordham University Press (in press).
11. Word count
Item 5: 202 words; Item 10: main proposal 1902 words; project descriptions
(including title) 768, 760; and 662 words, respectively.
12. International perspective
The international dimensions of this project are many and various. They build on the
research networks in Europe, North America, and Japan established through
“Cyberspace Salvations” and Asiascape, and have been further enhanced by the
workshops in The Hague and Oxford held in 2007 and 2008, which included Richard
Barbrook (Westminster University, UK), whose pioneering work was vital for
drawing up this proposal; Soongsook Choi (Kings College London, UK), who is
working on a PhD on the uses of digital technology in Korea; Mark Harrison
(Westminster University, UK), who is an authority on science fiction discourses in
Taiwan and China; Susan Napier (Tufts University, USA), who is the foremost
authority on anime outside of Japan; Sharon Kinsella (Oxford University, UK), who
is the foremost authority on manga outside of Japan; John Postill (Sheffield Hallam
University, UK) who works on media anthropology, “ICT for Development” and
internet activism in Malaysia; and Angus Lockyer (SOAS, London) who contributed
major insights on the Osaka Expo of 1970. We can also confirm the participation of
the eminent Tatsumi Takayuki (Keio University, Japan), whose work on Japanese
science fiction has won many awards; Kotani Mari (Keio University, Japan, and the
Japan Association of Feminist Science Fiction & Fantasy), who will provide an
important comparative dimension to our first and second projects; and Ishikawa
Takashi, one of the most influential and formative science fiction writers in postwar
Japan.
The first and second projects will continue to draw on contacts established
earlier during the “Cyberspace Salvations” project with scholars, science fiction
writers and digital designers on the United States West Coast, and especially the
dialogue started during a public lecture series co-organized with XS4all and the Waag
Society in the Spring of 2007 with Bruce Sterling (SF writer and design guru), Rudy
Rucker (SF writer and mathematics professor), RU Sirius (founder of cyberjournal
Mondo 2000), Brenda Laurel (Virtual Worlds designers and feminist activist), Bruce
Damer (VR designer), Galen Brandt (cyber-artist) and the CONTACT consortium (an
organisation of digital designers, science fiction writers and anthropologists). For the
third project, we are happy to confirm our collaboration with Prof. dr. Shamsul AB,
Director of the Institute for Ethnic Studies (KITA) at the National University of
Malaysia (UKM). We also build on well-developed research relationships with the
Universitas Gadjah Madah in Yogyakarta, especially through Prof. Laksono (Vicedirector of the Centre for Asian and Pacific Studies) and other members of the
Department of Anthropology.
Finally, we will work with North American anthropologists studying science
fiction: we have been invited by Prof. Debbora Battaglia (Mount Holyoke College,
USA; see Battaglia 2005) to collaborate after she was favorably impressed by an
earlier version of this proposal as a referee; and have established relationships with
Prof. Susan Harding (UC Santa Barbara, USA) during a visit to the Netherlands. We
regret that an initial plan to develop a branch of our research in relation to digital
development in Africa has as yet failed to materialize sufficiently, but will continue to
strive towards this, among others through the international research group on mobile
telephony led by Prof. Mirjam de Bruijn at the African Studies Centre in Leiden.
13. Work programme
For work elements, see the budget (below).
2010: Appoint AIOs and post-doc; conduct several internal workshops under the
guidance of the principal researchers to ensure coherence and direction of various
projects; create website for the project.
2011: Main period for the collection of research data in all three projects.
2012: Post-doc completes project and final publication; (partial) secondment of
principal researcher to finalize research and disseminate results of the first project;
pilot meeting with several international contacts, from Japan and Southeast Asia in
particular.
2013: AIO completes project and final publication; (partial) secondment of principal
researcher to disseminate results of the first project, and to produce a summative
report on the project in collaboration with the co-applicant; first international
conference with the international colleagues mentioned above; collaboration with
colleagues from Museums on exhibition plans.
2014: Second international conference with international colleagues, leading to a joint
publication edited by the applicants; museum exhibition.
14. Planned deliverables and knowledge dissemination
(Output of Goto-Jones and the VICI project is discussed in that proposal.)
• Pels: several articles in international social science and humanities journals;
(Co-)edited book with international contributors as the summative product
(based on two conferences to be held in Leiden).
• All: Museum exhibition on “Images of the Future” (based on research in the
project, but funded by one or several museums); possibly coupled to a series
of public lectures.
•
•
•
Barendregt: several articles in international social science and humanities
journals
Zandbergen: monograph
AIO: PhD
15. Brief curriculum vitae of the main applicant
2003-now
Professor in the anthropology and sociology of sub-Saharan
Africa, Leiden University
Jan-May 2001 Visiting professor, Institute for Global Studies, University of
Minnesota.
Oct. 1998
Visiting researcher, Program of African Studies, Northwestern
University, Evanston, USA.
Oct. 1997
Visiting researcher, Zentrum Moderner Orient, Humboldt Universität,
Berlin.
1995-2003
Lecturer, Research Centre Religion and Society, University of
Amsterdam
Sep-Dec 1995 Netherlands Visiting Professor, International Institute and
Anthropology Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.
1993-1999
2004 - now
2008
1998-2001
2003-2007
Jan 2007 -
Awarded four postdoctoral grants from NWO and IIAS
Research project grant (∈ 450,000) for “Cyberspace Salvations:
Computer Technology, Simulation, and Modern Gnosis”, Netherlands
Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO, file no. 252-25-050; main
applicant and project leader).
Two successful PhD grants from NWO.
Advisory Editor, Current Anthropology.
Editor-in-chief, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale (journal of
the European Association of Social Anthropologists).
Associate Editor, Encyclopedia of Cultural and Social Anthropology
(ed. A. Barnard & J. Spencer; Routledge).
Co-supervised three successfully defended PhD-dissertations since 2003; two
defenses to follow in 2009. Supervisor of seven more PhD-projects since 2004.
16. Relevant Literature
Chris Goto-Jones:
2005
Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and CoProsperity. London: Routledge (Leiden Series in Modern East Asia).
2005
Transcending Boundaries: Nishida Kitarô, K’ang Yu-wei and the
Politics of Unity, Modern Asian Studies 39: 4.
2005
On the Location of Japanese Philosophy: If the past is a different
country, are different countries in the past? Daiwa Foundation Prize
Lecture, Daiwa Foundation, London, October 2003. Revised and
expanded as ‘If the Past is a Different Country, are Different Countries
in the Past? On the Place of the Non-European in the History of
Philosophy,’ Philosophy 80: 311.
2007
2008
Peter Pels:
2002
2003
2008
2008
2009
The Kyoto School and the History of Political Philosophy:
Reconsidering the Methodological Dominance of the Cambridge
School, in C.S. Goto-Jones (ed.) Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as
Philosophy. London: Routledge.
Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
The Confessional Ethic and the Spirits of the Screen. Reflections on
the Modern Fear of Alienation, Etnofoor 15 (1/2): 90-118.
Introduction: Magic and Modernity, in B. Meyer & P. Pels (eds.)
Magic and Modernity. Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
(with Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman) Cybergnosis. Technology,
Religion and the Secular, in Hent de Vries (ed.) Why ‘Religion’? New
York: Fordham University Press.
(with Peter Geschiere and Birgit Meyer) Introduction, in P. Geschiere,
B. Meyer & P. Pels (eds.) Readings in Modernity in Africa, 1-7.
Oxford/Bloomington: James Currey/Indiana University Press.
Amazing Stories: How Science Fiction Sacralized the Secular, in J.
Stolow (ed.) Deus in Machina. Religion and Technology. New York:
Fordham University Press (in press).
Key Publications:
Barbrook, Richard (2007) Imaginary Futures. From Thinking Machines to the Global
Village. London/Ann Arbor: Pluto Press.
Cowen, M.P. & R.W. Shenton (1996) Doctrines of Development. London and New
York: Routledge.
Ferguson, J. (1999) Expectations of Modernity. Myths and Meanings of Modernity on
the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Iwabuchi, Koichi (2002), Recentering Globalization: Popular culture and Japanese
transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Jameson, Fredric (2005) Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire called Utopia and
other Science Fictions. London: Verso.
Koselleck, Reinhart (2004) Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Rosenberg, Daniel & Susan Harding (eds. 2005) Histories of the Future.
Durham/London: Duke University Press.
TATSUMI Takayuki (2006), Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk
Japan and Avant-Pop America. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
17. Summary for non-specialists (in Dutch)
Zo vaak als mensen hun activiteiten in het heden afstemmen op een bepaalde visie op
de toekomst, zo zelden onderzoeken wij de geschiedenis van de verschillende vormen
van de toekomst die verschillende mensen in verschillende delen van de wereld
hanteren. Dit onderzoeksproject stelt een dergelijk vergelijkend onderzoek voor op
basis van de wijze waarop mensen in de Verenigde Staten, Nederland, Japan en
Maleisië hun toekomstbeelden hebben veranderd in reactie op de opkomst van
digitale technologie, zoals uitgedrukt in science fiction literatuur en in het
ontwikkelingsdenken. Dergelijke beelden bepalen niet alleen beleid, maar ook
fantasieën “van onderop”, en het culturele erfgoed van verschillende delen van de
wereld maakt dat deze vormen van de toekomst vaak radicaal van elkaar verschillen.
Culturele globalisering leidt er echter ook toe dat een nieuwe technologische toekomst
vaak wordt gezien als iets dat van “elders” komt: in ontwikkelingsbeleid, van andere
landen, en in science fiction soms ook van buiten de aarde. Een beter begrip van de
samenkomst van (verschillende) toekomstvisies en verwachtingen in verschillende,
populaire zowel als beleidsgerichte media zou zowel in de wetenschap als in de
praktijk moeten leiden tot een bewuster omgang met de geschiedenis van onze
verwachtingen voor een betere toekomst, een gerichter keuze voor alternatieven, en
een realistischer inschatting van de (on)macht van technologische ingrepen om
verandering teweeg te brengen.
18. Research budget
200y
200y+1
200y+2
200y+3
200y+4
TOTAL
Post-doc (32
months)
62,8
64,7
44,4
PhD student 1
(Promovendus)
Replacement
40,1
48,7
52,2
56,6
197,6
12,5
12,5
25,0
Staff costs:
employees Dutch
institutions(in
k€)
171,9
Staff costs:
researchers from
developing
countries
0,0
PhD -Months in
Netherlands
PhD -Months in DC
0,0
Post doc
0,0
- Months in
Netherlands
0,0
0,0
0,0
Post doc - Months
in DC
Replacement
0,0
0,0
Non staff costs:
(k€)
Benchfee
Travel and
subsistence
Popular/societal
knowledge
dissemination
10,0
4,5
10,0
4,5
4,5
2,0
15,5
0,0
Internationalization
5,0
12,5
12,5
30,0
118,6
83,6
12,5
450,0
Other (specify!)
TOTAL
0
117,4
117,9