Dissertation Title: Designing the CthulhuCosmos: Toward a Speculative Cosmo-politics of Indigenous Epistemology in Space
Abstract:
For millennia, civilisations scattered across the earth have craned their necks up towards the cosmos to seed their origin mythologies into the blanket expanse of deep space. However the imbrication of imperial conquest, colonial expansion, and militarized competition transformed humanity’s seedbed of cosmology into a project of material incursion, casting outer space as a frontier primed for possession, surveillance, and extraction. The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons, but the horizon is no monolithic constant. It remains a jagged line as it wrestles with issues of democratisation of space exploration and access. For some countries and corporations the apparent ‘frontier’ of space is a territory familiar with significant resources and infrastructure to have become veteran voyagers; others take nascent steps, developing strategies to strengthen their space programs; and yet others remain feet planted firmly, gazing at the horizon that never moved, exploring the deep expanse of the cosmos through myth, language, ritual and dreamscape.
Indigenous people across the globe have remained explorers of this enigma through rich cultural cosmologies evolved over millennia of observation. Their knowledge represents diverse epistemologies that offer insight into radically different relationships that humans have evolved about space and its exploration, and is a fount of intangible heritage that rarely makes an appearance in the mainstream discourses. As humans become prominent actors in extraterrestrial realms, it stirs in its wake complex questions of identity politics. Whose identity becomes a blueprint for ‘humanity’? What cultures are represented and how? What cultures and narratives are silenced by deliberate obscuration or worse by ignorance and apathy? These questions emerge as a dialectic to the monolithic identities and monocultures of mind that underpin mainstream space discourse. Nested within storied cultural heritages are alternative cosmologies, attuned to other dimensions and extended voyages that offer the possibility of thickening the discourse towards a more inclusive mythology for future space exploration.
The argument then is to transition from a colonial aerospace to a decolonial cosmos. This dissertation proposes the CthulhuCosmos as a site of possibility, a speculative cosmopolitics inspired by Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, calling for tentacular forms of kinship that thread together the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial. Drawing from field-based engagements with the Likan Antai of the Atacama Desert, the Changpa of Ladakh, the Khasi of Meghalaya, the Maasai of Kenya, and other communities and sites in Central Asia, the dissertation extends epistemic hospitality to these cosmological traditions to enter into dialogue with modern techno-imaginaries in the realm of space exploration. Rather than drawing boundaries across disciplines, this dissertation moves nomadically through Anthropology, Critical Indigenous Studies, STS, Posthumanism, Animism, Conservation, Law, Design, and Art, it develops a methodology that resists enclosure. It proposes threshold craft as a mode of inquiry: a way of dwelling in the liminal, working from the edges, crafting encounter between the algorithmic and the ancestral, the sacred and the speculative.
Committee members:
Dr. Danielle Wood
Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Program in Media Arts and Sciences
Assistant Professor (Joint) of Aeronautics and Astronautics Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Zach Lieberman
Adjunct Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Program in Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. Amareswar Galla
Director of the International Institute of the Inclusive Museum
UNESCO Chair on Inclusive Museums and Sustainable Heritage Development at Anant National University, India