Traditionally, anthropology has usually been more concerned with the past than the future. Early evolutionist anthropologists like Tylor and Morgan set about to study the "savage" or "primitive" races because it was assumed they were living "remnants" of earlier evolutionary phases of humanity, "Stone Age Man." Even after the post-WWII "reconstruction" of anthropology, many anthropologists continued to study "primitive" or "premodern" peoples based on the assumption that modernity and global Westernization were "swallowing" them up. Some felt it was important to document these cultures (and most especially, assemble their artefacts in museums), because technology and modernization were causing them to disappear.

Today, of course, this old-style evolutionism is beginning to fade from anthropological discourse (although sociobiological-Darwinian-cultural 'adaptive' evolutionism is making a comeback), and so in our postmodern era are the notions of "modernization theory" - that technological and social changes somehow proceed according to some unitary timetable in every society. Indeed, cultural contact and diffusion is proving to be a two-way street. The modern has embraced the primitive ("gone native"), even as the primitive is 'modernized.' Anthropologists are at least now fully studying people right here in the present, including "advanced" high-tech societies, without naive assumptions about linear, continuous, evolutionary change.

There have long been futurist organizations, predicting what technological changes will occur in the immediate or remote future. Ironically, most of these organizations make extrapolations or predictions based on simple quantitative data. They lack an understanding of the qualitative technological and social changes humanity has undergone in the past (archaeologists being in a position to try and describe them), and their various levels of interrelation and feedback. Most of them simply fail to account for culture in their analyses. AnthroFuturism seeks to describe the cultural results of various impending technological changes; but unlike other forms of futurism, it does not see these changes as necessarily immanent, unavoidable, or desirable. AnthroFuturism takes the insights of anthropology and applies them to the "what if" scenarios of standard futurism.

Inevitably, AnthroFuturism seeks to avoid the mood of the "Futurist moment" of the early (and perhaps late) 20th century. The Futurist movement was primarily aesthetic, fetishizing power, speed, and change. "Progress" became a goal in itself. Even today, many practicioners of 'small f' futurism, such as Alvin Toffler, John Naisbitt, and George Gilder, display a naive sort of technophilism, technofetishism, and basic technoutopianism. For most of them, culture (civilization, technology, capitalism) has swallowed nature (the environment, the natural body, organic life itself), but it was inevitable anyway from the get-go; of course, anthropologists do know better, realizing you cannot have something cooked without something raw to start with. Anthropologists know that technology is not a "thing-in-itself," but is culturally situated and even encapsulates in its designs various cultural norms and values.

There are several technological scenarios where some AnthroFuturists are finally beginning to start examining what they mean for the future of human life and culture. Not because they are inevitable in themselves; but for some technologists, because these can be done, they should be. For some people, this is useless speculation, based on nonsensical presumptions. That is too bad, because neither Tylor or Morgan ever sat down to think about how the automobile and the railroad were changing their own civilization, leaving us to pick up the pieces afterwards. Clearly, the pace of technological change is increasing, for better or for ill; and to prevent one of the most important scholarly disciplines, anthropology, from examining impending changes would be unfortunate.

Human-Machine Interaction and Integration

Donna Harraway and others have begun to look at this problematic in terms of "cyborg anthropology." For Harraway, this is mostly a metaphor, a way of refuting the essentialisms and nature fetishism of ecofeminism, and of presenting women as cyborgs, hybrid assemblages of both nature and artifice. For me, "cyborg anthropology" can perhaps be taken more literally. Technology is invading the human body already - through prosthetics, implants, and artificial organs (and also through other various modifications - steroids, "pumping iron," plastic surgery, etc.); and in the future, it may be the case that all of us become cyborgs to some extent, replacing what nature gave us with technological improvements. In science fiction, the cyborg is basically the nexus point where more of the person is technological than "natural" - such as the Six Million Dollar man.

At the same point as humans are becoming cyborgs, AI researchers are attempting to make machines more like humans, through natural language and symbolic manipulation (5th Generation) systems, neural networks and parallel processing and "fuzzy logic" which emulate the human brain, sensory capabilities like voice recognition and visual processing, and even artificial life algorithms which emulate biological evolution. Most AI researchers think that the machine which can pass the Turing Test (e.g. "pass" as human) is not so far away. If that robot was equipped with a passably human-looking exterior, it might become the "android" of science fiction - the machine which passes for human. The anthropologist Arthur Harkins has suggested he might be the first to marry such a robot.

Meanwhile, as the moment of the appearance of true cyborgs and androids approaches, much research continues on the "interface" between humans and computers. There have been various breakthroughs in this field already the most important one being the emulation of the iconic way in which people relate to the world. Various "teleoperation" systems (remote human control) for robots are being developed right now. But the "cutting edge" appears to be a direct neural interface between wetware and software - a way of converting neural impulses to switching electronic logic gates. The Japanese are working on this already, and are rather unashamedly calling it "machine telepathy." Ultimately, of course, this possibility leads to cyborgs of a most unimaginable kind - perhaps a human brain at the "helm" of an aircraft carrier, for example.

Anthropology is in an unusual position to deal with this possibility. Indeed, the theory of cybernetics (Nobert Weiner's concept of communication and control in all kinds of systems, mechanical or otherwise) has already had a large impact on anthropology, (even on early pioneers such as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson) through systems theory, etc. Dialectical and structuralist anthropologists see this problematic as revealing the key human dilemma - culture and nature, the raw and the cooked. As Harraway notes, we have been cyborgs for a long time, using all kinds of artificial mechanisms and instruments to "lift ourselves out" of nature, beginning perhaps with the invention of language, tools, and fire. Certainly, the modfication of the body (through scarification, marking, elongation of body parts, manipulation of orifices, stigmata, etc.) through culture has had a long history.

It's hard to say what the results of all this will be. Can anthropologists do an ethnography of cyborgs, androids, and other "posthumans" in the same ways as they have previously? As we remake machines in our image, and we also become more and more like machines, where will the meeting point be? In what ways can AIs or robots be accomodated culturally and socially: will they be granted "human rights"? Why are some "extropians" predicting that our "mind children" (robots) will eventually replace our "loin children" (biological humans)? Should it be taken for granted that many of the things we consider part of "humanness" (emotions, values, aesthetics, commitments, sociability) will be possessed by our creations? Is the mind a computer because it can be "interfaced" with one? These issues

are not simple, and

the reasons why some people have already found simple answers for some of them tells us a great deal about our culture.

Back in the mid 70s, when the space program at least still appeared to be going full steam, and "New Wave" SF had still not turned from outer to inner space completely, and Gerard K. O'Neill and his L5 Society were the hottest thing since sliced bread, this was a hot topic for some anthrofuturists. In particular, one volume assembled by Magoroh Maruyama, Arthur Harkins, and Sol Tax in 1975, Cultures Beyond the Earth, openly brought together a range of thinkers to address "the role of anthropology in outer space." Well, this is a case where the optimism of futurism proved ill-founded. A quarter century later, we still don't have a moon base, a permanent manned space station, or any serious manned space programme to any of the planets in the solar system, let alone space colonies. And SETI still hasn't heard from ET yet, so this ultimate "culture shock" remains postponed.

Nonetheless, the questions raised in this volume remain somewhat valid, even if the immanence of their predictions needs to be revised. Interestingly, it is apparent that many of the space colonization proselytizers of the late 70s- "Jerry" Brown, Timothy Leary, O'Neill, and so on - saw it as simply the "Next Frontier" to be conquered by America, since the western frontier had closed a century ago. They saw space colonies as akin to the early utopian experiments created by the first "pilgrims" coming to America - a place to create new social formations and cultural experiments in self-sustenance (for which the Biosphereans are a practice run) that might not be realizable on an increasingly overcrowded Earth. The technoutopians assumed that even if we were terminally screwing up the "life support" system of planet Earth, we could just terraform Mars or Venus and start all over again from scratch.

For some, settling in space was not just intellectual exploration. It was Manifest Destiny all over again. And if we didn't do it, people with the wrong values, like the Chinese or Russians, might beat us to it. Of course, some space zealots simply saw the matter in more economic-utilitarian terms. Manufacturing in zero-G, rare minerals mined from the asteroid belt, and a lunar launching pad could generate untold wealth for our little third planet from the sun. And the "heads" like Leary proclaimed this was evolutionary necessity - that once we got out of the gravity well of the planet and soaked up a few cosmic rays, new biological and mental possibilities might be realizable. Our genes were telling us: go spaceward, young man! While much of the planet remained to be explored - parts of the interior of continents, the inner Earth, and the bottom of the ocean space was basically (for all relevant purposes) infinite. I mean, who knew just what the heck we might find out there? Certainly seeing the Earth from space was a potent mythic archetype, as Joseph Cambell suggested.

Today, due to various technological and human failures on the part of NASA, plus the inevitable budget-consciousness of today's Congress. the "high frontier" has been sharply put on hold. Many people still repeat what Joan Baez said back in 1969 - why go to the Moon when there's so much we still need to fix right here on Earth? Rightly so, some people said it was the ultimate escapism. It was bad enough to be polluting Earth into oblivion; but now we were proliferating space junk, too. Space still holds its fascination, but most astronomers now seemed convinced that it's probably easier (and cheaper) to let our machines do the exploring for us (although the failure of Mars Observer is now challenging even this newly-arrived consensus.) There are still space fanatics, trying to make the same old arguments for space exploration and colonization. One of the oldest - that we might find out that "We are Not Alone" - also has recently been on the ropes, with the axing of the SETI program.

It's curious that humanity does not want to be alone - we do share the planet with lots of other life forms, but heck they just won't talk to us

(except for a few dolphins and chimps), and they just aren't like us. Perhaps where anthropology can make its greatest contribution is to exobiology. In some ways, meeting the first extraterrestrial race will be sort of "1492 to the nth degree." Columbus met people who were culturally different, but they were not physically Other except for some minor differences. Despite the fantasies of various Star Wars and Treks, it is not likely that extraterrestrial life will resemble us (e.g. be bipedal humanoids) to any extent. Lots of people are debating about what impacts meeting another 'advanced' technological race might have, on such things as religion and the social order. It might well have a large impact, and anthropologists who have examined culture contact and collision in previous settings should certainly contribute to those pregnostications.

In that curiously technoutopian phase of the 70s, the enthusiasm of the L5 Society was perhaps only outdone by the even more zealous Immortalist Foundation, who proclaimed that through cryonics, organ replacement, cloning, and so on, we could conquer death itself. (Maybe even our minds could be downloaded into practically immortal robot bodies!) Well, that is certainly optimism of the greatest extent, and despite the fact that death (and what follows) remains one of the premier obsessions of most human cultures, few people have ever thought it was anything other than (like taxes) rather inevitable. Taoists sought various elixirs of Immortality, and some Westerners thought there might be fountains or magic isles where it could be obtained, but most cultures have generally resolved themselves to the finitude of human existence, even if they postulate some sort of survival (the soul or spirit) of the person following death.

Nonetheless, there is certainly a possibility that life might be extended, even if not indefinitely, even within the near future. Lifespans have already been growing, at least in this century, although this has caused curious byproducts (such as the prevalence of the chronic diseases associated with aging.) The average Westerner can probably expect to live thirty years longer (on average) than his great-great-grandparents, although whether this is due mostly to sanitation and hygiene, medicine, economic and technological prosperity, or diet, has been debated. Research on aging itself is proceeding, with some researchers boldly declaring that the standard "setting" for the human winding down of the "biological clock" ("three score and ten") is not fixed, and that perhaps aging can be slowed or partially reversed. Various drugs are being developed to combat the detrioration of the brain, heart, and other organs with age ("wear and tear.")

Efforts at life extension, like space colonization, meet variously with awe and anticipation, shock and horror, or skeptical indifference. The optimists think that extending the human lifespan means a new lease on human creativity - what if Einstein or Leonardo de Vinci had been given 50 more years? The pessimists suggest that it means a horrible surge in the overpopulation problem, as simple mortality ("death by natural causes") will no longer be a check on human numbers. And the skeptics simply say, as they often do, "not possible. Why worry about it?" In the meantime, some extrapolations on future life extension can be made just based on the lifespan changes already realized in this century. Already, the increasing lifespan has certainly caused changes in family structure and health patterns.

Life extension is likely to promote greater generational clashes over the distribution of societal resources. Certainly, no magic elixir will ever fully prevent the inevitable deterioration of mind and body that comes with advanced age. Therefore, the young will increasingly protest the social resources allocated to their great-grandparents who are not as "productive" as they. Even more curious scenarios may result from current fertility techniques permitting women to have children at ages normally thought long past child-bearing age (the mid 40s, originally thought to be the limit of this particular "biological clock," have already been extended into the

50s.) People in retirement age may be raising toddlers. Debates over already contentious areas such as these new fertility techniques, population growth, abortion, birth control, euthanasia, and foetal "rescue" techniques, are likely to accelerate under these conditions.

Likewise, in addition to an "information" and "wealth" gap between the developed/first and underdeveloped/third & fourth world, the "life gap" may become even more of a point of contention. As Westerners live into their lively 100s, consuming resources all along the way, Africans and others watching their children die in infancy, or live to the hoary age of 35 at best due to the lack of available food, medicine, and other parts of 'infrastructure,' might be decidedly upset. We may well see a debate about whether it is right for people to extend their lifespan beyond its natural course. Of course, such a quest has always marked the preoccupations of the wealthy and nobility since time immemorial, with their continual search for unguents, spas, and mud baths for preserving a fading youth. They are likely to be the first ones to fund these new techniques, even if the public as a whole chooses not to.

Although everybody was after "consciousness" in the sixties, they were pursuing it in a rather "low tech" way, although the roots of more recent brain/mind research lay in some of their activities. The tools of choice in 1965 were psychedelics (natural plant hallucinogens, but more often their derivatives, such as LSD), encounter groups ("consciousness raising"), various forms of mysticism (Tantric sex, Crowleyan magick, Castenadan shamanism, meditation, Yoga, and even technologically-aided biofeedback), and the pulsing strobe lights and sound of rock music. In 1995, those tools are likely to be "entheogens" (some natural, most synthetically created in a laboratory, such as katamine, MDMA, and the nootropics or "smart drugs"), "mind machines" (various devices said to modulate brain frequencies through various stimuli and induce altered states <ASCs>), "trippy" synaesthetic computer graphics and techno sound derived from fractals and various mathematical models of human perception, and of course VR (virtual reality), "the new LSD."

Books like Would the Buddha Wear a Walkman suggest that maybe it's not so bad to use technology to "amplify" consciousness and explore different realities. Today's New Agerspeak is filled with metaphors derived from technobabble and information-processing jargon - "spirit mediumization" has become "channeling," and according to Terrence McKenna and Jose Arguelles, the I Ching and the Mayan calendar are the "master blueprint" for the fractal structure of time and DNA. The key is to "tune in" to the galactic beam we're entering and get with "the Harmonic Convergence." Although technological metaphors have been used to deal with the mystical since the 19th century - telepathy was often called "biological radio" - they are being used with increasing frequency today. Today's "zippies" prefer scientific mavericks like Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Richard Dawkins to the mystical "gurus" and "swamis" of the earlier hippies - but not much else has changed.

Anyway, consciousness is once again the talk of the town, and cognitive scientists using computer-AI models are claiming to have cornered it, despite the occasional naysayers like John Searle, Francisco Varela, or Roger Penrose. Of course, the metaphor of the "biocomputer" was used in its own way by earlier less mechanistically minded scientists, such as John Lilly; people who suggested that the key to human wetware was that it not only could be programmed by various 'memes' but also could be meta programmed. Anyway, in most cog sci circles (and most of academia, having acceded to them), it's taken for granted that dualism is dead; mind is software (a program) running on this hardware (computer) called the brain, end of story. All that's left is to fill in the details. What's interesting is that many of this mind-brain reductionism paradigm are also using computer-based models of quantum gravity, "neural cytoskeletons," or chaos theory to challenge it.

It's not clear how far the reductionism paradigm will go. But what if it does end up a possibility that certain things we take as unalterable - our memories, our personalities, our own behavior (what we like to call free will ) - are subject to control or modification through chemicals, electrical stimulation of brain centers, various 'consciousness tools', or "biochip" implants? The possibility of mind/brain modification does not annul other paradigms or models of consciousness, but it certainly partially lends a lot of weight to reductionism; and in any case, since some success in this area has already been achieved (Prozac, Penfield's and Delgado's experiments, lobotomy and other brain surgeries, etc.), it is a matter for some considerable concern. Mainly, it leaves this problem of culture up for grabs. Most of us get "coded" with our culture's precepts through simple Skinnerian techniques - behavioral reinforcement through "parental units."

But what if you can "download" other norms - maybe an entirely different culture - into your brain? If there is a connection between language and culture (the Whorf-Lee hypothesis), what will cultures become when people can easily implant "chips" for Chinese, Swahili, or Urdu? Certainly cultures exist through the worldviews they "program" into most of their members. But one of the "breakthroughs" presented by the first "consciousness explorers" of the sixties was to get to the central problematic of cultural relativism in anthropology - the arbitrariness of one's own existing worldview. What happens when everyone gets to design their own world(view) through virtual reality? Will culture disappear? When multimedia lets us "shop" through the aesthetic products of a thousand disparate cultures - the music of Bushmen, the art of Aborigines - will "authentic" culture really be meaningful anymore? If culture is somewhere "in there" in the brain - a hypothesis which is, like most, probably only partially true - it may be as fair game for the brain/mind modifiers as anyone else.

If brain/mind research is a threat to existing ideas of language and culture, the promise/peril of biotech may strike at the third "tier" of Boasian anthropology - race and/or "ethnicity." Of course, it's been a truism of the discipline since Boas to suggest that human physiognomy is rather plastic, and there are realms of intermediacy between the genotype and phenotype, so "race" is not a meaningful concept in scientific, biological terms, but as we all learn in our introductory anthro courses, it is a "folk concept," a cultural category that most of us utilize in dealing with our fellow humans nonetheless. Though anthropology introduced culture to try and push away biological explanations for human behavior and difference, sociobiology is certainly trying to bring it back in, leading to accusations of bringing back eugenics and scientific racism into the field as well.

It is clear to most people that people are physiologically different. Clearly, there are people who differ from us (on average) in skin coloration, facial features, hirsuteness, stature, or distribution of body fat. It is based on attempts to taxonomize such differences that we arrive at "race." In the so-called "scientific" anthropology of the 1920s, most had arrived at the idea that there were basically three "races" - a black one ('Negroid') that had originated in Africa, a yellow one ('Mongoloid') originating from the Orient, and a white one ('Caucasian') originating from around the Caucasus mountains of Central Asia. Everybody on the planet olive-skinned Semitics, red-skinned Amerindians, and various "brown" Pacific Islanders - came from mixes of these three strains. Here I will not go into the whole issue of the appropriateness of this taxonomy for "scientific" physical anthropology.

What I do want to suggest is that if the "coding" for these physical traits lies in the genotype - and the investigators of the Human Genome Diversity Project are examining their distribution, prevalence, and origins - they

are just as subject as any hereditary defect or disease to alteration through genetic engineering. People's children need not have to carry any of the physical traits they themselves have; black wooly-heads can give birth to blonde blue-eyeds, and fiery red-heads can give birth to slant-eyed yellow-skins. "Designer genes" hold out the possibility that "race" as we know it will become meaningless, mainly because people no longer need to give birth to children that in any way physically resemble them. Indeed, entirely novel traits (a prehensile tail, for example, or gills) could be bestowed on human beings.

Certainly, there has been plenty of talk about the dangers of biotech, led by alarmists such as Jeremy Rifkin. Most of it has revolved around the inappropriateness of genetically-modified food for consumption, the introduction of genetically-altered organisms wildly modifying existing ecosystems, or the danger of releasing a genetically-modified bacterium, virus, or other germ. Since most genetic procedures revolving humans have (so far) involved only the elimination of the "defective" genes which lead to hereditary diseases such as Down's Syndrome, debate has not really focused on genetic modification of humans beyond the appropriateness of these "cures." This is mainly because most the "coding" for various physical traits in the genome is still being mapped (although certainly melanin content can be altered at the somatic level, and eye color and other traits can be modified through various artificial means such as plastic surgery and contact lenses.)

Since most people are fairly convinced (largely due to the persuasion of cultural anthropologists) that personality, intelligence, and behavior do not lie in the genome, most are not worried about applications of this kind. However, various "scientific" biotechnologists do not take this position, and look forward to where genes for criminality or deviance can be stamped out, and genes for intelligence and ability can be increased. The specter of eugenics and the quest for the "the master race" certainly lurk in these possibilities. More importantly, I want to return to what biotech means for race. It does seem to me that it means the elimination of race as a meaningful concept. Just because I have dark skin does not mean either of my parents did, if my melanin-genes can be "tweaked" at my request. Though most people would herald the "morphing" out of race (which in turn might lead to the lessening of racism, xenophobia, nationalism, ethnic hatred, etc.), one must wonder whether the human "race" is not losing something in sacrificing its own breed of "biodiversity."