Among Us: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Science Fiction Media

Abstract

Storytelling is an essential part of our experience as human beings. We turn to narrative to explain our own lives – casting ourselves as protagonists, others as secondary characters and antagonists, and the myriad of events that happen to us as a coherent, linear story. Fiction and metaphor are lenses for our collective imagination – a representation of how we see ourselves as a society, and how we see others outside of our culture. In the Western world, nowhere is this view more prominent than in the genre of science fiction. In the fictional interactions between humans and aliens – diplomacy, conflict, oppression, misunderstandings, and cultural sharing – we can see a reflection of our society’s values, its moral prescriptions, and its warnings for the future. Anthropologists, as experts on extracting cultural rules from observation, and picking up on cross-cultural misunderstandings, have long been aware of the human tendency to exaggerate difference between cultures in order to define them as distinct. Thus, an anthropological study of science fiction is crucial for understanding how a society defines itself. In this thesis, I undertake an analysis of the influential science fiction television serial, Star Trek. I seek to answer how the portrayal of specific alien societies in Star Trek inform and reflect the American society’s understanding of both itself and “the other”. Through film analysis and in creating a virtual ethnography, I suggest that Star Trek uses visual and textual symbolic choices to show a galactic and ever-changing society which tolerates a wide array of different cultures, but is still influenced heavily by Western ideals and stereotypes of “the other”. I focus on the interaction between human and alien characters, as well as looking into how they have changed throughout the serial. I discuss both the visual choices (made in the form of costume, props, and body language) and the dialogue (in the form of tropes, metaphors, and other symbolic language) in order to extract broader patterns in the subtext that suggest American and Western cultural rules and attitudes. I delve into historical patterns of colonialism within ethnographic and fictional writing in order to suggest influence on modern science fiction. Finally, I suggest that the way these fictional alien societies are portrayed shows how the (so-called) real-world society sees itself, and what it considers to be an innately “human” way to behave. Through this project, I hope to show how an anthropological analysis of science fiction gives us valuable information about the stories our Western society tells about itself and others, and the hopes and fears it projects toward the future.