E.T. Culture

Debbora Battaglia is Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of On the Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory, and Mortality in Sabarl Island Society and the editor of Rhetorics of Self-Making.

• Editors' Note Insiders’ Voices in Outerspaces / Debbora Battaglia Ufology as Anthropology: Race, Extraterrestrials, and the Occult / Christopher F. Roth Alien Tongues / David Samuels The License: Poetics, Power, and the Uncanny / Susan Lepselter “For Those Who Are Not Afraid of the Future”: Raelian Clonehood in the Public Sphere / Debbora Battaglia Intertextual Enterprises: Writing Alternative Places and Meanings in the Media Mixed Networks of Yugioh / Mizuko Ito Close Encounters of the Nth Kind: Becoming Sampled and the Mullis-ship Connection / Richard Doyle “Come on, people... we *are* the aliens. We seem to be suffering from Host-Planet Rejection Syndrome”: Liminal Illnesses, Structural Damnation, and Social Creativity / Joseph Dumit References Contributors Index

“E.T. Culture is a very strong theoretical intervention and a fascinating read. It is remarkable for its expansive, multiple-explanations approach. Each article makes a different, and each a compelling, argument for what UFOness is all about.”-Kathleen Stewart, author of A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America “Who would have guessed in this dark and fearful time that a collection of essays on aliens would offer so much hope? Debbora Battaglia and her contributors open up new spaces for thinking. They provide us with room to breathe. Approaching otherness and the uncanny not with anxiety but with optimism, her anthropology of visits invites us to make ourselves open to ambiguity, an invitation which, in an unfortunate age of absolutes, we would all do well to accept.”-Jodi Dean, author of Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace “[T]his work breaks new ground for anthropology by shedding light on an important aspect of our popular culture-one that is often overlooked in the literature of our discipline, despite its relevance to central themes like race, language, culture, power, politics, and religion.” - Sean P. O'Neill (American Anthropologist)