Anthropology Through Speculative Fiction
MIT OpenCourseWare offers the materials for this anthropology seminar that reads speculative fiction as a way into core anthropological questions. Print stories, films, and other media serve as case studies for topics including first contact, gift exchange, gender and kinship, cultural relativism, religion, race and embodiment, politics and war, and healing and consciousness. The course asks what counts as alien, what counts as human, and whether speculative fiction could exist without anthropology's framing of otherness. Materials include the syllabus, reading and viewing lists pairing ethnographic texts with novels and films, and assignment prompts used in the MIT classroom. As with other OCW offerings, the content is free to use for self-study; there is no instructor interaction or certificate, since this is a published record of an MIT course rather than a live class.