As an anthropologist, Victor Buchli has one foot in the Neolithic past and another in the space-faring future. A professor of material culture at University College London, his research has taken him from excavations of the New Stone Age site at Çatalhöyük, Turkey to studies of the modern suburbs of London to examinations of life on — and in service to — the International Space Station.

It is in that later role, as principal investigator for a European Research Council-funded research project on the “Ethnography of an Extraterrestrial Society,” that he visits the Social Science Bites podcast. He details for interviewer David Edmonds some of the things his team has learned from studying the teams — both in space but more so those on Earth — supporting the International Space Station.

Buchli describes, for example, the “overview effect.” The occurs when which people seeing the Earth without the dotted lines and map coordinates that usually color their perceptions. “When you look down,” he explains, “you don’t see borders, you just see the earth in its totality, in a sense that produces a new kind of universalism.”

He also reviews his own work on material culture, specifically examining how microgravity affects the creation of things. “It is the case within the social sciences, and particularly within anthropology, that gravity is just assumed. And so here we have an environment where suddenly this one single factor that controls absolutely everything that we do as humans on Earth is basically factored out. So how does that change our understanding of these human activities, these sorts of human institutions?”

Buchli has written extensively on material culture, serving as managing editor of the Journal of Material Culture, founding and managing editor of Home Cultures, and editor of 2002’s The Material Culture Reader and the five-volume Material Culture: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences. Other books he’s written include 1995’s Interpreting Archaeology, 1999’s An Archaeology of Socialism, and 2001’s Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: Victor Buchli is an anthropologist at University College London. He’s been leading a five-year European Research Council project on an unusual topic. Victor Buckley, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Victor Buchli: Thank you for having me.

David Edmonds: You’re an anthropologist, and the caricature of an anthropologist is that they go to the other side of the world to observe some alien culture. You’ve taken that to an extreme. You’ve gone into space, as it were. Tell me what your project is.

Victor Buchli: Well, basically, this has been a five-year ethnography about life on the ISS, particularly in relation to the communities on Earth and on the ISS that relate to one another. And it’s been focusing on this relationship between Earth and low Earth orbit, where the ISS is located, to try to understand essentially how, essentially human habitations begin to sort of expand from its terrestrial point of origin into low earth orbit. Essentially, we as humans have been inhabiting low Earth orbit right now for the past 25 years continuously.

David Edmonds: So the ISS is the International Space Station. But it’s not the only space station up there at the moment.

Victor Buchli: That is correct. There is the Chinese station, the Tiangong station, which has been up there for a little while right now, maybe two or three years.

David Edmonds: And how many people have actually been on the space station?

Victor Buchli: As of this date, hard to say exactly. But I would say, you know, probably close to 300.

David Edmonds: And they spend several months there before they come back to Earth?

Victor Buchli: Yes. I mean, usually missions there last from, you know, about six months or so, or could be longer. It’s essentially the oldest continuously occupied habitat in space to date.

David Edmonds: What’s your data? How are you collecting your information?

Victor Buchli: Well, the data is quite varied, because essentially what we’re working with are the communities that interact with International Space Station. So in many respects, it’s very conventional ethnographic data. I’m working with communities on Earth that are participating in life on the ISS on a daily basis.

David Edmonds: These are people doing what exactly — the people on earth, what kind of tasks do they have?

Victor Buchli: Various individuals. I mean, we have one individual here who’s essentially been the embedded anthropologist in the flight director training program at ESA in terms of how flight directors are trained. We have another individual who’s working on the so-called overview effect, the idea that if you are in space and you look down onto the Earth from space, you will experience a transformation of consciousness that produces a new understanding of man’s relationship to the Earth.

David Edmonds: But there’s only about six or seven people on the International Space Station. How many people are servicing that tiny community from Earth?

Victor Buchli: That would be in the hundreds or even thousands. It’d be hard to sort of like specify, because we speak about the various mission controls, Mission controls in Russia, mission controls in Europe, mission controls in the United States, and also support staff. It’s quite a large community of people who are in constant contact.

David Edmonds: Give us an idea of the variety of tasks that they have.

Victor Buchli: Everything from, you know, the launch site centers, where, essentially, you’re preparing for the launches, where you’re also training the astronauts, where you’re also sort of creating the experiments and loading the experiments on the International Space Station. How, in a sense, you monitor those experiments and those activities with the ground control and all the various backup support and research facilities that contribute to that. It’s an enormous operation, and it’s many hundreds of people.

David Edmonds: So we’ll talk about those people in a moment. Let’s first start with those few individuals who are on the space station. You’re an anthropologist — you’re interested in what kinds of things?

Victor Buchli: Well, we’re particularly interested in the relationship between the activities in the natural space station and activities on Earth, because it’s impossible for us to go up as anthropologists. It’s also very, very difficult for us to conduct interviews on the International Space Station, because astronauts’ time is very expensive and very much protected. So what we can do is actually work with the people who are engaging with them on Earth.

David Edmonds: They obviously live very isolated lives. They’re also living lives without gravity. What’s interesting about their existence?

Victor Buchli: Well, for us as anthropologists, what’s interesting is how it is we as humans have started to basically live in an environment where there is no gravity, and how the absence of gravity affects our understanding of various human institutions and human social relations. And more importantly, how the absence of gravity helps us understand our relationship to the environment, our modes of communication, our understanding of the materiality, but also our understanding of questions of sovereignty, religiosity and the like. A number of the sort of the key issues within the social sciences basically are questioned under the conditions of microgravity. It is the case within the social sciences, and particularly within anthropology, that gravity is just assumed. And so here we have an environment where suddenly this one single factor that controls absolutely everything that we do as humans on Earth is basically factored out. So how does that change our understanding of these human activities, these sorts of human institutions?

In my particular area, I’m focusing on the new kinds of materials that are produced in microgravity, and what happens when gravity is removed and other forces come into play when you start manufacturing new materials. And so that has a b