Space agencies and private companies around the world are taking various measures to tap into the new space economy. In Sweden, this is reflected in the construction of a spaceport for launching small satellites into Earth orbit. While these endeavors are sometimes justified by the potential of space infrastructure to address climate change, the Swedish case also highlights how space exploration, commercialization, and militarization can perpetuate colonial legacies. The Swedish rocket launch site and its impact area overlap with the reindeer herding territories of Indigenous communities whose members actively contest the initiative.

In this article, I focus on how the members of a Peruvian NGO – specializing in theimplementation of fog catchers – mobilized the notion of “the project” to pursuetheir goals. While the fog catchers were presented by the NGO workers as a watersupply system for vulnerable populations on the urban periphery, they were oftenredirected by their beneficiaries as tools for informal urbanization. The fog catcherscaptured not only fog, but also property ownership and state infrastructure, amongother things. Within this context, the NGO members created and sustained anecology of “non-projects” – an ever-proliferating number of projects that seemed toexist but actually did not. By describing how my interlocutors went about doing this,the article argues that ethnographers should attend to how contemporary influenceand ubiquity of the project form may reside not only in its role as an organizing force,but likewise in its aesthetics and status as a sign. From this perspective, a key aspectfor the study of projects is people’s capacity to mimic their form, exploit theiraesthetic appeal, and, in doing so, circumvent their structuring effects.

Neste artigo, foco em como os membros de uma ONG peruana – especializada naimplementação de captadores de neblina – mobilizaram a noção de “projeto” paraalcançar seus objetivos. Enquanto os captadores de neblina eram apresentados pelostrabalhadores da ONG como um sistema de abastecimento de água para populaçõesvulneráveis na periferia urbana, eles eram frequentemente redirecionados por seusbeneficiários como ferramentas de urbanização informal. Os captadores de neblinacapturavam não apenas neblina, mas também propriedade e infraestrutura estatal,entre outras coisas. Nesse contexto, os membros da ONG criaram e sustentaram umaecologia de “não-projetos” – um número sempre crescente de projetos que pareciamexistir, mas que na realidade não existiam. Ao descrever como meus interlocutoresrealizavam isso, o artigo argumenta que os etnógrafos devem prestar atenção a comoa influência e a ubiquidade contemporâneas da forma-projeto podem residir nãoapenas em seu papel como força organizadora, mas também em sua estética e seustatus como signo. Nessa perspectiva, um aspecto-chave para o estudo de projetos éa capacidade das pessoas de mimetizar sua forma, explorar seu apelo estético e,assim, contornar seus efeitos estruturantes.

En este artículo, me enfoco en cómo los miembros de una ONG peruana – especializadaen la implementación de atrapanieblas – movilizaron la noción de “el proyecto” paraperseguir sus objetivos. Mientras que los atrapanieblas eran presentados por lostrabajadores de la ONG como un sistema de suministro de agua para poblacionesvulnerables en la periferia urbana, a menudo eran redirigidos por sus beneficiarioscomo herramientas para la urbanización informal. Los atrapanieblas capturaban nosolo niebla, sino también propiedad e infraestructura estatal, entre otras cosas. Eneste contexto, los miembros de la ONG crearon y sostuvieron una ecología de “no-proyectos” – un número siempre creciente de proyectos que parecían existir pero que, en realidad, no existían. Al describir cómo mis interlocutores llevaban a cabo esto, elartículo argumenta que los etnógrafos deberían prestar atención a cómo la influencia yubicuidad contemporáneas de la forma-proyecto pueden residir no solo en su rol comofuerza organizadora, sino también en su estética y su estatus como signo. Desde estaperspectiva, un aspecto clave para el estudio de los proyectos es la capacidad de laspersonas para imitar su forma, explotar su atractivo estético y, al hacerlo, eludir susefectos estructurantes.

Contemporary social inquiry into outer space often focuses on the extraterrestrial’s embeddedness in earthbound categories, politics, and socio-material relations. Space—and whatever is done to, in, or with it—is a figure that cannot but have recourse to Earth-as-ground. While this focus productively highlights the cultural tropes and sociopolitical processes by which human engagements with space are inevitably informed, emergent extraplanetary relations demand that we also investigate how terrestrial processes are continuously being “un-Earthed” and become other to themselves. This article draws on three examples to showcase the significance of a focus on Earth’s extraterrestrial-likeness: first, the growing reliance of ground-based infrastructures on space infrastructures, which renders terrestrial sociality vulnerable to space weather; second, how mission scientists and engineers, when operating their rovers, need to adjust their routines and practices according to the non-coeval temporality of Mars; and third, recent findings that the impact of human activity on polar ice sheets reverberates through to the planet’s rotation and movement vis-à-vis the Sun. As moments of explicitation, the examples reveal that the distance between Earth and the extraterrestrial can suddenly contract and expand, thus encouraging an STS approach that is able to attend to the topological quality of cosmic relations.

The unequal ocean offers a timely analysis of the relationship between climate change and ocean ecologies. Based on ethnographic research and interviews conducted in Lima between 2012 and 2019, the book focuses on the urban coast of a city marked by deep-seated racialized and socio-economic inequalities – inequalities historically reinforced by the attempts of the city's elites to maintain social divisions amid a changing urban landscape. The book describes how these dynamics both shape and are intensified by contemporary environmental change, or as Viatori puts it, how ‘social and economic inequalities [are] bound up with natural systems in ways that put specific groups of people and the places they live or work in greater vulnerability’ (p. 11). The unequal ocean also examines how these asymmetries and histories of marginalization are rendered invisible through elite-driven racializing and classist representations of the ocean and the urban poor. As an alternative reading of ecological change, the book contributes to a broader anthropological effort to challenge such narratives through grounded ethnographic inquiry that highlights the sociopolitical aspects of climate and the environment. Viatori draws on interviews with surfers along Lima's Costa Verde, artisanal fishers in the coastal district of Chorrillos, and architects and city planners involved in coastal development. In addition, he incorporates archival research on the history of scientific research and regulatory measures concerning fisheries and marine species, as well as newspaper articles, television broadcasts, and social media posts. These materials are used to address four issues – coastal development, plastic pollution, extreme weather events, and overfishing – each of which is explored in a dedicated chapter.

Scholars have noted that the celebration of relationality in multispecies and posthumanist scholarship sometimes disregards how more-than-human entanglements entail various kinds of disjuncture. While such critiques tend to figure disconnection as external to relation, this essay suggests that disconnection and connection are constitutive of all relations in equal measure. To help, the author draws on two multispecies science fiction novels—Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky and Semiosis by Sue Burke—that complicate the stakes of more-than-human relationality not with recourse to its purported absence but rather by foregrounding its productive impossibility. By drawing on a conception of the Anthropocene as a contemporary form of entrapment par excellence, the essay cautions against idealized states of traplessness and posits disconnection as a precondition for the Anthropocene’s modulation.

This chapter draws a series of connections between anthropology and science fictional world-building to reflect on the possibilities of ethnographic enquiry into the extraterrestrial. More specifically, the chapter hones in on Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novella Elder Race, in which an anthropologist-protagonist on another planet is used to displace earthbound assumptions in a manner that is strikingly reminiscent of how anthropologists engage in frontal comparison through ethnographic immersion on Earth. As such, Elder Race serves to highlight the science fictional qualities of anthropology, and especially those evinced by topological approaches to socio-material relations developed in the anthropology of infrastructures. Whereas situating anthropos in space becomes a means to investigate and unsettle earthbound categories, the anthropology of infrastructures helps foreground cosmic relations by exploring how extraterrestrial processes are brought down to Earth.

If the Cold War space race culminated in a return to Earth, at present we are experiencing a renewed interest in space. Drawing on fieldwork among people working in the space sector in Sweden, this article focuses on some of the imaginaries underpinning this resurgence and the contemporary commercialization of space. Specifically, I hone in on the envisaged potential of miniaturized satellite technology to modify how humans relate to Earth and the cosmos. As I show, the allure of smallness relies on interscalar practices whereby something that shrinks in size simultaneously magnifies its scale of significance, meanwhile pushing the terrestrial infrastructures of space into the background and figuring largeness as an outcome, not a precondition. While this is often achieved with the help of logistical metaphors that conceal the material specificities of low Earth orbit, the proliferation of orbital debris throws such qualities into relief and presents expansiveness as a challenge to be addressed at scale. If space professionals posit smallness as ground rather than figure, emergent threats to their activities dramatically flip the order between smallness and largeness, thereby signaling that to bracket scale in the analytical interest of connectivity and comparison ultimately reintroduces scale as a problem.

Space activities in subarctic Sweden are predicated on older infrastructures of underground resource extraction. The ongoing expansion of the country's rocket launch site outside Kiruna relies on the Swedish state's historical construction of the region as a resource frontier. Yet fieldwork among space actors and reindeer pastoralists reveals that relations between mining and space are also invoked ethnographically: in oppositional terms, by herders for whom the impact area of the launch site serves to hold mining companies and other land users at bay; in a positive sense, among space enthusiasts who call for potential synergies between the two industries; and analogically, by actors who envisage extraplanetary futures vis-à-vis mining and the subterranean. While the grounding of outer space in earthly milieus is a recurring analytical procedure in the social sciences and humanities, these empirical-ethnographic connections and comparisons encourage an anthropological approach that also attends to the way Earth is occasionally rendered extraterrestrial-like.