I Became an Anthropologist to Study Alien Cultures
It worked, just not the way I planned
I have spent my entire life trying to understand how people build worlds that make existence bearable.
I didn’t know that was what I was doing for most of it. It looked like reading. Then it looked like fieldwork. Then it looked like a career in cultural resource management, surveying the buried remnants of civilizations that had already finished asking the question. But underneath all of it, the investigation was always the same: How do humans take a universe that offers no inherent meaning and make one anyway?
The answer, I have come to believe, is worldbuilding. Not as metaphor. As the most fundamental human act there is.
I cannot point to a single year when it started. I only know that by the fourth grade I was already living in more than one place at once.
My first real book — the first one that felt like an object with gravity — was an illustrated edition of The Wind in the Willows. Not a cartoon adaptation. A thick book with textured paper and inked drawings of Mole stepping into sunlight for the first time. What captivated me was not the plot. It was the world. The riverbank felt continuous. The Wild Wood existed whether or not Mole was in it. There were seasons, class structures, invisible boundaries between safety and wilderness. I did not yet have the word for it, but I was learning that a world could be built — not invented in a burst, but layered, sedimented, inhabited.
People assume the spark must have been Star Wars. It would make sense. An entire galaxy with religions, ruins, and a lived-in past that felt older than the screen itself. The first time I saw it I felt something shift: the recognition that a story could imply ten thousand stories behind it. But Star Wars only confirmed what Wind in the Willows had already taught me. I wasn’t watching the hero’s journey. I was asking: Who built this? What came before? What myths do these people tell about themselves?
Those are, it turns out, anthropological questions.
OMNI
The magazine was slick in a way that felt like the future. OMNI didn’t sit on the rack the way Time or Newsweek did — it practically hummed. I picked up an issue sometime in the early eighties and somewhere between the advertisements for home computers and the fiction in the back, I found the article that quietly rearranged everything.
NASA had a problem. They could build the dish. They could write the algorithms. But if something answered back — something genuinely, irreducibly other — the engineers had no framework for what came next. So they were turning to anthropologists. People trained to sit inside a culture that wasn’t their own, to learn its logic on its own terms, to resist the very human urge to assume that the way you see the world is the way the world is.
The people who mattered most at the edge of the unknown weren’t the ones who built the technology. They were the ones who understood that contact, if it ever came, would be first and foremost a problem of meaning.
