Terraforming a field site: Reflections on crafting knowledge on Mars

The chapter considers the role of paraethnography, whereby the reader is invited to vacillate between a Martian and Earthly reading of the ethnography of a space analogue mission. Co-written between an artist and an anthropologist, the chapter attends to the role of performance, play, art, and curation in thinking through emergent social relations and the coordinates of knowledge, as we try to understand the significance of world-building during a simulated Martian space mission. The chapter ethnographically traces our experiences on a remote Scottish island that was used to simulate a Martian space mission where remote healthcare protocols were tested. Using the notion of bricolage, we argue that both the artist and the anthropologist can draw attention to particular relations between people, things, and place through the production of art, ethnography, and narrative. As such, we challenge overly static notions of fieldsites as a priori there to be observed, read, and reported, and argue that the fieldsite emerges through ethnographic and artistic practices of curation.