Aliens, Anthropologists, and American Indians: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Culture, and Difference in Midcentury US Modernism

Abstract:This essay argues that Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles participates in the interdisciplinary debates over culture and form that emerge in the 1920s through the 1940s, as anthropologists and artists deploy new conceptions of culture as relative, plural systems of meaning—debates played out through ethnographies of Southwest Native American peoples, in desert landscapes such as Bradbury’s Mars. With Martians in the role occupied by Native Americans in anthropological discourse, Bradbury’s text engages the complex interplay between pluralist difference and universalist assimilation/antiessentialism central to early Cold War conceptions of (Native) American culture.