Data Entry: Please note that the research database will be replaced by UNIverse by the end of October 2023. Please enter your data into the system https://universe-intern.unibas.ch. Thanks

Login for users with Unibas email account...

Login for registered users without Unibas email account...

 
Die Zukunft überleben ⁄ Surviving the Future Today
Project funded by own resources
Project title Die Zukunft überleben ⁄ Surviving the Future Today
Principal Investigator(s) Genner, Julian
Organisation / Research unit Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Departement Gesellschaftswissenschaften / Kulturanthropologie (Leimgruber)
Project start 01.03.2017
Probable end 28.02.2018
Status Completed
Abstract

How to make fire without a lighter or a match? How to build a bamboo shelter in the jungle? How to eat a venomous scorpion? In short, how to survive in the wild without the comforts of modern civilisation? Ironically, the answers to such questions are presented whilst enjoying the comforts of this very civilisation, namely whilst sitting on the couch and watching TV. Today’s popular culture is obsessed with surviving offside this very culture. At least a dozen Reality TV Shows and hundreds of how-to manuals teach the viewer or reader how to survive all sorts of catastrophes. Some of them picture situations in which one has accidentally stranded in the wild and has to make it back to civilisation. Reality TV Shows for instance often re-enact ‘true’ stories of people who survived plane crashes, ship accidents or simply got lost in the woods. Others picture a temporary or permanent breakdown of the world as ‘we’ (the ‘West’) know it. In the popular TV Series The Walking Dead, a group of survivors tries to cope with a post-apocalyptic, zombie-flooded world. The protagonists of the Reality TV show Doomsday Preppers prepare for all kinds of wars, invasions, collapses, and disasters. Survivalist fiction too is about living in a world descending into chaos. Over and above, i.e. beyond TV screens, individual lifestyles are centred around preparing for catastrophic events, be them transient or lasting. Survivalists devote their – and their families’ – time and money to training for such extreme situations. They form a loose and diverse subculture.

But how it comes that possible catastrophes, as the imagined end of ‘our’ own culture, become and form part of our contemporary culture? What is the origin of their force to determine individual lifestyles? As Luhmann points out, futures are creations of the present. How then do the catastrophes imagined by survivalists reflect the contemporary? Using Simmel’s notion of adventure, one can add that survivalists’ longing for a life offside its ordinary pathways both contrasts and mirrors contemporary cultural norms and values at the same time. Studying survivalism is a means to understanding the contemporary culture it evolves from. For, after all, imagining a catastrophic future one must cope with, is an activity taking place here and now. My basic research question thus is: How does survivalism contrast and mirror contemporary everyday life in its attempts to overcome it? More precisely, how can we gain insights concerning contemporary culture from investigating its negation as presented by survivalism?

 

Keywords survivalism, globalization, popular culture, future, apocalypse
Financed by University funds
   

MCSS v5.8 PRO. 0.363 sec, queries - 0.000 sec ©Universität Basel  |  Impressum   |    
29/03/2024