Anthropology of Life Support Systems: From Earth to Outer Space, and Back

It is often thought that the best way to understand how living beings interact, and how life works, is to immerse oneself in seemingly pristine “untouched” environments such as forests. Yet there is another, equally valuable and complementary approach. This approach focuses on what humans do with life itself, by looking at the techniques they use to interact with living beings (for instance, agriculture or medicine), and at projects in which they attempt to artificially reproduce the functioning of life. Drawing on the dialogue between the Anthropology of Techniques and the Anthropology of Life, it is therefore relevant to investigate “life support systems”—devices that seek to sustain the lives of human and non-human organisms by constructing artificial ecological relations. One of the key challenges for Anthropology is to understand how these epistemological objects shed light on our ways of inhabiting both our planet and outer-space.

About speaker Prof. Perig Pitrou

Leverhulme Visiting Professor Perig Pitrou is an anthropologist and Senior Researcher at the CNRS. He leads the research group Anthropology of Life at the Collège de France (PSL University). He is also co-director of the project. This year he is the 2026 Leverhulme Visiting Professor at University College London, invited by Prof. Victor Buchli, to deliver in the UK a series of lectures on the anthropology of astrobiology and space exploration. These themes are also addressed in Otherwhere Ethnography: An Introduction to Outer Space Studies (Oxford University Press, 2025), which he co-edited with Istvan Praet.

Drinks will be served following the event.

Image: Lunar Greenhouse © Gene Giacomelli

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