Introducing...

Hello! I'm delighted you've found your way here, to this peculiar corner of the internet where anthropology meets the weird, the liminal, the fictional, the ‘elsewhere’.

I’m Christopher Marcatili, an author of weird/queer fiction and anthropologist in training. My research focus is on creativity, creative processes, and social/cultural change (focused on Iceland). But more broadly, I’m interested in the ways creative practices help us connect with people and exchange ideas.

I was born in 1986, the same year Melford Spiro committed the common anthropological call to action to paper: ‘to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar’.

Coincidence?

I would say so, yes.

And yet this central theme is at the heart of this blog series, what makes anthropology such an interesting discipline and, in my opinion, such an important one.

My goal with this series is not to expound on the virtues of anthropology, or any academic discipline. It’s to put them into practice in interesting ways. To practice the ways of seeing the world I’ve taken from studying anthropology and put them in conversation with fiction and creativity more broadly.

What does that even mean?

You might want to stick around if:

• You’ve wondered what real-world lessons we can take away from thought-provoking speculative fictions (books, shows, games) and the works of creators like Ursula Le Guin.

• You find yourself drawn to the strange poetry of academic papers that read like science fiction.

• You believe that the best way to understand humanity might be to look at how we dream up our monsters, our frontiers, our anxieties and aspirations.

• You believe research and academic ideas should be shared in ways people want them, and want to explore ways this might be done.

• You've ever felt that certain places—abandoned malls, late-night diners, abandoned hotels, empty swimming pools—seem to operate according to their own laws of physics.

• You enjoy fictional vignettes exploring the weird world.

As an Elsewhere Anthropologist, I want to study the spaces where reality gets a little thin. My ‘field sites’ include everything from the ghost stories that emerge from airports to the folklore of climate change. I'm interested in how we make sense of the inexplicable, how we navigate spaces that don’t or shouldn't exist, and how we tell stories about the things we can't quite understand.

Think of this blog as a field journal from the edges of reality—part academic inquiry, part creative exploration, part documentation of the weird.

As any good anthropologist knows, the most interesting stories often emerge from the margins—from the spaces between categories, from the moments when our usual frameworks for understanding the world break down. That's where we'll go: attempting to map the territories that exist just beyond the edges of our maps, where there be monsters.

Welcome to elsewhere. Let's see what we find.