Ethnographies of Possible Worlds: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Science Fiction
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Abstract
Daughter of Theodora Kracow and Alfred Kroeber, Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) grew up in an intellectual milieu that led her to experience the feeling «that nothing and no one is irremediably foreign-alien-Other» (interview with Le Guin in Baker-Cristales 2012, 23-24). The protagonists in her novels are often ethnographers, or specialists in other disciplines with a marked anthropological sensibility, who show a strong propensity for listening to the other. Le Guin’s novels are genuine ethnographies that portray the complexity and contradictions of other worlds in all their aspects, thus inducing the reader to question established categories of interpretation of reality and to reflect on our own society
Keywords
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- Science Fiction
- The Left Hand of Darkness
- The Word for World is Forest
- Always Coming Home