Imagin(eer)ing Peace: Simulations of the State

Abstract

Anthropologists of media have examined explicit relationships between the state and mass media industries in numerous postcolonial and postsocialist societies; however, media anthropology has attended less to the role of the American entertainment industry in relation to the U.S. state. Building on work from political science and media studies (Der Darian 2001; Hamilton and O’Gorman 2016; Wasson and Grieveson 2018), this paper is part of a larger anthropological project that looks at why and how the U.S. state turns to Hollywood R&D to “imagineer” solutions to U.S. military and societal problems, and the international media flows that these efforts generate. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in southern California and media analysis, I explore here some of the conditions that enable the institutional and industrial collaborations that go into creating a media simulation technology used to capture and preserve valuable U.S. and Chinese wartime testimonies. Informed by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim’s conceptualization of “sociotechnical imaginaries” (2015), I suggest that the entertainment, educational, and state applications surrounding these collaborations, and their implications, reveal how technologies designed to imagine and materialize peaceful futures are a complicated social and political process.