Jon Bialecki

Anthropologist John Bialecki examines what transhumanism means for a social science that defines itself as the study of the human. He traces anthropology’s Boasian tradition of treating humanity as remarkably plastic yet culturally dependent, then asks whether posthuman transformations—particularly radical scenarios like Churchland’s networked “centipede” minds—would place future beings beyond the reach of ethnographic methods. Bialecki proposes that anthropology’s capacity to study a transformed subject might serve as a test for whether that transformation enhances or abandons what we recognize as human.

Anthropologist John Bialecki presents preliminary findings from his participant observation research on the Mormon Transhumanist Association. He argues that the MTA is anthropologically significant for several reasons: its distributed existence across physical and virtual spaces, its “Janus-faced” nature as simultaneously religious and secular, and its distinctive temporal imagination that bridges near-term emerging technologies with cosmological timescales. Bialecki suggests that the MTA’s speculative orientation—grounded in Mormon concepts like eternal progression—offers a model for how religious communities might adapt to changing social conditions.