35 Cultural Relativism and Inequality Leveling the Playing Field: Cultural Relativism and Inequality Kurt Vonnegut’s novel The Sirens of Titan and short story “Harrison Bergeron” Adam T. Bogar Vonnegut and Anthropology: An Introduction In his 1989 essay “The Concept of Fiction” (“El concepto de ficción”), Argentinean writer Juan José Saer mentions the expression “speculative anthropology” (“antropologia especulativa”) as a “suggested definition of fiction” (Hemer 180). Although he never goes on to elaborate on this definition, according to Oscar Hemer, Saer “quite obviously uses the word [speculative] in an affirmative sense—speculative as uninhibited, unpredictable, transgressive” (182). The fiction of American writer and public intellectual Kurt Vonnegut (probably best known as the author of the seminal novel Slaughterhouse-Five) fits that bill perfectly for a variety of reasons. This chapter will provide a reading of Vonnegut’s novel The Sirens of Titan and his short story “Harrison Bergeron” as well as a selection of his nonfiction works. Through this reading, I will explore the ways in which Vonnegut’s study of anthropology informs his thought and writing, to the extent that his fiction becomes speculative anthropology itself. I will also elaborate on the interrelatedness of anthropological and political thinking in his works, apparent in his treatment of, and comments on, social and economic inequality. Vonnegut had a somewhat unconventional educational history. Coming from a family of hardware salespeople and, later on, architects, there was a family pressure on him to study science: “Although [Vonnegut] would have preferred to study literature or the humanities, or to become an architect like his father and grandfather before him, both Kurt, Sr., and his older brother, Bernard, pushed him toward the sciences. . . ” (Farrell 5). He frst started studying biochemistry at Cornell University in 1940, but left in 1942, partly due to his enlistment in the US Army, but partly due to his displeasure