Air: [Air-L] Virtual ethnography and online fieldwork

Here's Tom Boellstorff's carefully crafted, recent posting to the Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) email list. He's the author of "Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human" (Princeton 2007), the first anthropology of a virtual world, and a professor at the University of California, Irvine:



This is my first post to this list, so hopefully I won’t mess it up!

As an utter newbie to this list, it’s interesting to see so many discussions of “virtual ethnography,” “cyber anthropology,” whatever you want to call it. I share Christine’s sense of being snowed under (I am enjoying very much being Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, but the workload is quite extraordinary, particularly when teaching three courses, as I am at the present!). However, I did want to take a couple minutes to respond to the postings about “virtual ethnography and online fieldwork,” particularly the recent posting from Don Slater. As is the case with Christine, I’ve never yet had the honor of meeting Don, though his work has influenced mine greatly and I teach with it often. Don’s impassioned posting is, as always, insightful, but there’s a bit of the baby getting thrown out with the bathwater so to speak, and I want to make a case for not closing the door on certain kinds of ethnographic research topics and methods.

Don is absolutely right when stating that:

> 'virtuality', like the off-line/online distinction, is the variable social
> accomplishments of particular actors, which might be performed differently in
> different settings, or be largely absent and irrelevant (as in the Miller and Slater
> Trinidad book).

Online we encounter a range of social formations that vary in the ways they are linked up to actual-world contexts. Sometimes the link is quite direct, as in the case examined in the Trinidad book, or in my colleague Victoria Bernal’s work on Eritreans online, and so on. One of my graduate students, Robert Phillips, has just completed a fascinating dissertation on gay Singaporeans’ use of the Internet that fits into this rough genre of work as well. There are all kinds of social formations “in between” (though it’s too multidimensional for “in between” to really make sense).

And then another genre or type of social formation that we can study ethnographically is online games or virtual worlds whose connection to the actual world is much more indirect in terms of reference or community. The majority of persons who participate in Eritrean diasporic websites are themselves Eritrean (though we don’t know 100% for sure of course, and there are migrants, children of migrants, etc., that complexify designations like “Eritrean”). In a virtual world like Second Life, where I’ve conducted a lot of ethnographic fieldwork, the connection to the actual world is more indirect. There are things like avatars with humanlike bodies, grass and water, social norms of facing someone you talk to, and a thousand other examples of indirect linkage, and some cases of residents who know each other in the actual world prior to involvement in Second Life (siblings, friends, spouses, etc.) or who meet in the actual world after becoming close in Second Life. But the majority of social interaction and meaning-making that takes place “inworld” is not directly predicated on actual-world sociality. If I and my friend Joe in Sydney have a conversation in Second Life one day, that conversation is predicated on us both having physical bodies, Internet access, and so on, but it’s not true that the content and meaning of the conversation (and our social actions inworld, etc.) is only comprehensible to a researcher if that researcher books flights to Los Angeles and Sydney so as to talk to us in the physical world.

This has really interesting and I think significant implications for method as well as theory. As I discuss in Coming of Age in Second Life, having written two books on gay Indonesians I’ve been fascinated to see both similarities and differences in how I’ve had to conduct ethnographic research in physical-world and online contexts. The political dimensions to all of this are important, but I do think they are more complex than Don presents them (although we are basically in agreement):

>I'd only add a political dimension to this: the northern academic presumption that
>virtuality is an intrinsic property of some new machines acts to frame all research
>within this analytic so that we are incited to study virtuality, or within the agenda
>of virtuality, rather than to ethnographically discover how actors frame and
>perform their use of these new machines (and rejecting the notion of virtuality is
>just as ethnographically and analytically senseless). Having worked over the last
>ten years in non-northern settings, and in development contexts, it became very
>clear to me how politically important - and potentially neo-colonial - are the
>framings and concerns that we might impose on other people and the technologies
>we export to them: virtuality, and cognates such as cyberculture, are so clearly a
>projection of internal northern debates about identity, community, connection,
>reality, etc, articulated through specficially northern intellectual traditions such as >poststructuralism and performativity. Time to stop projecting our dramas onto
>everyone else and start looking at what they are doing and saying. And we need to
>do this not only in order to do better research but also in order to ensure that
>alternative uses and understandings of new technologies are actually allowed to
>emerge and be valorized. There are clearly issues of power involved here.

There are absolutely issues of power here, but they are multivalent and complex. Having worked in non-northern settings for 17 years, I can state quite emphatically that virtuality and cognates like cyberculture are not so clearly a projection of internal northern debates. The potential for neo-colonial thinking runs both ways here. In fact, historically colonial thought worked in essence to preserve “virtuality” as the prerogative of the colonizer, through what Mamdani terms “the spatial containerization of the native.” In particular, a notion of “virtuality” was a threat to colonial power because it could lead to the “imagined community” (in Anderson’s classic phrasing) of nationalism that directly challenged colonial rule. (In this quick example the notion of “virtuality” isn’t the same as in “virtual world,” but there is a shared history, and additionally I could talk about the fascinating ways persons in non-northern settings use online spaces, including creating their own virtual worlds!)

So projecting of dramas can take multiple forms, and Don is certainly right we should be vigilant, but part of that vigilance is to not assume a single form of that “drama,” or that the category of “internal northern” is clearly definable -- particularly if it presumes an analogous “internal non-northern.” I’ve certainly had many conversations over the years where gay Indonesians (that is, Indonesians using what at first glance appears to be the English term “gay”) find it interesting to discuss where the “internal”-ness of their sexual subjectivities begins and ends!

To me the key thing is to keep the theoretical and methodological doors open as we research this broad, broad range of new ethnographic domains. Don’s entirely right that “Asserting 'virtuality' as a methodological or substantive presumption is not only daft and obscurantist, it also misses precisely what is interesting” – so the point is to explore the forms virtuality takes and follow that moving target. Don’t assume it, but also don’t assume it’s fake, a projection of northern academic fashion, etc. Don hits on precisely this point when stating that:

>In my recollection, the only real difference between Christine's book and Danny
>Miller and my book was that she constructively focused on fashioning the tools
>needed if one does follow the actors into more online/bounded spaces; whereas
>our book was more concerned to contest the universal applicability of virtuality as
>a methodological framing, and we therefore (possibly) overstated continuities with
>classical ethnography, as if the online settings (which we also looked at extensively
>- Trinidadian websites and chat) made no difference methodologically. These are
>merely differences of polemical intention and research pragmatics.

In fact, I don’t think Don and Danny overstated continuities with classical ethnography at all: I think their book is very well crafted theoretically and methodologically to respond to what they were looking at. It’s that kind of sensitivity and flexibility that to my mind characterizes the best ethnographic work, whether I encounter it as Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, among the work of my colleagues working in Indonesia studies, or among my colleagues working in the ethnography of virtual worlds or other aspects of Internet culture.

What seems clear to me is that there are many contexts in which researchers must explore various direct interfaces and interchanges between online and offline culture, which in some cases will demand meeting people in the physical world in addition to meeting them online. But it is also clear that there now are (and will continue to be in the future) contexts in which forms of society and culture appear online, in online games, virtual worlds, and other things too. These forms of society and culture are obviously shaped by physical-world societies and cultures in many ways, but the persons interacting within the online societies and cultures in question will in most cases meet few (or even none) of each other offline, and it does an ethnographic injustice to that situation to assume that all ethnographic research on online culture must include meeting one’s interlocutor’s in the physical world. In some cases (and for some research questions) it will make sense, but in other cases it will not. Any approach can be done well or badly, and all have something important to contribute.

All the best, Tom Boellstorff

February 8, 2009
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I'll engage his work directly in my actual and virtual Harbin Hot Springs' ethnographic project.

In making his case for virtuality, I wonder how one might include the neural activity which goes on in our minds symbolically, and particularly, in Harbin's case, vis-a-vis counterculture, especially in-world. I'm particularly interested in examining ways in which the shaping of a virtual world, for example a virtual Harbin in Second Life, and ethnographically, in text, as well, may give rise to, and may complement Tom's examination of virtuality.