Bridalveil Falls, Yosemite: Terms of Discussion - Virtual Worlds, Actual, Virtual, 1960s/Counterculture, Imagination

Harbin ethnography:



... into my arms and begin to float her.


Terms of Discussion

This characterization of life in the milieus of actual and virtual Harbin Hot Springs, and what's possible now with digital technologies and virtual worlds, like Second Life, in realizing and generating imaginative narratives, interactively, reflect Ursula K. Le Guin's (the daughter of UC Berkeley Anthropologist Kroeber, after whom the Cal Anthropology building is named) California fiction and imaginary creation in her ethnographic science fiction “Always Coming Home” (1985 - which included an audio cassette of Kesh music, composed by Todd Barton) This actual/virtual Harbin ethnography also comes into conversation with Le Guin's focus on appropriate use of technologies. Four hundred years in the future, the Kesh people, who live in the valley of Na – which reflects Le Guin's childhood growing up in summers in California's Napa Valley, a world where Le Guin would “most like to live; but that's partly because I did live there, all the summers of my childhood” [The Guardian, February 9, 2004, Chronicles of Earthsea - http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,6000,1144428,00.html] – limit and choose their technologies carefully and live in a very beautiful and imagined real world. People have done so many fascinating and colorful things at actual Harbin since 1972, when Ish bought the Harbin Hot Springs property, as this book and ongoing fieldwork will show. On virtual Harbin, an island in the Open Simulator virtual world program begun in 2008, and which was subsequently stolen with my laptop computer in 2009, as well as in Second Life, ethnographic characterizations of virtual Harbin highlight the significance of creativity in representation as well as Harbin's culture/fabric of life, centered around the pools, with their harmonizing effects leading to a kind of oneness for some, and hippie informed freedom for a time for others. At actual Harbin people, both residents and visitors, have found great freedom, in the pools, away from the city, and in exploring their visions of living informed by the 1960s, counterculturally, as part of a tribe. At virtual Harbin and in Second Life, avatars have created hot springs, have participated in gatherings and festivals, like Burning Man, and Second Life and Open Simulator generate carnivalesque representations and possibilities, at times, in their potential for creativity, the liminality which occurs there, and their digital representations, explorations and instantiations of the imagination. At actual and virtual Harbin, people take off their clothes, get naked, soak in the pools, cuddle together, harmonize, make love, come to polyamory workshops, get married, play together, find oneness, explore the moment, and are creative. At actual Harbin, the physical valley and waters themselves create and enhance these explorations. At virtual Harbin, avatars do all this, and they also can create more ongoing, generative representations through interactive digital technologies, including writing new scripts to animate avatars in new ways, and create new builds on virtual islands, informed by their visions. In both places, people put on colorful clothing, or take off their clothing, and often find freedom to shine and be happy in these liberating milieus of retreat, with possibilities for intimacy, creativity and regeneration. But such remarkable new forms of living require very clear terms of discussion to understand their anthropological significance as well as what's at stake. Engaging Boellstorff's (2007) in “Coming of Age” and building on these, will make an understanding of 'virtual worlds' and representational generativity open to further conversation among anthropologists.

Notwithstanding the histories of virtual worlds thus far ...






(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/04/bridalveil-falls-yosemite-terms-of.html - April 28, 2010)