Trinity Alp: The term 'place' entails a name, boundaries, unique social and physical qualities, a distinctive kind of permanence, Harbin Pools

Harbin ethnography:


... its virtuality is informed by the 1960s to this day, as field work will show.

The term 'place' entails a name, boundaries, unique social and physical qualities, a distinctive kind of permanence (Harvey 1996: 293), and related cultural processes, interpreted ethnographically. Place is describable in terms of place-time coordinates and is therefore an entity which occurs within, and is transformative of, the constitution of space-time (Harvey 1996: 294). But taken with other topographic features, permanence here is relative. Besides permanence, the idea of online ‘place’ also includes names, representations of boundaries, distinctive social qualities, and representations of physical qualities. The idea of ‘place’ thus becomes mediated by representations of physical aspects of a particular kind. In the context of the world wide web, online representations of virtual Harbin, which avatar builders generated have specific characteristics which shape the experience of the computer user visiting it. These aspects of virtual Harbin add progressive layers of representation between the viewer and physical Harbin Hot Springs, which the individual would otherwise not experience soaking in the pools there. Information, for example, which the computer user can see in the virtual Harbin, as well as critical digital information about the actual Harbin such as captions, is, by the same token, not available in person when visiting the Harbin valley. The web site thus constitutes aspects of Harbin Hot Springs as ‘place’ as defined above, but of a different order. Thus, the concept of ‘place’ offers a useful mode of analysis for contrasting virtual and actual Harbin Hot Springs. virtual Harbin – of the mind … defining virtuality in terms of place and culture. And the Harbin pools as place broaden conceptions of the anthropological 'field site' in terms of fluid fields, with unique 'cultural' effects.















(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/05/trinity-alp-term-place-entails-name.html - May 4, 2010)