Friday, October 22, 2010

Dodonaea fruit: In the next chapter, I examine the methodological implications for studying 'Virtual Harbin Communication,' Virtual generation

Harbin ethnography:

... What's significant about these technologies vis-a-vis virtual Harbin, in this reading, is the possibility to, not only explore but, generate qualities of the neurophysiology of loving bliss, now in emergent virtual places, such as virtual Harbins. 'Virtual Harbin Communication,' then, refers to the possibility, too, to create new kinds of salutary, imaginative and beneficial connectedness, from the comfort of one's own home, and in a virtual world on a computer.

In the next chapter, I examine the methodological implications for studying this {'Virtual Harbin Communication'} thesis, ethnographically. The significance of a placeless, Harbin virtual place, connecting bodyminds-to-bodyminds, even across species, and cyber-hippies-to-cyber-hippies – and here connectible by bodyminds, language and internet protocols to other virtual worlds - makes possible new understandings of counterculture, emerging from the 1960s. We'll have to go in to the aqueous world of the Harbin warm pool, a fluid 'place,' to participant-observe ways in which counterculture finds freedom in intimate, connected, together, naked releasing, - from narratives of Bonobo chimpanzee culture to present, in-world, New Age, digital, interactive representations of Harbin – to explore aspects of free, bodyminds' culture. Welcome to approaches to thinking about and being in virtual Harbin – virtual world, digital address http:// . What is this ease and freedom-generating Harbin, New Age space of connectedness via multimedia? While anthropology has historically generated much knowledge about peoples and cultures around the world, what would happen if ethnography began to generate not only modes of digital communication among all peoples of the world, but in the context of the freedom-seeking explorations of countercultural oneness. In what ways can ethnographic approaches to communication, now digitally mediated, give form to generative readings between 'cultures' and peoples, now vis-vis information technologies, where the making of virtual Harbin Hot Springs as ethnographic field site in Second Life and Open Simulator (MacLeod 2009) becomes a place of anthropologically-represented, bodymind connectedness, as well as mutual learning, – and from one's own, home bath-hub, for example? How does the virtual generation of the generative virtual here, now, vis-a-vis Harbin communication & language, especially in relation to floating in the warm pool, emerge?



Chapter 3: Method

Harbin on its own terms - Anthropology and ethnography – Participant observation – Interviews, pool work and virtual field work in the pools – Ethics – Claims and reflexivity – Actual Harbin and virtual Harbin compared and contrasted – In warm waters - Virtual world, countercultural communication in a virtual Harbin – What flows between, observationally – Soaking in the waters – Watsu ....











(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/10/dodonaea-fruit-in-next-chapter-i.html - October 22, 2010)

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