Hi Anne,
I enjoyed your excellent "Embodying the Goddess: Revealing the Practice of Tattooing in Ancient Egypt" - http://events.stanford.edu/ events/608/60867/ archaeological/anthropological talk (with its interpretive emphasis on the Egyptian Goddess Hathor) on Friday evening at Stanford a
lot. Your recent remarkable and unusual find from about 3200-3500 years
ago of a (female) mummy with tattoos in Egypt raises all kinds of
creative and interesting new interpretive possibilities in your
discipline (which are approaches I enjoy, for example, and in writing my
Actual~Virtual Harbin Hot Springs' ethnography - http://www.scottmacleod.com/ ActualVirtualHarbinBook.html).
How does the academic literature on Ancient Egypt further distinguish
between religious culture/discourse and culture/discourse beyond Ancient
Egyptian "religion" and "decorum"? Thanks for your helpful reply to my
question. (I asked this question with "religious culture" in India and
religious culture in "U.S." today in mind, for example, and by way of
very loose comparison, as distant as these are from each other and from
scholars' understandings of Ancient Egypt's "religion," which is not
generally as "culture," in my very, very limited reading. India is still
very religious in my interpretation and in ongoing ways in the modern
world / the information age, having visited 3 times). Ancient Egyptian
"culture," archaeologically, is such a fascinating topic and so distant,
especially given Anthropology's theoretical developments over the past,
say, 100 years.
Understanding
Ancient Egyptian culture, both "religious" and in complementary
"not-religious" ways further would be significant in, for example,
beginning to create a data set which might inform a virtual earth in
Google Street View/Maps/Earth with time slider - for
ethno-wiki-virtual-world- graphy (here's the Ethno-Wiki-Virtual-World- Graphy label in my blog
http://scott-macleod.blogspot. com/search/label/ethno-wiki- virtual-world-graphy)
- in the places and periods in which you do field work, Anne, and the
questions you are asking. Both tattooing and how such new data, and
finds, might create very new developments in interpreting Ancient
Egyptian culture (fabric of daily life) could be further engaged very generatively with
developing information technologies in so many ways (not to overstate
the obvious:).
Your
talk also highlighted the significance of digital technologies in
revealing new finds. In my ongoing Harbin ethnographic research, where I
hope in part to create a virtual Harbin Hot Springs as ethnographic
field site for ongoing comparative anthropological study in something
like Google Street View with time slider with OpenSimulator, your talk
on tattooing suggested to me that people reading my book 3,500 years
from now, or looking at the virtual Harbin/earth then from around now
might also begin to ask questions of (or make discoveries about)
tattooing at Harbin, for example - of which there is some, and viewable
in the Harbin pool area.
And
thanks to your talk, I may in subsequent Harbin books I write seek to make
distinctions about questions of culture - e.g. "religious culture" and
"culture more generally" - further re Harbin, which emerges out of
California in the 1960s and 1970s as counterculture, in my
interpretation, and is also a little New Agey as well as "California"
culturally. Harbin is both two churches, HCC (http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/Heart%20Consciousness%20Church) and NACOB - but which
aren't affiliated with any other churches and which may have been a
hippy tax dodge in 1975 and 1996, and Harbin embodies a kind New Age
clothing-optional hippy culture (e.g. hippy Hinduism and Buddhism and
language etc.) a few decades after the 1960s. How will all of this
emerge digitally and for "publishing" Harbin in a film-realistic, 3D,
interactive, group build-able, wiki with avatars, and in all 8K
languages, and for later research are fascinating questions for me.
Harbin is also simply a nice place to visit. (Have you been there?)
(More about CC World University and School possibly in the future).
Would you be available to have a coffee at Stanford (https://history.stanford.edu/people/anne-austin - http://www.anneeaustin.com - https://stanford.academia.edu/AnneAustin) to talk possibly further about some of these questions?
Thanks for your great talk.
Best regards,
Scott
P.S.
Here's a slide presentation I gave at UC Berkeley in November re Ethno-Wiki-Virtual-World- Graphy - http://scott-macleod. blogspot.com/2015/11/waters- 36-slides-from-uc-berkeley- talk.html
Naked Harbin and Ethno-Wiki-Virtual-World- Graphy:
Methodologies for Ethnographically Studying Virtual Place: Virtual Harbin
36 slides from UC Berkeley talk on F 11/6/15
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