Gibbon: In this actual / virtual draft version, I engage the 'structure' of classic ethnographies, Multiple Ethnographers

Harbin ethnography:



... I thus begin with terms in the first chapters, and allow the reader to choose in which order to read the chapters.

In engaging Boellstorff's “Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human” in this draft, I also engage the 'structure' of the classic ethnographies by Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Mead and multiple other ethnographers. In chapter 2, I examine histories of Harbin, from modernity to counterculture, from actual to virtual, from experiential to the virtual, visionary, countercultural Harbin, emerging from the 1960s. In Chapter 3, on method, I both examine reflexively the methods I engaged to write this, as well Harbin on its own terms. Anthropology, and ethnography, through participant-observation and field work, interviews, pool work and virtual developments as method, makes possible kinds of understanding not found in other knowledge-oriented, human processes of inquiry. I also examine here questions of ethics, while further developing the claims about Harbin that I'm making, especially vis-a-vis counterculture and hippieness. In the process I further compare and contrast actual and virtual Harbin. Part I thus offers an overview of the whole of this subject and scope of this inquiry.


In Part II on Harbin as counterculture emerging from modernity, I examine questioins of place and time at Harbin. ...

















(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/07/gibbon-in-this-actual-virtual-draft.html - July 26, 2010)