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Comments

Thomas Malaby

I'm very distressed to hear of this, Tom (and Celia). I just read the transcript from the Metanomics site, and please know that I share your concern about this kind of ambush, and the persistent and misguided ideas which seem to lie behind it. For Dr. Bloomfield to claim that his own view is "pragmatic" especially makes me wince, since it is patently dogmatic to reduce science to hypothesis-testing and generalizability.

It is doubly distressing that Dr. Bloomfield, a fellow author of mine at Terra Nova, also has not chosen to comment or otherwise engage these issues there when I have raised them in my own posts ( http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/05/virtual-general.html and http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/12/antiantianecdot.html ) or when he has not responded to comments from me and others about his own posts about using virtual worlds experimentally (see http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/06/the_glovebox_an.html ).

Ron Meiners

Welcome Dr. Boellstorff, and good to see you Thomas... and while I generally agree that the proposed view of culture and anthropology is simplistic (as is my own, I heartily admit, being gleaned from work in community and desultory readings and conversations prompted by that work), I think the elephant's already in the room, cultural experimentation goes on all the time in virtual worlds - let's call it interaction design (and to a lesser extent, community management), part of the overall game or world design. I'll post the gist of my comments in response to Celia's piece, since they're more germane to the points she raises, but I think implicitly, given the plasticity of culture and the ability to influence it and track it in a virtual world or mmo, there's a very big question here about the opportunities for understanding cultural workings, and the results of experimentation.

Celia Pearce

Please check out this other parallel discussion that is happening on http://dusanwriter.com/index.php/2009/03/08/accounting-for-human-nature-anthropology-academia-and-virtual-worlds/

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