Recorded on November 6, 2010.
Cultural anthropologist Tom Boellstorff draws on his pioneering research in Second Life to investigate how people invent and reinvent their bodies in cyberspace. Second Life is a virtual world, accessed online, in which participants create avatars and choose how much these avatars resemble their real selves in appearance and action. Boellstorff is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and editor in chief of American Anthropologist. He is the author of Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, based on nearly three years of fieldwork in Second Life. In a first for the Festival, this lecture will take place simultaneously in the physical world and in Second Life, where it will be delivered by Boellstorff’s avatar.
Read the CHF blog post about this program.
