The Coming of Age in Second Life
Author
Tom Boellstorff (b. 1969), American anthropologist, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He previously did long-term fieldwork in Indonesia on sexuality and nation, published as The Gay Archipelago (2005), and edited American Anthropologist from 2007 to 2012.
Publication Details
Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 316 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-16834-0 (2015 paperback edition with a new preface).[1]
Description
The book is the first full-length ethnography conducted entirely inside a virtual world. Boellstorff spent more than two years in Second Life between 2004 and 2007 as an avatar named Tom Bukowski, keeping an office and a house there, conducting interviews, attending events, and taking fieldnotes — using, deliberately, the ordinary methods of anthropology and no others.
The title's echo of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa is the book's methodological argument in miniature: Second Life is treated as a field site like any other, deserving the same techniques and the same seriousness.
The Central Methodological Claim
Boellstorff's most contested decision was to stay inside. He did not seek out participants' offline identities, did not verify their claims about their physical lives, and did not treat the offline person as the truth behind the avatar.
His justification is a principled one. If anthropologists have long studied a village without following residents home to another country, and have long taken what happens in a place as worth understanding on its own terms, then a virtual world can be studied the same way. To insist that the "real" person behind the avatar is the proper object is to assume in advance that virtual sociality is derivative — which is precisely the question at issue.
Key Ideas
- "We have always been virtual." Boellstorff's central claim, and a deliberate echo of Latour. Culture is the human capacity to live inside meanings that are not given by nature; virtual worlds are a recent instance of a very old competence, not a departure from an unmediated condition. This is the same premise that organises digital anthropology generally.
- Techne and place-making. How residents made a synthetic space into somewhere, through building, ownership, neighbourhoods, events and habit — a working demonstration of Tuan's claim that place is produced by pause and attention rather than by physical substrate.
- Afk and the rhythms of presence. The distinctive temporality of a world where people are visibly present and absent at once, and the etiquette that grew up around it.
- Embodiment without bodies. Avatar customisation, gesture, personal space and the reproduction of physical proxemics in a space with no physics requiring it — see extended avatar and Hall.
- Economy, property and governance. Land, currency, labour, griefing, and the intractable problem of what a platform owner's authority actually is.
Criticism
The decision to remain in-world is the book's principal target: critics argue it forecloses questions about who is behind an avatar and about how offline inequality shapes online life, and that a study of a commercial platform cannot bracket the company that owns it. Boellstorff's reply is that no ethnography studies everything, and that the choice makes visible what mixed-method studies routinely obscure.
Second Life's decline in prominence has also changed how the book reads — less as a report on a phenomenon than as a record of a particular world at a particular time, which is what ethnographies generally become.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
This is the demonstration that anthropology's ordinary methods work on synthetic environments without modification, and that the results are worth having. Its refusal to treat the virtual as a degraded copy of the real is the same argument this site makes about technology in general.
Related Reading
References
- ↑ Coming of Age in Second Life, Princeton University Press.
