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"Golub, Alex"
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Being in the World (Of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game
This paper discusses two main claims made about virtual worlds: first, that people become \"immersed\" in virtual worlds because of their sensorial realism, and second, because virtual worlds appear to be \"places\" they can be studied without reference to the lives that their inhabitants live in the actual world. This paper argues against both of these claims by using data from an ethnographic study of knowledge production in World of Warcraft. First, this data demonstrates that highly-committed (\"immersed\") players of World of Warcraft make their interfaces less sensorially realistic (rather than more so) in order to obtain useable knowledge about the game world. In this case, immersion and sensorial realism may be inversely correlated. Second, their commitment to the game leads them to engage in knowledge-making activities outside of it. Drawing loosely on phenomenology and contemporary theorizations of Oceania, I argue that what makes games truly \"real\" for players is the extent to which they create collective projects of action that people care about, not their imitation of sensorial qualia. Additionally, I argue that while purely ingame research is methodologically legitimate, a full account of member's lives must study the articulation of in-game and out-of-game worlds and trace people's engagement with virtual worlds across multiple domains, some virtual and some actual.
Journal Article
The Public Anthropology of Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead was anthropology’s most significant public voice during the twentieth century. Her monthly columns in Redbook magazine (1962–1978), which had a subscription base of more than 3 million women in the 1960s, were perhaps her most important public forum. These columns, coauthored with Rhoda Métraux, were sometimes in brief question-and-answer format but more often were lengthy thought pieces. An analysis of these longer columns on women’s issues from 1962 through 1970 reveals Mead’s thinking about women’s roles during this era of change. Mead was an advocate of abortion rights and no-fault divorce, yet on other issues she was not an opinion leader, supporting public norms on premarital sex, motherhood, and marriage while criticizing feminists of the period. She was also reluctant to discuss discrimination against women as a group until 1970. To understand Mead’s views, her Redbook columns can be read in tandem with the broader history of public opinion during this period and her own personal career. This article concludes with a discussion of Mead’s success as a public intellectual in this forum and why her kind of public anthropology is unlikely to be replicated by anthropologists today.
Journal Article
Ironies of Organization: Landowners, Land Registration, and Papua New Guinea's Mining and Petroleum Industry
Contemporary policy work in Papua New Guinea portrays the country either in terms of an inflexible tradition to be remedied by liberalization, or a weak state whose disintegrating social institutions must be strengthened by regional neighbors. As an analysis of land registration issues surrounding resource developments shows, rural Papua New Guineans demonstrate a willingness to innovate on past practice that is strikingly modern in its outlook, and the politics of land registration cannot be explained by liberalization or disintegration approaches. At the same time, the fluidity of land tenure makes it difficult to study land in Papua New Guinea as if it were common property, as is done in new institutional economics.
Journal Article
Media, anthropology and public engagement (Studies in public and applied anthropology)
Contemporary anthropology is done in a world where social and digital media are playing an increasingly significant role, where anthropological and arts practices are often intertwined in museum and public intervention contexts, and where anthropologists are encouraged to engage with mass media. Because anthropologists are often expected and inspired to ensure their work engages with public issues, these opportunities to disseminate work in new ways and to new publics simultaneously create challenges as anthropologists move their practice into unfamiliar collaborative domains and expose their research to new forms of scrutiny. In this volume, contributors question whether a fresh public anthropology is emerging through these new practices.
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