The Virtual Body: Coming of Age in Second Life

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 Chicago Humanities Festival, this lecture will took place simultaneously in the physical world and in Second Life, where it was be delivered by Boellstorff's avatar.