Hi, John,
Thanks so much for your email yesterday saying "send the first batch of what you want me to read". I enjoyed also a recent book on Esalen not too long ago, which Ishvara, Harbin's Founder, I think, looks toward. I'm attaching to this email the introduction and first chapter of my Harbin manuscript. And here are Tom Boellstorff's "Reviews | Table of Contents | Chapter 1[PDF]" for free from Princeton UP - http://press.princeton.edu/
I just began to add a center section of photos last night after chapter 4 ("Place and Time") and before chapter 5 ("Personhood" at Harbin), so I'm planning to sprinkle photos throughout, like in Tom's first chapter, and also publish a robust centerfold section to document Harbin fully before its fire, and from during my years-long time of field work, but haven't developed an organizing focus for photos yet in the middle of the book.
I'd love to incorporate "play, purpose and potential ... " re key ideas here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Thank you.
Happy Thanksgiving, Feast Day, Harvest Festival plus to you! :)
Hi John, (Charles, and David),
In sending you my Harbin ethnographic 1st chapter manuscript, plus index, just now, it looks like I'm playing lead ... guitar ... but rather possibly Scottish small pipes, and you John may be on rhythm guitar, and you on keyboard?, Charles, and you David on bass, upright possibly, in our little rock and roll band - all metaphorically of course ... until we play musical instruments. :)
I'd be interested too in engaging the tennis metaphor of keeping the ball going back and forth (doubles, of course) ... for flow experiences ... in this Harbin publishing process ... rather than putting the ball away each point to make a win, and losing the ball in the bushes thus ending the game, and the "flow" experiences.
I'm including below University of Toronto Press' Anne Brackenbury's email and my response re potentially excerpting this now 443 page Harbin manuscript for a 2nd Harbin book for UoT's "Teaching Culture" series ... could be fun ...
{New "Academic Press at World University and School" questions to follow, Charles, and wanting to publish, in a parallel way, with Google Books, if possible, anticipating machine learning translation probably in Google at some point in the future).
Again, Happy Thanksgiving, Feast Day, Harvest Festival plus to you! :)
Hi Scott,
Thanks very much for this query and for your patience in waiting for my reply.
This is a hugely interesting project but I have to admit that I find the “hugeness” may be a bit of stumbling block in determining how to proceed with this. I’m still not totally clear on whether the “book” you want to write is an ethnography of the actual Harbin or of the virtual Harbin, a comparison of the two, or all of the above! My sense is that you’re trying to do too much with one book and so I would encourage you to break this down into more discrete projects. I think there may be a book about the ethnography of actual Harbin, a virtual recreation of this community and its ongoing second life, and perhaps a journal article that compares the two and makes a contribution to methodological and theoretical issues about digital technology.
I edit a series designed for undergraduate teaching called Teaching Culture. These are scholarly informed works but they tend to be written with undergraduates in mind – so narratively driven, with rich characters and thick description, and with the theory receding more into the background. I could imagine a Harbin ethnography that was brief (55,000 words maximum) and which touched on linking this community to broader questions in anthropology, and maybe ended with a chapter that explained the digital second life of this community. That, paired with access to the virtual Harbin you build could be a really great pedagogical (and public) contribution when used together in a classroom. That’s a far cry though from a 153,000 word book with up to 100 images (that would result in a book close to 500 pages! though.
So I would encourage you to revisit this project and think distinctly about different audiences – the scholarly audience (which might be serviced by a journal article), the course market (a pedagogical book), the broader public (maybe that’s a coffee table book?), and the virtual version – and think about how these various pieces might all tell different parts of the story; a transmedia approach, if you will. I would potentially be interested in the pedagogical book and if you were able to work with getting funding from another organization, there is also the potential for a collaboration to ensure the virtual Harbin and the printed book worked together well. But all this requires you to refine your vision a little, and then do some footwork with other organizations (Mellon?) to think about a collaboration.
Hope this helps!
Best,
Anne
From: Scott MacLeod [mailto:sgkmacleod@
Sent: October-18-15 10:59 PM
To: Brackenbury, Anne; Hildebrand, Doug
Subject: Actual / virtual Harbin Hot Springs' ethnographic book proposal
Sent: October-18-15 10:59 PM
To: Brackenbury, Anne; Hildebrand, Doug
Subject: Actual / virtual Harbin Hot Springs' ethnographic book proposal
Dear Dear Anne Brackenbury and Douglas Hildebrand,
Dear Anne,
Thanks very much for your email and great ideas. I'm potentially interested in writing a pedagogical Harbin ethnographic book. It would be great to reach a student market which buys books (and both scholarly journal article and coffee table book markets), and as the University of Toronto Press's executive editor, and as head of its "Teaching Culture" series, your suggestion of a 55,000 word ethnography, and other related further publications focusing on "Teaching Culture" anthropologically vis-a-vis my Harbin ethnographic project (as counterculture) is something I'd love to follow up on, do and write. (And I'd also like for the eventual Academic Press at World University and School to publish the whole 500 page ethnography as WUaS prepares with machine learning for translation). Perhaps I can turn the Harbin talk I'm giving the UC Berkeley Anthropology department (in the Tourism Studies' Working Group in http://tourismstudies.org/
The book first and foremost I wanted to write about both actual and virtual Harbin came into conversation with Tom Boellstorff's ethnographic book "Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human," and I wrote it. My Harbin ethnographic manuscript is thus of a whole as it is, albeit long. (But I think there would be a significant academic library+ market for this worldwide, and price-wise, as well). I also think the anthropological knowledge-generative/
It could be very interesting therefore to explore excerpting parts of this and write a Harbin-centric, teaching culture, undergraduate ethnographic book for the series you edit, Anne, "which is narratively driven, with rich characters and thick description, and with the theory receding more into the background." I'd enjoy developing a Harbin ethnography that was brief (55,000 words maximum) and which "touches on linking this community to broader questions in anthropology, and ends with a chapter that explains the digital virtual Harbin of this community." I'd also enjoying pairing this with access to the virtual Harbin I build, but again in a virtual earth with a developing film-realistic 3D interactive build-able wiki-informed virtual Harbin/earth and even as a classroom itself both for teaching ethnography (but also for World University and School, for example). (I would hope again to develop my whole 153,000 word actual / virtual "Naked Harbin" manuscript for an emergent Academic Press at World University and School some years ahead, with its planned focus on translation into other languages with developing machine learning/AI and a planned WUaS universal translator).
The transmedia approach you suggest has much merit, Anne. Google would be my virtual earth / virtual Harbin of choice as infrastructure (with Google in an Android Smartphone, and used even in Goggles, with Google Translate, with G+ Hangouts +), while the Mellon foundation could also be a very important collaboration partner for funding (given their creative funding history such as with CC MIT OpenCourseWare which World University and School plans to accredit upon). Would it be possible to get your, the University of Toronto Press, or UT faculty members who know the Mellon Foundation (or have already received grants from them), letter writing and network support when applying for possible grants/funding from Mellon please?
How does this sound to you? Thank you.
Best regards,
ScottJohn, (Charles and David),
In terms of reading for "finalization," THEORETICALLY after getting the unfinished bits from me - e.g. list of illustrations, etc., you, John, could email the 9 chapters and index you've read to Charles, or similar, on February 7th, 2016, and he could put, and ready, the manuscript in Google Books for pressing the publication button, or similar, on Valentine's day, as publisher, but I'm planning to do this ...
One goal of the book is to co-create a kind of centering down in Friends' Meeting from home and in one's bath tub even (for the relaxation response / inner releasing action meditation) in a virtual Harbin, so that the Reader as well as you and I could get the Harbin experience (like the Jimi Hendrix experience?) ... from home, socially, "realistically and virtually in a virtual world with film-realism, interactivity, 3D, and which is build-able, eventually" (http://scott-macleod.
Best regards,
Scott
Scott
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There's a fascinating brief Harbin history in the Califia's Children blog called "Harbin Hot Springs and the Heart Consciousness Church," which link you'll find here - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2015/09/harbin-hot-springs-and-heart.html - and I hope my !500 page Actual~Virtual "Naked Harbin" ethnographic book will be out by Valentine's Day 2016 ~ http://www.scottmacleod.com/ActualVirtualHarbinBook.html.
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Hoping to create two Harbin ethnographic books as well as a new Academic Press at World University and School - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Academic_Press_at_World_University_and_School - out of this process, where WUaS's Press with its first book would publish "Naked Harbin", and the University of Toronto's Press, in its "Teaching Culture" series, would publish the other.
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