re #3: I don’t think we agree! But I’ll take a closer look and try to elaborate on that.

re #4: Well now. You claim in CASL that the “static pages of a book” cannot make people experience, vicariously, the joy and heartbreak of others. I simply disagree and would argue that books have been doing this for (conservatively) hundreds of years.

What I find interesting is the implication that there are other “non static” semiotic technologies which can somehow more adequately capture the human experience… maybe SL perhaps?

Thanks so much for your careful review. I’m very grateful for all the interest. I’m also in dire need of catching up on American Anthropologist reviewing work, so I’ll just reflect on some statements, correct some misunderstandings, and hopefully contribute further to the discussion.

#1 First, to correct the mistaken impression of “anon.” I did not do my research solely in Second Life because of the University of California, Irvine’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). They were actually very easy and supportive. Where do these rumors originate? (If anyone is planning on doing research on a virtual world kind of space, feel free to email me and I can share with you my IRB form. Several people have done so in the past couple years and have found it helpful.) I’ve had much more issue with my work on HIV/AIDS and gay, lesbian, and transgendered Indonesians than I ever had with my Second Life research.

#2 While we’re on the topic of methods and the idea of studying a virtual world “in its own terms” (I unpack that phrase further in the book). To be clear (and I say this in the book): I’m not saying that all online research needs to do this, or even that my future research online will do this. I could imagine a project in Second Life or Facebook or elsewhere where it might not make sense, depending on the research questions at hand. But I do want to disagree with any claim (and there are people who make this claim) that *every* online research project *must* include meeting or interviewing one’s interlocutors in the physical world, even if those persons never meet in the physical world. That’s one valid way of doing research, but not the only way. It represents an unhelpful straightjacket if imposed dogmatically as the only valid method. I’m reminded of the methodological experiments I made in my first two books on gay Indonesians, where I explain that I’m studying gay “Indonesians,” not gay “Javanese” or “Balinese.” In those books I’m quite clear that I’m not saying studying people as “Balinese” or “Javanese” is wrong, just that for the research questions motivating my work at that time, it was important to foreground the nation-state as a spatial scale of culture. So in the case of Coming of Age in Second Life, the claim is not that what I’ve done is the only appropriate way to conduct the ethnography of virtual worlds, only that it is one of many legitimate methods.

#3 Rex, when you say this:

“his justification for staying strictly in-game strikes me as fishy. His attempt to demonstrate the validity of such an approach relies on the claim [t]hat SL is a valid and unique world which is not derivative of or secondary to the real world. This seems wrong to me. First, I would argue that virtual worlds are both discrete realms of social action and predicated on the real world (this is why we stop playing SL when we die, but not vice versa).”

I think we’re in agreement here. I won’t cite myself, but take a look at pages 62-65 or so.

#4 Your claim that I have an “inability to acknowledge the power of the book as genre” seems wrong to me (obviously) and is based on taking a quotation out of context. At issue is not apologizing for one’s analytical ambitions, but situating them. Those of you out there who’ve written books know the interesting choices one confronts when crafting a book. Coming of Age in Second Life is the first I’ve written where not a single chapter was previously published: it was written all in one amazing period, right after completing the formal fieldwork. Unlike The Gay Archipelago and A Coincidence of Desires, I also didn’t have specific set of topics to narrow the focus (sexuality and nation, among other things, in the case of those two books). Since I didn’t want the book to get too big, that meant that I couldn’t write a whole book-length section on religion, or gender, or economics, etc., and instead took a broad perspective. And then played around with the “classic” ethnographic mode as a result. The Mead link is obvious from the title, but if you look around in the book I have fun with Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard, among others. Historical sensibilities can be productive in these technologically mediated times. Savage Minds indeed!

On that note – I thank you (and Kerim and everyone) for engaging with my work and apologize that I don’t have time to respond in more depth. I owe both of you a drink at the AAAs! Coming of Age in Second Life was a joy to research and a joy to write. I’m so happy with the result and while I know I sound like a broken record, I am *truly* thankful for the interest in the book.