Functional Equivalence Across Virtual Cultures

Abstract

Globalization, economic development, and information technology may either be rendering cultural anthropology obsolete, or giving it a new set of purposes and methodologies. Global communications may either cause convergence of previously distinct national and tribal cultures, or conversely support divergence as individual people may assemble virtually on the basis of unusual interests. Originally, cultural anthropology was both an outgrowth of colonialism and a corrective for its abuses. If all peoples of the world are well educated and communicate over Internet, will sociology replace cultural anthropology as the scientific means for understanding them? Or could all of the social sciences dissolve into a more general science of information and communication? Cultural anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) had proposed that different cultures actually contained much hidden similarity, having found different solutions to a small set of human problems, thus exhibiting functional equivalence despite cultural relativism. This chapter uses ten avatars, all based on Malinowski, to explore cultural differences across ten races of avatars in the Vanguard virtual world, under severe time pressures because the research began when this computer-generated environment had been scheduled for termination. One goal for this chapter was considering whether every single culture on earth deserves close ethnography, before it dissolves into a major global culture, and by analogy whether every single online game also deserves study. An alternative approach to the same question was the attempt to determine why Vanguard had failed. One section closely follows anthropological studies of religious initiation rituals. Cultural heritage is also a theme, for example in consideration of the fact that Vanguard was a direct successor to EverQuest, which led indirectly to a failure to give the avatar ethnic groups sufficient histories and quest arcs. This virtual world simulates challenges for globalization in the real world, through tension between convergence and divergence.