Cosplay as Tribal Ritual: Transmedial Archetypes as Avatar and Shaman
A recent transmedial cultural phenomenon has transformed into annual mass gatherings of anime acolytes, exploring their unique cross-cultural identities at large regional “cons.” Over a quarter million Americans attended regional expositions in 2014. A central feature of these events is secular ritual play, the actualization of archetypal personalities, as individuals don costumes and masks as tools for storytelling and personal transformation.
Cosplay participants use craft and performance art to express a “second face to the face,” (Keats) exploring their spiritual and cultural ties to their chosen archetypes. Observers share in the ecstasy of interacting with these avatars in a unique social ritual, suspending their rational disbelief in the moment. Cultural boundaries between East and West are lowered as the universal archetypes of hero, guardian, herald, shadow, mentor and trickster (Campbell) create strong emotional bonds with each other and the crowd.
Anime conventions fit all the parameters for ritual; a repetitive social practice, setoff from the routines of daily life, encoded in myth, and following recognizable ritual schema. (Shultz and Lavenda) The identities constructed are a fertile source of insight into the mores and myths of the millennial generation. These ritual moments out of time reveal the values and belief systems of attendees, as anime pilgrims gather for a unique mixing of the tribes that make up this primarily virtual society.
Presented at American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2015
Link to full presentation- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tk29m7inQI
Trailblazing in a Transmedial Age: Parents Making Place for Transgender Children
Tech savvy millennial parents are creating novel transmedial dialogues about their transgender and gender fluid children at an early age, trail breaking a path to acceptance and validation. Like their children, these parents are “persistent, consistent and insistent” when advocating for their child’s right to exist and thrive as his/her genuine self. The tactics and tools that they employ, to start a different conversation with an expanding audience, are a paradigm shift to global visibility and activism facilitated by social media. Compelled by terrifying suicide rates and unconditional love, these families attack a steep learning curve while connecting with the wider world in a fledgling social justice movement that is quickly gaining momentum.
Eyewitness testimony, created by parents of young children, has the unique audience appeal of separating gender from sexuality. Although 90% of Americans claim to know a person that is homosexual (Pew), only 16% have met an individual that is transgender (Harris) and form opinions through exposure to media. Therefore, increased visibility of gender nonconforming youngsters, facilitated by access to and mastery of technology and communication strategies, can shift the social construct of gender, by transforming the local storytelling of individual families into global policy action.
Presented at American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2017
Link to full presentation- https://archive.org/details/TrailblazingInATransmedialAgeAAA2017
Glimpses of a Trickster: Kitsune in Popular Culture: Japanese Fox Legends
Inquiry into Japanese folklore paralleled European folkloristic investigations, beginning in the late 19th century and reawakening in the 1960s. Lafcadio Hearn collected Japanese folktales, including legends and ghost stories, while living in Japan in the 1890s. One of the most widespread category of tales concerned magical, mystical and sly foxes. Similarly to the European folklorists, Hearn felt that he was capturing the last moments of a romantic rural tradition that would soon disappear under the pressures of industrialization and globalization. In spite of Hearn’s prediction, author Kiyoshi Nozaki was able to document an equally rich culture, of art, literature, superstition and religious observations surrounding the legends of the fox, which was still popular during the folkloristic inquiry revival of the 1960s. Even today, these tales and folk beliefs continue to permeate modern culture…
A visit to modern day Japan reveals both ancient and current expressions of the long standing kitsune folklore as the global popularity of Japanese culture continues to carry this story across borders to distant parts of the world in a cultural diaspora.
Full transcript available at: https://drive.google.com/open?id=11D93YntSv9raFmuh25A6mswflg7DXF82
An Aegis for the Ages: Ekphrasis of Shield Imagery as Allegory
The symbolism of divine and mortal realms crafted on the shields of Agamemnon, Achilles, Herakles and Aeneas, and spoken of in varied ekphrases, can be viewed as a literary device that the ancient poets employed to reveal their belief systems, legends, and lore. These epic shields have more than one function; the first is physical protection, the second is to promote a symbol of status for the wearer and whoever captures the shield as a spoil of war. The shield is also meant to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy and can transmit a message to the other protagonists and the audience.
The imagined handiwork of Hephaestus/Vulcan, celebrated in the ekphrasis, serves to present a microcosm of world views that must have been familiar to the audiences of Homer, Hesiod and Virgil. As Aelius Theon writes in the first century AD, “descriptive language brings the thing being made manifest vividly before the sight.” (Becker, p. 8). These authors create a window with language to view an illusion of vividness so that the listeners can imagine the object in front of them. Each poet employs both description and embedded narratives to create and then break the illusion of the physical object and the life that it depicts, as Theon further describes “the vividness of seeing the things narrated.” The spatial arrangement of images and their relation to each other creates a visually organized map of each civilization’s worldview as the poet’s descriptive simile interprets the wonder of observing the human experience in all of its presence. In this way, the poets manipulate descriptive verse to interpret the scenes that are portrayed to create thauma (wonder or amazement), relating the range of mortal experience, in context with divine cosmology and intervention, as the observer of the tableau invites the audience into the world of the past through ekphrasis. The story arc of each epic poem is specific to an experience out of time either as a journey, a battle, or a series of interactions with mythic beings. It is only through the vehicle of shield ekphrases that the tableau of the shield imagery can convey the wider world of man as understood by the ancient Greeks and Romans…
Full transcript available at:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1sKUkb4ZN9rKPo6Y_VFBOfg5Nt-aLuoFF