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What does it mean to incorporate a culturally significant practice from one society, not into another culture or social tradition, but rather into an imagined, fantasized and idealized world? This is one of the questions I will be discussing during my talk \u201cDigitizing Raqs Sharqi<\/em>\u201d<\/strong> during the International Bellydance Conference of Canada<\/span> in April. I have been conducting some virtual fieldwork, looking at Belly dance in Second Life<\/span>, an online game created managed by Linden Labs<\/span> of Seattle, Washington. <\/p>\n \u201cVirtual fieldwork\u201d is fieldwork in a digital setting; for example, looking at online magazines, message boards, social networking and video sharing websites to learn about what people do there and why. It also includes looking at multi-player online games such as Second Life, where people from around the globe can interact in a simulated online world. <\/p>\n When the issue of Belly dance in Second Life first arose in one of the research interviews I was conducting for my PhD, which is about the international dance community and the globalization of Belly dance, I was intrigued. Through my interviews I had learned just how much the Internet has changed the way dancers interact with one another in the past nineteen years, reflecting the way it has radically changed the way people communicate and interact with one another more generally in that time. However, it had not occurred to me that people would turn to an online game to dance, an activity that (until then) I thought of as something that couldn’t be done digitally. Though my research on the ways dancers communicate online took a different direction for my PhD thesis, I remained interested in this phenomenon. <\/p>\n\n
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