ABSTRACT
The thirty-six chapters making up this edited collection speak to a staggering range of interests in relation to digital consumerism. Since there is no way I can engage at length with any particular chapter, for this afterword I have set myself the goal of identifying shared problematics, interests, and avenues for inquiry. Of course, I approach this task in light of my own scholarly history. As an anthropologist who has conducted extensive research on questions of sexuality and national belonging in Indonesia (e.g., Boellstorff 2005, 2007), I have a longstanding interest in culture, mass media, and consumerism. For instance, in thatwork, I developed a notionof “dubbing culture,”drawn fromadebatewhere the dubbingof foreignfilms and television shows into the Indonesian languagewas briefly banned on the grounds that if Indonesians saw Westerners appearing to “speak Indonesian,” they would no longer know where Indonesia ended and the West began (Boellstorff 2003). I have used this concept of “dubbing culture” to theorize forms of globalization where two
systems of meaning lie alongside each other without fusing. The difference between dubbing and translation is that while translation is animated by the impossible hope of a total shift from one language to another, in dubbing the moving lips never match with the new soundtrack, nor is there an expectation this will happen. I have found this concept of transformation not predicated on fusion helpful in my research on virtual worlds, particularly my book Coming of Age in Second Life (Boellstorff 2008). In this book and more recent work on ethnographic methods for virtual worlds (Boellstorff et al. 2012), I explore the “dubbing” of practices and meanings across the physical/virtual divide. These interests resonate with themes evident in The Routledge Companion to Digital Consumption.
