While most of us feel that it is integrated and stable, the self relentlessly engages in a complex gymnastic. Not only does it oscillate between a plurality of facets, roles, ideas, values, emotions, sometimes contradictory, but it is also endowed with a relative elasticity. Certain immersive experiences constitute fascinating laboratories to explore such dynamics. Like actors, historical reenactors impersonate men and women of the past. Cosplayers embody comic book heroes whilst furry fans and puppy players pretend to be animals. Fiction writers invent literary alter egos for themselves, a fabrication of identity that resembles the creation of avatars in the cyberspace. Some anthropologists, too, are familiar with such experiences. In participant observation, the ethnographer self appears to be increasingly fragmented and malleable. I call these “exo-experiences.” Rooted in perspective-taking, empathy and imitation, they share a desire, that of having, as captured by Proust in La Prisonière, “other eyes, of seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others, of seeing the hundred universes that they see.”
David Berliner is a professor of anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He mostly writes about memory, nostalgia, heritage, and cultural transmission, but has started a new research project about digital immersions. His books include Becoming Other (Berghahn Books, forthcoming), Losing Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and the edited volumes World Heritage on the Ground (with Christoph Brumann) and Anthropology and Nostalgia (with Olivia Angé).
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