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166 DOI: 10.7330/9780874218909.c08 8 Love and War and Anime Art An Ethnographic Look at a Virtual Community of Collectors Bill Ellis The concept of folk groups has been central to academic folkloristics for many years. Originally, such groups were assumed to be illiterate, preliterate, or simply not as literate as the academic elite who studied them.1 Alan Dundes boldly challenged this stereotype in 1965, declaring that “folk groups” could be “any group of people whatsoever,” so long as they shared some common factor and developed traditions that gave their communities individual identity (1980, 6–7). “The folk” could include professionals , college professors, and even the most elite of scientists and engineers. Since then, folklorists have tried to banish the stereotype of “the folk” as the poorly educated topic of elite research, but, sadly, old habits of thinking are difficult to break. With the emergence of the Internet, most Americans now spend a considerable amount of time, both on the job and in leisure, keeping in touch through the medium of typed text transmitted among computers. Nevertheless, folklore theory stubbornly tends to define “folk groups” as networks of people who meet face-to-face and share information through spoken word and body language alone rather than through the more sophisticated means of electronic media now in fashion. Yet such a preference revives the old ethnocentric stereotype of “folk” meaning “ignorant ” and implicitly condemns the discipline once again to the study of obsolescent communities rather than to those that are vibrantly alive and active in our midst. David Pierpoint (screen name Sith Krillin), a Colorado PC technician and anime fan, created Anime-Beta, an online forum for anime art Love and War and Anime Art 167 collectors, in April 2002.2 Today it continues as a well-visited and cohesive virtual community. This chapter explores the multifaceted dynamics of symbolic interaction within this group, in which I have been actively involved since October 2004. Made up of a wide range of members, mostly in their late twenties and thirties with professional careers, the “Betarians” (as they refer to themselves) represent a lively group, passionate about their hobby but generally polite and respectful to each other and newcomers. Even so, the things they collect are not just rare but unique, and so anime art becomes, I argue, a type of fetish in both an imaginative and a social sense. Ownership means absolute possession of a specific, emotionally significant event in the narrative created by using the object. For this reason, possessing such an object invests the owners with equivalent social power among those sharing the same reverence for that narrative. No wonder competition among collectors is intense; yet the Anime-Beta community, with a few important exceptions, has remained relatively cohesive over time. What distinctive social customs account for this paradoxical camaraderie among highly competitive individuals, deadly enemies as an auction’s close time approaches, but mutually cooperative fellows otherwise? I argue that the two instincts—competition and cooperation—are in fact not mutually exclusive but inextricably linked in a way common to many dynamics in folklore. I propose that they are mediated through a factor that I call “restitution,” a social means of resolving the tension that the competitive act creates in a way that is seen as beneficial to the collectors’ community at large. After suggesting how pre-Internet folkloristics could be extended into the virtual realm, I briefly introduce the field of anime art collecting and provide a short history and demographic overview of the Anime-Beta community . I then examine the dynamics of this virtual community with the help of discussions posted on the forum and in personal surveys I have conducted, identifying the key values and tensions that characterize anime art collectors in general and draw them together as a group. Finally, I look in at several serious disagreements within Anime-Beta that led to public “flame wars” and observe what means were used to restore the group’s sense of shared identity. In so doing, I intend to not simply establish that Anime-Beta is a folk group motivated by the twin laws of innovation and conservatism, for the participants in this and similar web-based groups already know and feel this. 168 Bill Ellis Rather, I intend to show how a close examination of the way this community ’s identity is performed and negotiated can give us insights into the social dynamics that keep such groups cohesive and viable. Restitution is a...

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