Travelling Languages

Culture, Communication and Translation in a Mobile World

John O'Regan, Jane Wilkinson, Mike Robinson, John O'Regan, Jane Wilkinson, Mike Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317749707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Based on the commonly held assumption that we now live in a world that is 'on the move', with growing opportunities for both real and virtual travel and the blurring of boundaries between previously defined places, societies and cultures, the theme of this book is firmly grounded in the interdisciplinary field of 'Mobilities'. 'Mobilities' deals with the movement of people, objects, capital, information, ideas and cultures on varying scales, and across a variety of borders, from the local to the national to the global. It includes all forms of travel from forced migration for economic or political reasons, to leisure travel and tourism, to virtual travel via the myriad of electronic channels now available to much of the world's population. Underpinning the choice of theme is a desire to consider the important role of languages and intercultural communication in travel and border crossings; an area which has tended to remain in the background of Mobilities research.

The chapters included in this volume represent unique interdisciplinary understandings of the dual concepts of mobile language and border crossings, from crossings in 'virtual life' and 'real life', to crossings in literature and translation, and finally to crossings in the 'semioscape' of tourist guides and tourism signs.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication.

Crossing borders virtual and real: a transnational Internet-based community of Spaghetti Western fans finally meet each other face to face on the wild plains of Almeria, Spain

Lee Broughton

Since the rise of the Internet, the act of border crossing has become a pursuit that must necessarily be conceptualized in both real and virtual terms. By using theories connected to virtual communities, new technologies, fan cultures and tourism, this paper seeks to show that the culturally productive activities of a transnational virtual community of Spaghetti Western fans resulted in some of their number crossing real borders and meeting each other face-to-face. My findings are in part supported by evidence collected via a participant observation exercise and e-mail interviews.

Com o avanço da Internet, o ato de se cruzar fronteiras tornou-se um projeto que deve necessariamente ser pensado tanto em tempo real quanto virtual. Recorrendo a teorias sobre comunidades virtuais, novas teconologias, fã-clubes e turismo, este trabalho irá mostrar que as atividades culturalmente produtivas da comunidade de fãs de Spaghetti Westerns, estabelecida num ambiente virtual e transnacional, fizeram com que vários de seus participantes cruzassem fronteiras reais e se encontrassem pessoalmente. Essa constatação é em parte baseada em evidência que obtive por intermédio de um exercício de observação participativa e entrevistas por e-mail.

Introduction

The box office success of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) resulted in a worldwide vogue for Italian Westerns. Leone’s films, and several other so-called Spaghetti Westerns, were released theatrically in America and Britain but hundreds of other genre entries failed to find American or British distributors. American and British reviewers tended to dismiss these films as worthless, ersatz Westerns that lacked cultural roots and the genre eventually came to an end in the late 1970s (see Frayling, 1981). In recent years some Spaghetti Westerns have undergone critical reevaluations, resulting in new acknowledgement of their cinematic worth. But while Leone’s films remain popular, much of the rest of the genre enjoys no public profile. However, cult cinema fans throughout the world do still champion the genre’s wider catalogue to this day and a number of these fans now gather together at an Internet message board called the Spaghetti Western Web Board.

Having been a fairly regular contributor to the Spaghetti Western Web Board, I posted a message on 1 February 2006 explaining my academic interest in fan culture theory and asking whether anybody would object to me gathering evidence and quotes from the board in order to map the fan culture activities that occurred there. I received a number of positive responses and, more importantly, no negative responses. Remaining aware of Seiter’s (2000) concerns regarding subjects modifying their behaviour in order to impress their observer, I detected no change of behaviour in any of the web board’s members during the course of my ethnographic exercise, which ran for a year. Reference to the identities of the posters quoted, the titles of their messages and the messages’ URLs has not been made in order to preserve the posters’ anonymity and privacy. Quotes from the message board are simply attributed to the Spaghetti Western Web Board. Those who took part in e-mail interviews were happy to be identified.

This article represents the first detailed examination of the participatory activities of this select group of film fans. As such it seeks in the first instance to prove that this transnational body of Spaghetti Western fans, who cross virtual borders in order to communicate with each other on-line via the Spaghetti Western Web Board, are a ‘virtual community’ (Rheingold, 2000). The test criteria for evidence of virtual community used here is drawn from the work of Denzin (1999), Rheingold (2000) and Bakardjieva (2003). Secondly, this article seeks to map some of the practices of cultural production that are evidenced on the web board. The methodology employed – participant observation and e-mail interviews – is drawn principally from the work of Wakefield (2001) and Bird (2003). Jenkins (1992), Bacon-Smith (1992), Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) and Hills (2002) have all developed theories connected to fan cultures that are primarily focused upon the activities of fans of cult television texts. I use these theories to test the Spaghetti Western Web Board’s members’ cultural production, thus proving that fan culture activity can be found amongst cult film fans in this instance.

In the course of doing so, I show that a transnational body of Spaghetti Western fans – who first met each other by crossing virtual borders – were finally moved to meet each other face to face at the Spanish locations where their favourite films were shot. The impetus for this in-person meeting was the circulation of a fan-produced film, Mario Marsili’s C’era una Volta il Western (2003), whose content suggested that many of the iconic buildings and shooting sites associated with Italian Westerns would soon be lost to the ravages of time or industrial redevelopment. Seen by some participants as a last chance to personally view the remains of the genre’s filming locations before they disappeared forever, this in-person group meeting necessarily involved the physical crossing of numerous real world borders. This physical crossing of real world borders in turn resulted in the web board members embarking on a still ongoing mission to capture filmic and photographic records of what remains of Almeria’s Spaghetti Western filming locations so that they might be digitally preserved for the enjoyment of future generations. Two films shot during the trip to Almeria and web sites subsequently created by members of the Spaghetti Western Web Board were used as the primary research resources for the final third of this article.

Virtual borders, virtual community

Most Internet users’ on-line activities reflect their off-line interests too. Hence, fans of The X-Files (Wakefield, 2001) and Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman (Bird, 2003) are drawn to become members of Internet message boards that are devoted to their favourite television shows. An American citizen, John Nudge advises that he created the Spaghetti Western Web Board in 1998 after he realized that some members of a Sergio Leone message board needed a space to discuss Italian Westerns that were not directed by Leone (personal communication, 4 March 2007). While acts of self-disclosure have revealed a transnational membership, with individuals posting from the USA, UK, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Japan, Turkey, Australia, South Korea and beyond (Spaghetti Western Web Board – hereafter SWWB – 2006), the board members tend to communicate in English. Anybody with an Internet connection can access the Spaghetti Western Web Board and, mindful of the emotional hurt and communal disharmony that the offensive personal attacks known as flaming can provoke, the board carries the following welcome message:

Hola, Amigo! Welcome to the SPAGHETTI WESTERN WEB BOARD. All posts relating to Spaghetti Westerns are welcome, but, please, no cussing, name-calling or eye-gouging … No slanderous or deliberate attacks on other people will be tolerated… the Marshal and his deputies, have the sole discretion with regard to deleting posts they feel are detrimental to the board … Leave your smoking guns at the Marshal’s office or you’ll be asked to leave town. (SWWB, 2006)

As if taking its cue from Rheingold’s pithy subtitle to The Virtual Community (Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier) (2000), the welcome message playfully likens the web board to a lawless, Wild West town on the edge of civilization and this sense of play feeds into some posters’ messages when they use language associated with Westerns. One member announced their permanent departure with the words, ‘adios, amigos y amigas … this board has been a great blessing to me … but … it is time I mounted up and moseyed on down the trail’ (SWWB, 2006).

The inherent sense of playfulness found in the use of this kind of Western-themed lingo – known the world over thanks to the popularity and pervasiveness of Hollywood Westerns – plays an important role in the way that some board members communicate and relate to each other. It effectively represents a common vernacular language whose use can play a part in helping individuals from different cultures, who have crossed virtual borders in order to gather together, communicate with each other and feel at ease. As such, the web board remains remarkably flame free and although the board’s members are predominantly male, there is little evidence of the kind of confrontational and argumentative ‘male styles’ of communication that Bird observed in some fan forums (2003, p. 66).

Like many such fan forums, the web board represents an asynchronous form of communication. This means that whenever a message is posted to the Spaghetti Western Web Board, other board members are at liberty to post a response in the form of a reply message within their own time, be it hours, days or weeks later. Kollock and Smith refer to these kinds of message boards as ‘‘‘pull’’ media’ because their core content attracts interested participants who then have to consciously choose which messages they read (1999, p. 6). Messages on the Spaghetti Western Web Board usually receive multiple replies, leading to an ongoing state of group-based discursive activity, but the resultant message threads have a finite life: stacked in date order, they are automatically deleted after approximately two months.

Jordan indicates that virtual communities literally coalesce around the ‘text [being] fired back and forth’ by participants on Internet message boards (1999, p. 57) while Denzin asserts that individuals ‘establish their presence … [in such virtual communities] … through their regular participation in the conversational topics of the group’ (1999, p. 114). Repeated participation on a message board results in the individual establishing a virtual ‘personality, self and reputation’ (Denzin, 1999, p. 114). In December 2006 a tradition of posting Christmas greetings revealed 48 regular Spaghetti Western Web Board posters who might collectively be considered a virtual community (SWWB, 2006). Rheingold describes virtual communities as:

social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on … public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace. (2000, p. xx)

Nudge observes that ‘many of the [Spaghetti Western Web Board] regulars joined early [on], … within the first year or so … [and] … we’ve become good friends over the years’ (personal communication, 4 March 2007). Exercises in self-disclosure have encouraged posters to reveal their birthdays, allowing one archivist member to initiate regular ‘birthday greetings’ messages (SWWB, 2006). Fernback maintains that ‘if communication is the core of community, then [a] community is real whether it exists within the same physical locality or half a world away via … telephone wires (1999, p. 213). The Spaghetti Western Web Board is a site of much communication, averaging over one thousand postings per month (SWWB, 2006; SWWB, 2007).

Furthermore, actors and directors associated with the Italian Western genre have at times visited the board, sometimes offering first hand testimonies that allow members to add further detail to their personal histories and knowledge of the genre. Nudge observes:

We’ve had a number of Spaghetti Western insiders post – Hunt Powers, Robert Woods, Sergio Donati, Aldo Sanbrell, Robert Mark, just to name a few. Dan Van Husen is a regular. One member has struck up a friendship with Nicoletta Machiavelli … [while] … another tracked down Charles Southwood, who everyone thought was just a pseudonym for an Italian actor (he’s American, and that’s his real name). For years we’ve been trying to find the name of the man who played Guy Calloway in For a Few Dollars More. Last year, out of the blue, his son visited to tell us his father is a Spanish stuntman … [called] … Luis Rodriguez. (personal communication, 4 March 2007)

Most of the professionals that Nudge refers to had their identities confirmed when they were subsequently interviewed for the fanzine Westerns All’Italiana.

In seeking evidence that confirms that an on-line gathering is a virtual community, Rheingold adopts and expands upon a schema developed by graduate student Mark Smith (1992), which asserts that ‘three kinds of collective goods … [act] … as the social glue that binds’ genuine on-line communities together: ‘social network capital, knowledge capital, and communion’ (2000, p. xxviii). ‘Social network capital’ is evidenced when ready-made ‘real world’ communities are accessed via introductions initiated on an Internet message board (Rheingold, 2000, p. xxviii). A real world community of Spaghetti Western fans exists in California and Nudge reports that he and others have accessed this community thanks to ‘another board member, [who] has generously sponsored a number of us [non-Californians] to attend the Golden Boot Awards in Beverly Hills the last few years’ (personal communication, 4 March 2007). Similarly, a New York-based community of Spaghetti Western fans issued the following invite when the soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone performed in the city: ‘We are having a pre-Ennio dinner at Virgil’s, Saturday at 4 PM, if anyone else is interested’ (SWWB, 2007). In both cases, ‘social network capital’ (Rheingold, 2000, p. xxviii) resulted in a number of American Spaghetti Western fans, that had first come to know each other on-line, briefly meeting in-person for largely social (albeit still genre-related) purposes. By contrast, the sense of transnational participation and cultural production found in the board members’ gathering in Almeria, Spain makes that particular real world meeting more significant to my mind and it will be duly covered in detail in section two.

‘Knowledge capital’ is evidenced when individuals are able to draw upon the collective expertise of an on-line community (Rheingold, 2000, p. xxviii). Nudge notes that some Spaghetti Western Web Board members are ‘known authorities on the genre … [who are] … very generous in answering questions’ posted by newer members (personal communication, 4 March 2007). One new poster observed ‘through reading the numerous posts on this site [I] find out more info and without doubt learn a lot’ (SWWB, 2007). Baym notes that ‘[together] a large group of fans can … accumulate, retain, and continually recirculate unprecedented amounts of relevant information’ (1998, p. 118). Citing the work of Pierre Levy (1997), Jenkins refers to on-line fandom groups as ‘knowledge c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Travelling languages: culture, communication and translation in a mobile world
• 1. Crossing borders virtual and real: a transnational Internet-based community of Spaghetti Western fans finally meet each other face to face on the wild plains of Almeria, Spain
• 2. Crossing the intercultural borders into 3rd space culture(s): implications for teacher education in the twenty-first century
• 3. Figuring home: the role of commodities in the transnational experience
• 4. Language and the negotiation of identity and sense of belonging: a study of literary representations of Indians in England
• 5. Travelling languages? Land, languaging and translation
• 6. Portuguese ‘to go’: language representations in tourist guides
• 7. ‘Please don’t climb trees and pick flowers for the sake of life’ – making sense of bilingual tourism signs in China
• Index