The Metaverse And Its Double: Toward Phygital Anthropologies

Immersive media offer a privileged site for examining contemporary transformations of reality, presence, embodiment, and mediation. This study approaches extended reality (XR) and the broader imaginaries associated with the metaverse as hybrid environments in which bodies, images, screens, gestures, and technical supports enter into increasingly dense relations. Drawing on media studies, visual culture, media archaeology, the anthropology of media, and performance theory, it develops a genealogical and interdisciplinary framework that foregrounds the centrality of theatre and the performing arts for understanding immersive experience. From this perspective, virtuality emerges as a matter of embodied and performative world-making, shaped by scenic organization, ritual efficacy, liveness, and relational mediation. Through the chapters *Gazes*, *Bodies*, *Environments*, and *Simulations*, the dissertation traces how immersive media transform images into environments, interfaces into habitats, and mediated experience into hybrid ecologies of relation. It further advances the concept of the **Metaverse of Attractions** as an analytical framework for describing contemporary phygital regimes structured by spectacle, reenactment, synchronized participation, and embodied interaction. The study culminates in the proposal of **phygital anthropologies**, in the plural, in order to account for the multiple ways contemporary human experience is configured across images, screens, bodies, infrastructures, and technical environments.