Fish: Harbin Hot Springs, Immersion as Method, Pools

It’s the qualities of immersion and mingling which people experience in the Harbin warm pool that is a very good example of how soft, fluid, together and free-form life can be. People trickle in and out of the pools any time all year long, and 'harmonize,' in a sense. It’s the well-being (that can lead to happiness), togetherness and, in some ways, the not-knowing-people yet still being curiously connected through water, that is so interesting. The language that Harbin posts in the pool area on signs, for example, states that the warm pool is a meditation zone. And people meditatively, in a relaxed, unique-to-the-Harbin-pools way, commune in the milieu of Harbin and especially in the pools and pool area. A remarkably wide variety of people and experiences merge together in the Harbin pools, naturally with neurophysiological effects.

People from all walks of life, of all ethnicities, come to the Harbin pools, and return again and again, because they like them, and Harbin's milieu. Harbin is diverse and multicultural, and reflects, significantly, its proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area and being in northern California. And most people go naked in the Pool area, and this adds to the harmonizing effects of the Harbin pools and milieu.

Conducting fieldwork at Harbin gives new meanings to the ethnographic method and practice of immersion - participant observation - in the field, where life in the the Harbin warm pool, significantly, comes to parallel key aspects of field work. At Harbin, the warm pool becomes the field site, in an anthropological sense. To begin to understand Harbin ethnographically is to engage life in Harbin's pools, in all its variability and fluidity, and write about it. This process may well involve exploring the neurophysiology of the 'relaxation response' elicited by the Harbin pools, especially the warm and heart pools, from the 'inside.' Like a fish in water, immersion is key to learning about Harbin.

The waters, especially the warm pool, both draw people and come to significantly influence the culture at Harbin itself, as well as in the surrounding communities outside of Harbin in Lake County.