Seed: Learning at Harbin, Workshops and Singularity

Harbin Hot Springs offers the following opportunities as courses, workshops or gatherings:

Watsu, water dance, healing dance, Human Awareness Institute "Love, Intimacy and Sexuality" workshops, Tantric Love & Ecstasy workshops, Kirtan (chanting), massage, Yoga, (life - Harbin's culture) and many other areas. It's a fascinating range of therapeutic practices and teachings, that have emerged uniquely at Harbin in the aggregate, and around the baths.

Harold Dull created Watsu {water shiatsu} in the Harbin pools. Watsu is an unique-to-Harbin art & social form.

And each of the above makes up a unique community at Harbin.

How to explore these, for example, Watsu movement in water, in the creation of a virtual world will be interesting.

In terms of social theory, Harbin Hot Springs, in my view, is a remarkable example of singularization. In explaining how social objects gain meanings, the writer and social theorist Igor Kopytoff emphasizes the possibility of commodities or objects gaining social meanings in spheres apart from those determined by exchange, focusing specifically on the process of singularization. Using Durkheim as a starting point, he proposes a counterdrive to commodification in the form of culture, where excessive commodification is anti-cultural (Kopytoff 73).

"And if, as Durkheim saw it, societies need to set apart a certain portion of their environment, marking it as “sacred,” singularization is one means to this end.

Culture ensures that some things remain unambiguously singular, it resists the commoditization of others; and it sometimes resingularizes what has been commoditized (Kopytoff 73)."

Using a Durkheimian analysis, he thus suggests that the shaping of homogenized cultural meanings, i.e. commodification, occurs within the context of consumption and production and then examines the possibility of other possible spheres where social and cultural forces oriented to uniqueness shape meaning. By assuming a Durkheimian perspective and arguing that societies construct individuals and things in different ways, however, Kopytoff, fails to consider the role of authorship or agency in shaping social processes, which ascribe meaning to objects (MacLeod, May 24, 2002 - http://scottmacleod.com/papers.htm).

In my ethnographic research, the founder of Harbin, Ishvara, has engaged an unique form of authorship in its creation, in conjunction with the very great number of people who have come through Harbin's gate since 1972.

Kopytoff, Igor. `The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process', in Arjun Appadurai (ed), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge. Pp. 64-91.