Firefly: 'What’s not to like about Harbin?' & Social Theory

As you observed not too long ago, “What’s not to like about Harbin?”

And I ask myself how might I shape a ‘reading’ of Harbin that stems from a place of bliss and ease that is also richly regenerative for readers, and leads to helping to produce a new ethos? Perhaps I can do so in a virtual world, while spending a lot of time at Harbin.

Since our visit at Harbin in the spring of 2005, I’d like to evoke life at Harbin in relation to its way of life vis-à-vis its physical place – the valley, the pools, the main area, the conference center, the temple, and the domes, for example - in your mind with word pictures, and why I think these places are significant ethnographically. Each of these places here, as well as the valley itself, come together as a whole (the gestalt, meaning for me, also, ‘the whole,’ the milieu, context, or discourse, here) to give shape to the Harbin community. But the Harbin experience is unique for everyone who comes here, and finding and giving form to the right words, that sing ethnographically, would be very enjoyable.

But before I begin to examine how people explore the uniquely beautiful Harbin gestalt vis-à-vis its physical structures including the valley, the pools (which were built in ), the conference center, the walkway art between Stonefront Lodge and the guest rooms of Azalea / Walnut, the domes, the temple, the garden, the resident’s center, and the planning for the new guest room area in the meadow, as well as the three buildings with guest rooms, the Fern Kitchen (the community kitchen), the Harbin restaurant, the Harbin market, the Blue Room café, Stonefront Lodge and its library, main room the trailer park, the bookstore, the office, the residents’ dwellings, tents, the Warehouse, etc., I’d like to outline the theoretical approach I’ll take to this ethnography, moving toward a sophisticated ethnographic interpretation of Harbin.

But before I begin, I’d like, in brief, to outline other social scientific approaches, as well as some speculative ones, and why I won’t engage them, applicable as they may be to a rigorous study of Harbin.


Modernity

In a broad sense, I’d like to suggest that Harbin emerges out of the 1960s and 1970s as a response to Modernity (Habermas). Modernity, with some of its roots in the Enlightenment and Industrialization, and now Globalization, shapes far-reaching ways of thinking against which counterculture resists. But Harbin hasn’t responded to Modernity in any direct way, if one can conceive of Harbin as an entity, - it just happened organically. And Harbin has explicitly stayed away from any direct analysis of Modernity, as a hot springs’ retreat center. But even as an identity has emerged here, the people who visit here live a life that they want at Harbin, quietly in a California County distant from metropolises.

Although Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Freud and Foucault offer specific analyses of Modernity, in the context of social science, that offer fascinating approaches to understanding Harbin, their analyses tend to obscure what an ethnographic, hermeneutical method engaging field work makes possible. A Weberian sociology of comparative religions’ approach provide ways to analyze Heart Consciousness Church and Harbin’s New Age, as well as rich insight into questions of meaning and agency here in what developed into a kind of hippie organization, where no one is really in charge – Harbin has succeeded due to its popularity - but Ish and the managing directors continue to make some decisions, I think a hermeneutic approach to understanding Harbin from the inside through ethnographic practice yields a wide variety of experiences that, using Weber as a starting point, would not help explain. And while a Durkheimian approach might help to shape a reading of Harbin as a social fact, where access to the Harbin pools, and Harbin’s yoga, for example, might somehow balance or bring into harmony other aspects of life here shaped by role specialization, if, following Durkheim, you conceive of Harbin as a social organism using the metaphor of the body. In this view, I think the pools could be understood as a symbol, like a totem, that ritually, but even more experientially, harmonize individuals and the eclectic group, but ethnography’s use of field work as the basis for ethnographic practice avoids many of the assumptions Inherent in such Durkheimian “social fact” analysis, because it allows for examination of what the actual Harbin experience, harmony-wise and milieu-wise, is here. The examination of multiple perspectives that empirically dispute such positivist assumptions of social processes, directly engages what individual actors experience. And while a Marxian approach could easily be shown to demonstrate the role that capital plays in the now globalized economic system, to create kinds of false consciousness through the media, stratifying workers and owners into contested relationships, and that this happens at Harbin Hot Springs and Heart Consciousness Church, an ethnographic approach offers insight into rich cultural phenomena here that Marxian totalizing analyses don’t take into account. I also haven’t heard of any attempts to unionize Harbin; a renters’ strike occurred at Harbin in the 1970s. And a rigorous Freudian reading of Harbin could make rich use in examining the role of desire, the unconscious, id and libido vis-à-vis ego principles, as well as giving rise to the emergence of Harbin as a place for society’s discontents, Freud’s work can’t usefully explain, as I see it, Harbin’s emergence in conjunction with counterculture, as well as the interesting linguistic expressions of individual Harbin residence, or the value of such a free place for libido, due to the Freudian tendency toward judgmentalism. Freud did, however, attempt to reason about questions of the mind and sexuality, thus giving rise to a far-reaching societal discourse. And Foucault’s examination of the relationship between discourse and power doesn’t really take into account the role that economics pay in influencing social processes.

And while each of these seminal (social scientific) thinkers, offer insights into ways in which structure and agency in social processes articulate with one another, none of them can explain these questions vis-à-vis Harbin, its hippie-ness, and its orientation to the New Age, as well as its success as the Heart Consciousness Church business. And in wishing also to document Harbin now and over the past 36 years, these approaches are also not helpful.

A sociology of religion of Heart Consciousness Church offers ways to examine how the New Age finds specific and historical expression as a syncretic religion mostly at the Harbin Hot Springs property, and less so at Sierra Hot Springs. But a sociology isn't a great approach for this project.