Soil and Roots: Actual and Virtual Harbin - Problem and Venue

Problem and Venue in Actual and Virtual Harbin


Problem

The site, space, or discourse that is Harbin Hot Springs emerges into the present out of a blockage, difficulty, or breakdown that was the late 1960s and early 1970s, (as well as modernity) where widespread expressions of counterculture found form. Harbin's ongoing expression as site, space, or discourse requires both the conceptual work of understanding this unique assemblage, as well as the narratives that emerge there which inform the Harbin experience. The parallel practical work which my fieldwork as well as my creation of virtual Harbin Hot Springs in Second Life / OpenSim gives rise to, as problem, concerns the disjunctions that develop in the actual-virtual space.

The blockage that is Harbin vis-a-vis modernity, and as an organization - in the present - becomes the platform for the elaboration of tensions, where the people, actors and organizations that are my informants, and Harbin, Heart Consciousness Church, New Age Church of Being, and the Watsu Center, etc., both give rise to breakdowns, as well as shape practices in an ongoing way that make up the 'Harbin experience.' Additionally, in examining these breakdowns that occur 1) in studying actual Harbin ethnographically, 2) in creating a virtual Harbin, and 3) in giving form to these blockages vis-a-vis both the 'actual' and the 'virtual,' the disjunctions that emerge between these two aspects give new form to this study of Harbin.


Venue

Two venues, then, emerge from this problem. 'Actual' Harbin becomes the venue that shapes both the narratives and the objects of inquiry, including the pools, the pool area, etc., explicit understandings of the present, questions of embodiment, and the Harbin experience.

And 'virtual' Harbin, as information technology in the form of virtual world building, and then avatar interaction in what will become a comparative in-world, field site, which then gives expression to new forms of narrativity. So, venue includes here a new form of 'textual' generation.

In addition to the venue of actual Harbin, the venue here becomes both literally a kind of informational technological equipment – virtual Harbin, as well as the generation of this as ethnographic practice – in the present.