No Frost
No frost
on the sleeping deck
last night
at Harbin :) ~
and the day
was so beautiful.
*
Metaphorical {and Narrative} Relativism
I'm curious about a kind of metaphorical relativism emerging in some ways from cultural relativism (Franz Boas) and linguistic relativism (Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf) in the beginnings of anthropology in the 20th century. Simply put, cultural relativism suggests that all cultures are relative, and claims to superiority of any one are explicitly called into question. Linguistic relativism explicitly examines the role that language plays in understanding, again questioning any claims to superiority, for one over another, suggesting instead that languages are different (Hopi and English, for example) and make fundamentally different understandings of the world possible.
Both Stanford Professor Richard Rorty and, possibly, University of Pennsylvania philosopher Elisabeth Camp may touch on related questions.
I see metaphorical relativism (a term I may be coining), in anthropology, as continuing to bring questions of relativism to spheres of metaphors relating to identity production.
I find hippie and virtual world metaphors {as well as those from nature} fascinating ... :)
**
I used to take Greyhound bus lines to Middletown, California, to get to Harbin Hot Springs in the mid-1990s. I posted a Harbin visitor's pass of mine to this blog a while ago, from 1995 {scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2008/12/poem-green-tortoise-pass.html}. I may have first visited Harbin in 1993 or 1994. I'm not sure exactly when Greyhound stopped passing through Middletown, California, but it may have been in 1997.
Now there's a Harbin ride board on yahoo groups.
***
I'm very interested in exploring the 1970s at Harbin. Ishvara is the only resident still living at Harbin who has been there since then (1972). And yet that's a time when Harbin was probably as wild as we might imagine, emerging from the 1960s. I speculate that characterizing Harbin as its own unique, ongoing kind of Rainbow Gathering, 365 days a year, in that decade, is a better characterization than most others, - until I can talk with folks who were there then.
Just as I was leaving Harbin today, I talked with someone who has been there since 1981. He's been at Harbin for longer than most people. Re-reading what he's written may open avenues for further conversation, - which is so cool. All of the longest-time Harbin residents have been there since the early 1980s. With my interest in counterculture vis-a-vis Harbin, and having lived in the 1960s and 1970s, it's fascinating to me how few Harbin visitors I've met who remember that time. And while this makes Harbin in the 1970s remote vis-a-vis my ethnographic inquiries, it also makes me to find and talk with people who were there at that time.
****
After playing my bagpipes during the Harbin Easter egg hunt, as well as piping up to the pools today {hippies seem to love parades:}, I talked with a Harbin resident who suggested reading "Golf in the Kingdom" {of Fife, Scotland}, which he compared glowingly to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" in its luminosity, for him. I later noticed that Michael Murphy, who, significantly, gave form to Esalen, with its many parallels with Harbin, wrote this book. :) (Esalen may still largely be Murphy's business). A lot of people traveled back and forth between Harbin and Esalen (see Kripal's "Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion") in the 1960s and '70s. Hippies can be very anti-religious and funny about seeing religion as a kind of hoax, the opium of the people, a tool of oppression, etc. ...
(Scott Macleod Bagpiping at Easter Harbin Hot Springs with wizard and Easter Bunny
photo: Harbin Hot Spring's Easter 2005 (Scott MacLeod and Eric R.) photo credit ?)
*****
But something happens in the Harbin warm pool which is very harmonizing and enjoyable, akin to the relaxation response - https://web.archive.org/web/20100210223158/http://www.relaxationresponse.org/steps/ (was: relaxation response), ~ see, too: https://www.massgeneral.org/
*
...
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment