Lodoicea maldivica - biggest seed: When I think of Harbin as place, the pools are most significant, and the softening that goes on there

Harbin ethnography:


... Harbin's gatehouse is the in-out portal to this hippie-'system,' or counterculture-cum-system, of getting in touch with your warm pool self, and of living the future (Ishvara, “Living the Future,” Harbin publications, 1996), and to a kind of place-based freedom, especially in relation to the 'modernities,' as milieu, from which people are coming.

“When I think of Harbin as place, the pools are most significant, and the softening that goes on there, tucked as the pools are in a pretty little canyon very distant from the activity of a metropolis or modernities 'out there,' is quite unique” (MacLeod, Harbin Field Notes 2007-2008, May 30, 2008). For anthropologist James Clifford, modernity, characterized by rootlessness, mobility, alienation, scattered traditions, craziness, and disorder (Clifford, 1988:3-4), entails historical uncertainty and undermines concepts of cultural ‘essence.’ Modernity, in this book, refers to ways of life that emerges from everything since Gutenberg's press and printing, the Enlightenment, and the industrial revolutions, including consumerism, and how these processes may effect people in the everyday - what some hippies might call Babylon - but informed by a myriad of readings and constructions of modernities in the social sciences. “By 'countercultural,' I mean those human articulations that reflect the radicalism - political, sexual, psychedelic, communitarian, artistic - of the 1960s and early 70s which heralded, and creatively explored, widespread envisionings of possibilities to change society for the better against the powerful, and against corporate interests, as well as in response to limitations of cultural traditions and modernity (e.g. consumerism). Significant and widespread aspects of society were touched by this thinking, and far-reaching use of L.S.D., also called acid, may have lead to the expanding the consciousnesses of a generation, thus furthering counterculture, and exploding the 60s, in a way that previous generations of alternative folks and precursors to hippies didn't have access to. By one account, much of this began because mostly white, middle class youth had time on their hands to protest against the war in Vietnam and for civil rights, engaging their first amendment rights of freedom of speech and free expression (a U.C. Berkeley Ph.D. who is a professor of sociology in a Canadian university in 1999). From this emerged a variety of ways of life and thinking, practices, traditions, organizations and institutions, including Harbin Hot Springs and the Rainbow Gathering, for example” (MacLeod, Harbin Field Notes 2007-2008, June 10, 2008). In my umbrella characterization of modernity, I include what is often referred to as post-modernity, as this term emerges with and relates to, loosely, hippies and counterculture.

“Modernity sucks,” as Reg said this morning in the (Harbin's Fern community) kitchen. ...





























(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2011/02/lodoicea-maldivica-biggest-seed-when-i.html - February 15, 2011)