Pied avocet: In its warm pool and valley as place, Harbin's counterculture, as sociocultural processes, involves connecting in the pool area

Harbin ethnography:


... The central Harbin Hot Springs' Mainside area, while natural, countercultural-emergent and Bohemian, in many ways, is a hippy-human-constructed environment where human decisions about technologies, informed by a kind of Harbin vision, give shape to ways of life and ease in all of Harbin's immersive and generative beauty as place.

In its warm pool and valley as place, Harbin's 'counterculture,' as 'social' sociocultural processes, involves connecting and interactions between more than one person (as a defining characteristic, too, of emergent virtual worlds like Second Life these days - Boellstorff 2008:92), in the pool area, particularly, which is very visually oriented. Harbin's warm pool adds and complements many familiar and normative sociocultural processes in modernity, with clothing-optionalness, an warm aqueous environment, and a counter-culture, where people are free to cuddle and love each other, naked, outside and in a beautiful, natural place, or simply soak alone together with others in the Harbin warm pool, also all very visual, partly because talking doesn't occur, for example, in the wary pool. And in many ways, people see their own stuff at Harbin, that is, they see people they are uniquely attracted to, for example, or natural aspects of Harbin such as (what I call) the Dragon ridge-line from the warm pool on the other side of the valley, or the fig-tree-over-the-warm-pool's little jeweled treasures suspended from its branches. But Harbin in its hippy and Gestalt-Center-with-hot-springs' origins is about seeing the whole, and, even more, living this in the now (e.g. Ishvara, “Living the Future,” Harbin publications, 1996). To know Harbin involves all visitors and residents being (anthropological?) participant-observers – Seers (with a capital S in the Upanishads?) - in the pool area, for example, - in the going into and out of the pools, naked ,and in the now. And this visuality informs, socioculturally, the Harbin-family, the Harbin property as land and territory for this tribe of residents and visitors. In this interpretation, Harbin is partly about seeing/being our naked, attractive, natural selves, as well as seeing our own stuff, as human primates (an idea which not many people have at the fore of their minds) in the New Age, at ease in the pools, which the 1960s significantly opened the way for, counterculturally.

The ways in which the Harbin pool area, vision and nudity, or more accurately clothing-optionalness, are linked at Harbin, emerging out of a resistance to mostly Western, but also including many or most spiritual, cultural and religious traditions, hang ups and concerns about a covered body – of the 1960s, counterculture and the New Age. ...

















(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2011/02/pied-avocet-in-its-warm-pool-and-valley.html - February 28, 2011)