Harbin ethnography:
... It's this singularity that I hope to observe and interpret as Harbin's milieu emerges in virtual Harbin.
Vis-a-vis Harbin's singularity (Kopytoff), commodification and its (counter-)culture, while Harbin is a successful Hot Springs' Retreat Center business (last week when I visited, Harbin as a business just seemed to me to be humming along) these days, Harbin's location – its place – and culture make it unique. It's also a kind of not-a-commune Hippie commune, where, due to the abundance of water flowing out of the ground, its beauty, and a large number of somewhat Bohemian-minded visitors coming through the gate, in an unbroken stream since at least the mid-1960s, when it was briefly and nominally Harbinger University, a psychedelic university, life is easy there for residents and visitors alike. And although there is a 'management structure' by which decisions are made, Harbin is pretty funky in this respect, as well, and it all works as if by itself, with a very, very distributed hierarchy. The founder, Ishvara, who still lives at Harbin, has most significantly influenced this vision, simply because he's been there continuously since 1972, and, in a sense, been able to say no (not easy at Harbin), occasionally, through the years, and the other longest-term residents have been there since the 1980s. Harbin is very singular, indeed.
While values-free representation in social science ...
(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/07/white-throated-sparrow-harbins.html - July 6, 2010)
Showing posts with label Igor Kopytoff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Igor Kopytoff. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Hippocampus kuda: Both actual and virtual Harbin may articulate in new ways in the context of the Network Society, Harbin is singular
Harbin ethnography:
... new forms of counterculture emerging from the 1960s in virtual Harbin, in new ways, is something ethnography can uniquely represent.
While both actual and virtual Harbin may articulate in new ways, as countercultural 'places,' in my interpretation, in the context of the Network Society (Castells 2000), I want to suggest that Harbin is also singular (Kopytoff) in a variety of ways, vis-a-vis the 'virtual.' There have been times since 1972 when the Harbin valley has created/has been its own 'world,' akin to a nation state, or a city-state, as a separate hippie, tribal entity (an institutional, land-based polity?) – i.e. 'Harbin' (also Heart Consciousness Church, sort of) - independent from the State of California, Lake County and the U.S.A, etc. (Harbin is pretty loose/watery). Since I first visited Harbin in 1993 or 1994 to the present, and despite the theft of my laptop computer with 14 Harbin chapters and the beginnings of virtual Harbin in Open Simulator, I've come to understand Harbin in multiple ways. Its remoteness, its emergence from the 1960s in California, its independence-mindedness, and particularly its pools all give form to multiple ways in which Harbin residents and visitors think of Harbin as its own world and as unique, a key aspect of its culture. It's this singularity that I hope to observe and interpret as Harbin's milieu emerges in virtual Harbin.
Vis-a-vis Harbin's singularity (Kopytoff), commodification and its (counter-)culture, while Harbin is a successful Hot Springs' Retreat Center business ...
(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/07/hippocampus-kuda-both-actual-and.html - July 4, 2010)
... new forms of counterculture emerging from the 1960s in virtual Harbin, in new ways, is something ethnography can uniquely represent.
While both actual and virtual Harbin may articulate in new ways, as countercultural 'places,' in my interpretation, in the context of the Network Society (Castells 2000), I want to suggest that Harbin is also singular (Kopytoff) in a variety of ways, vis-a-vis the 'virtual.' There have been times since 1972 when the Harbin valley has created/has been its own 'world,' akin to a nation state, or a city-state, as a separate hippie, tribal entity (an institutional, land-based polity?) – i.e. 'Harbin' (also Heart Consciousness Church, sort of) - independent from the State of California, Lake County and the U.S.A, etc. (Harbin is pretty loose/watery). Since I first visited Harbin in 1993 or 1994 to the present, and despite the theft of my laptop computer with 14 Harbin chapters and the beginnings of virtual Harbin in Open Simulator, I've come to understand Harbin in multiple ways. Its remoteness, its emergence from the 1960s in California, its independence-mindedness, and particularly its pools all give form to multiple ways in which Harbin residents and visitors think of Harbin as its own world and as unique, a key aspect of its culture. It's this singularity that I hope to observe and interpret as Harbin's milieu emerges in virtual Harbin.
Vis-a-vis Harbin's singularity (Kopytoff), commodification and its (counter-)culture, while Harbin is a successful Hot Springs' Retreat Center business ...
(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/07/hippocampus-kuda-both-actual-and.html - July 4, 2010)
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Toucan: Virtual Harbin's emergence from actual Harbin reflects ongoing expressions of the 'Network Society,' Culture finds new form in virtual Harbin
(The book "Naked Harbin Ethnography" is published in 2016 .... )
... gives form to actual Harbin's countercultural milieu in a particular virtual world.
Virtual Harbin's emergence from actual Harbin reflects ongoing expressions of the 'network society' (Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2000, and Castells, The Internet Galaxy), where sociocultural processes – counterculture, in this interpretation - that have found form at actual Harbin Hot Springs since 1972 now find new form in multimedia in virtual Harbin. The significance of the scope and scale of virtual worlds, and their role in human life, relative to, for example, the nation-state (Anderson, Imagined Communities, in Boellstorff 2008: 24)) or to the printing press and the widespread emergence of texts and literacy, as well as pre-world wide web (and pre-internet) media, needs further study (http://webnographers.org/books). Both national identity as well as forms of social interaction and narrativity can be argued to change dramatically relative to these other process. The pace of change of giving form to these new forms of sociality are also difficult to assess at present. The possibility to create, with information technologies, new forms of counterculture emerging from the 1960s in virtual Harbin, in new ways, is something ethnography can uniquely represent.
While both actual and virtual Harbin may articulate in new ways, as countercultural 'places,' in my interpretation, in the context of the Network Society, I want to suggest that Harbin is also singular (Kopytoff) in a variety of ways, vis-a-vis virtuality ...
*
_in_Papaya_Tree_(Carica_papaya)_(28997424215).jpg)
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Gap: Place Creates Its Own Culture, Variation, Loving Bliss
The island I'm visiting creates its own world. I'd say place gives rise to (socially constructs, in a sense) culture or subculture. And humans do this all the time vis-a-vis place, and have done this very far back into ancestral (evolutionary) environments. This human variety is wonderful, and occurs today in conjunction with the homogenizing processes of globalization, modernity, post-modernity, internetity etc.
I think of such unique cultural expressions as ongoing developments of singularization vis-a-vis Kopytoff's writing about this (see, for example: scottmacleod.com/2002May24SocialMeanings.htm).
*
Can one focus such subcultures on something unique like eliciting loving bliss? Yes, but I can't yet think of many historical examples that have been successful in the way I envision here: scottmacleod.com/GuidelinesPracticingLovingBlissvavMusicalInstrument.htm.
**
(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/08/gap-place-creates-its-own-culture.html - August 22, 2009).
I think of such unique cultural expressions as ongoing developments of singularization vis-a-vis Kopytoff's writing about this (see, for example: scottmacleod.com/2002May24SocialMeanings.htm).
*
Can one focus such subcultures on something unique like eliciting loving bliss? Yes, but I can't yet think of many historical examples that have been successful in the way I envision here: scottmacleod.com/GuidelinesPracticingLovingBlissvavMusicalInstrument.htm.
**
(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/08/gap-place-creates-its-own-culture.html - August 22, 2009).
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Hot Springs: Harbin Hot Springs and Modernity
Harbin Hot Springs and Modernity
I'd like to examine how Harbin Hot Springs as {countercultural} place (Basso) that gives rise to an unique culture (Aubrey, Herder, Brothers Grimm) which emerges as a response to modernity (Baumann & Briggs). By examining this binary relation vis-à-vis de Certeau ("Practices of the Everyday"), I'll examine ways in which Harbin as counterculture emerges as a form of tactic in relation to the techno-rational-bureaucratic-legal 'strategies' of modernity. To do this, I'll examine Harbin particularly as a construction of place in terms of Herder's and the Brother Grimm's 'constructions' of traditionality vis-à-vis Romanticism, but also in terms of Harbin as a singularity (Kopytoff). Using interviews and textual analyses, I'll examine also how today's Harbin Hot Springs, emerging from the late 1960s and early 1970s (as counterculture), then, gives rise to place-related practices that instantiate, in an ongoing way, alternative practices in relation to modernity. As place (Basso), too, I'll examine questions of the poetics of Harbin as place, where the experience of 'oneness' as part of the founder Ishvara's understanding of Harbin and New Age practices - particularly in the pools {and the 'relaxation response'} and uniquely mediated by Harbin's milieu - emerges in response to modernity; traditionality, vis-à-vis Native American practices are similarly invoked by Harbin residents and in Harbin literature. As a response to modernity, Harbin's beautiful, natural setting thus makes possible a return to nature, accentuated by the pools. I'll then examine ways in which Harbin as emerging from counterculture informs a reading of modernity as culture.
In my project to create a virtual Harbin in OpenSim / Second Life 3-D virtual world software, which is ethnographically comparable with actual Harbin, I'll explore ways that information technology and virtual world software emerge from the 'project' of modernity, and in which an 'alternative' virtual Harbin makes in-world (in a virtual 'space') ethnographic fieldwork possible through the creation of a virtual field, thus giving rise to new instantiations of countercultural place, virtually. In so doing, however, I'll examine ways in which people anthropologically might elicit similar virtual experiences {i.e. in their bathtubs} to those that people actually have at Harbin {i.e. the relaxation response in the pools}, as well as related 'flow: the psychology of optimal experience' experiences (Csikszentmihalyi), thus engaging a virtual experience of Harbin. As a virtual “field site,” I'll examine also ways in which a virtual Harbin may become a countercultural ‘destination’ as field site unto itself, vis-à-vis modernity.
The pools are central to the Harbin experience as a retreat (from modernity), and many people come to Harbin simply to soak in the pools and relax in the pool area, but also for its alternative culture. This going-to-natural-hot-springs took on unique (counter)cultural and historical expressions in the 1960s and 1970s, which I'll also use to contextualize Harbin's emergence. Methodologically, I'll use fieldwork and interviews to examine how, through language (parole in de Certeau's usage), Harbin residents, in what is loosely a hippie commune, engage New Age, astrological, Human Potential Movement, wildman (Taussig), environmental, and communitarian ideas to cast modernity in a unique-to-Harbin way which gives form to Harbin's milieu, both actually and in a virtual world.
I'd like to examine how Harbin Hot Springs as {countercultural} place (Basso) that gives rise to an unique culture (Aubrey, Herder, Brothers Grimm) which emerges as a response to modernity (Baumann & Briggs). By examining this binary relation vis-à-vis de Certeau ("Practices of the Everyday"), I'll examine ways in which Harbin as counterculture emerges as a form of tactic in relation to the techno-rational-bureaucratic-legal 'strategies' of modernity. To do this, I'll examine Harbin particularly as a construction of place in terms of Herder's and the Brother Grimm's 'constructions' of traditionality vis-à-vis Romanticism, but also in terms of Harbin as a singularity (Kopytoff). Using interviews and textual analyses, I'll examine also how today's Harbin Hot Springs, emerging from the late 1960s and early 1970s (as counterculture), then, gives rise to place-related practices that instantiate, in an ongoing way, alternative practices in relation to modernity. As place (Basso), too, I'll examine questions of the poetics of Harbin as place, where the experience of 'oneness' as part of the founder Ishvara's understanding of Harbin and New Age practices - particularly in the pools {and the 'relaxation response'} and uniquely mediated by Harbin's milieu - emerges in response to modernity; traditionality, vis-à-vis Native American practices are similarly invoked by Harbin residents and in Harbin literature. As a response to modernity, Harbin's beautiful, natural setting thus makes possible a return to nature, accentuated by the pools. I'll then examine ways in which Harbin as emerging from counterculture informs a reading of modernity as culture.
In my project to create a virtual Harbin in OpenSim / Second Life 3-D virtual world software, which is ethnographically comparable with actual Harbin, I'll explore ways that information technology and virtual world software emerge from the 'project' of modernity, and in which an 'alternative' virtual Harbin makes in-world (in a virtual 'space') ethnographic fieldwork possible through the creation of a virtual field, thus giving rise to new instantiations of countercultural place, virtually. In so doing, however, I'll examine ways in which people anthropologically might elicit similar virtual experiences {i.e. in their bathtubs} to those that people actually have at Harbin {i.e. the relaxation response in the pools}, as well as related 'flow: the psychology of optimal experience' experiences (Csikszentmihalyi), thus engaging a virtual experience of Harbin. As a virtual “field site,” I'll examine also ways in which a virtual Harbin may become a countercultural ‘destination’ as field site unto itself, vis-à-vis modernity.
The pools are central to the Harbin experience as a retreat (from modernity), and many people come to Harbin simply to soak in the pools and relax in the pool area, but also for its alternative culture. This going-to-natural-hot-springs took on unique (counter)cultural and historical expressions in the 1960s and 1970s, which I'll also use to contextualize Harbin's emergence. Methodologically, I'll use fieldwork and interviews to examine how, through language (parole in de Certeau's usage), Harbin residents, in what is loosely a hippie commune, engage New Age, astrological, Human Potential Movement, wildman (Taussig), environmental, and communitarian ideas to cast modernity in a unique-to-Harbin way which gives form to Harbin's milieu, both actually and in a virtual world.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Seed: Learning at Harbin, Workshops and Singularity
Harbin Hot Springs offers the following opportunities as courses, workshops or gatherings:
Watsu, water dance, healing dance, Human Awareness Institute "Love, Intimacy and Sexuality" workshops, Tantric Love & Ecstasy workshops, Kirtan (chanting), massage, Yoga, (life - Harbin's culture) and many other areas. It's a fascinating range of therapeutic practices and teachings, that have emerged uniquely at Harbin in the aggregate, and around the baths.
Harold Dull created Watsu {water shiatsu} in the Harbin pools. Watsu is an unique-to-Harbin art & social form.
And each of the above makes up a unique community at Harbin.
How to explore these, for example, Watsu movement in water, in the creation of a virtual world will be interesting.
In terms of social theory, Harbin Hot Springs, in my view, is a remarkable example of singularization. In explaining how social objects gain meanings, the writer and social theorist Igor Kopytoff emphasizes the possibility of commodities or objects gaining social meanings in spheres apart from those determined by exchange, focusing specifically on the process of singularization. Using Durkheim as a starting point, he proposes a counterdrive to commodification in the form of culture, where excessive commodification is anti-cultural (Kopytoff 73).
Kopytoff, Igor. `The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process', in Arjun Appadurai (ed), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge. Pp. 64-91.
Watsu, water dance, healing dance, Human Awareness Institute "Love, Intimacy and Sexuality" workshops, Tantric Love & Ecstasy workshops, Kirtan (chanting), massage, Yoga, (life - Harbin's culture) and many other areas. It's a fascinating range of therapeutic practices and teachings, that have emerged uniquely at Harbin in the aggregate, and around the baths.
Harold Dull created Watsu {water shiatsu} in the Harbin pools. Watsu is an unique-to-Harbin art & social form.
And each of the above makes up a unique community at Harbin.
How to explore these, for example, Watsu movement in water, in the creation of a virtual world will be interesting.
In terms of social theory, Harbin Hot Springs, in my view, is a remarkable example of singularization. In explaining how social objects gain meanings, the writer and social theorist Igor Kopytoff emphasizes the possibility of commodities or objects gaining social meanings in spheres apart from those determined by exchange, focusing specifically on the process of singularization. Using Durkheim as a starting point, he proposes a counterdrive to commodification in the form of culture, where excessive commodification is anti-cultural (Kopytoff 73).
"And if, as Durkheim saw it, societies need to set apart a certain portion of their environment, marking it as “sacred,” singularization is one means to this end.
Culture ensures that some things remain unambiguously singular, it resists the commoditization of others; and it sometimes resingularizes what has been commoditized (Kopytoff 73)."
Using a Durkheimian analysis, he thus suggests that the shaping of homogenized cultural meanings, i.e. commodification, occurs within the context of consumption and production and then examines the possibility of other possible spheres where social and cultural forces oriented to uniqueness shape meaning. By assuming a Durkheimian perspective and arguing that societies construct individuals and things in different ways, however, Kopytoff, fails to consider the role of authorship or agency in shaping social processes, which ascribe meaning to objects (MacLeod, May 24, 2002 - http://scottmacleod.com/papers.htm).
In my ethnographic research, the founder of Harbin, Ishvara, has engaged an unique form of authorship in its creation, in conjunction with the very great number of people who have come through Harbin's gate since 1972.
Kopytoff, Igor. `The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process', in Arjun Appadurai (ed), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge. Pp. 64-91.
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