Part III (set in New York in 2094) of Hanya Yanagihara's "To Paradise" has earthsuits; amidst a certain depauperation of language under a foreign power, they're called "cooling suits".
Depauperation of language of this sort seems to be a feature of the “managerial ethos” that we’ve come to inhabit, as described by my colleague Chad Wellmon in this essay of last year:
We don’t have problems we have “issues”. Airplanes — according to the US carriers — no longer experience turbulence, they simply go through “rough air”. It’s as if by refusing to allow sources of conflict or anxiety to rise to the surface of language we can erase them from the social sphere, rendering them things that individuals must deal with on their own.
The clarification of haenyeo and ama-san practice is welcome. I think we can find extensive existing practice of somaforming, although less radical in high regions of the Andes, Himalaya, etc. Many costal areas have diving practices that are radical compared to most humans and a conventional notion of swimming/diving. I suppose we might call them somaforming-lite and that is how we collected abalone and even a few fish with our spear guns as kids.
Thank you — this is an excellent point. My colleague Andrea Wiley has written about the developmental physiology of high-altitude maternity and childhood, which certainly rivals the haenyeo and ama-san for somatic plasticity.
Wow, what a journey today's commentary is! Thank you. Lots of food for thought.
🙇 It’s my pleasure. Thank you for reading, Juan.
Part III (set in New York in 2094) of Hanya Yanagihara's "To Paradise" has earthsuits; amidst a certain depauperation of language under a foreign power, they're called "cooling suits".
Depauperation of language of this sort seems to be a feature of the “managerial ethos” that we’ve come to inhabit, as described by my colleague Chad Wellmon in this essay of last year:
https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/degrees-of-anxiety/
We don’t have problems we have “issues”. Airplanes — according to the US carriers — no longer experience turbulence, they simply go through “rough air”. It’s as if by refusing to allow sources of conflict or anxiety to rise to the surface of language we can erase them from the social sphere, rendering them things that individuals must deal with on their own.
The clarification of haenyeo and ama-san practice is welcome. I think we can find extensive existing practice of somaforming, although less radical in high regions of the Andes, Himalaya, etc. Many costal areas have diving practices that are radical compared to most humans and a conventional notion of swimming/diving. I suppose we might call them somaforming-lite and that is how we collected abalone and even a few fish with our spear guns as kids.
Thank you — this is an excellent point. My colleague Andrea Wiley has written about the developmental physiology of high-altitude maternity and childhood, which certainly rivals the haenyeo and ama-san for somatic plasticity.
https://anthropology.indiana.edu/about/faculty/wiley-andrea.html