Bryan Alexander emailed me today to say that “sauna culture in Finland has now become inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”.

You can read the details on the UNESCO website. Or here.

This morning I interviewed Agnieszka Pokrywka for a special crossover edition of our new podcast Common Practice, in which we talked about fermentation as a possible act of cultural importance.

As part of my preparation for this I had reread some of the articles I have gathered about Sandor Katz, the author of Wild Fermentations and The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved among other books.

Lev Manovich argues that the database is replacing central perspective as the dominant symbolic form by which we make sense of our world. In this he follows the work of Ernst Cassirer, whose Philosophy of Symbolic Forms defines the task of humankind as seeking “the categories of the consciousness of objects in the theoretical, intellectual sphere” and suggests that this “starts from the assumption that such categories must be at work wherever a cosmos, a characteristic and typical world view, takes form out of the chaos of impressions.”.

This essay is simply me thinking aloud about some of the issues and questions that this raises.