Hedonic Atlas

Summary
The Raw Hedonic Atlas.
Feel free to add recommendations either directly to the sheet above or fill in the Recommendation Form.

Sign up for the meetups here.
Think of this as a set of two things:
– A bucket-list of cultural experiences
(think: travel, art, food, music, literature)
– A community of people to tick those off with
(think: curation, discussion, meetups, travel groups)

Overview
I’ve always thought it would be great to have a map of all the sensations or experiences that various cultures around the world have to offer, in particular: the tastes, the music, the literature, the visual aesthetic.

That’s what this Hedonic Atlas hopes to be. The idea is: you’ll be able to click on a country, say, Suriname, and see a few great works of art, listen to some brassy koseko, read a short story or two by their famous writers, and be given recommendations to restaurants near you for moksi meti.

I think once Covid-related restrictions ease up, I think it would be immensely interesting to host culturally themed meetups here in London, and if you’re interested, please add your email address to the Meetup tag here.

I’ve seen some interest from friends in other countries who might run meetups abroad, too. If you’re interested in running atlas meet ups, then contact me.

Eventually, it might be great to get even more granularity by distinguishing between say Xhosa and Zulu hymns and between the Czech and Hungarian goulashes. The hope is that, this way, we can together experience all the beauty and aesthetic pleasures of the world around us in an accessible, interesting and elegant way. I imagine that eventually we can even slowly start to learn about ways of life, local politics, cultural habits, collective wisdom. Maybe even try to direct to ethnic ware from local vendors. (Think kurtas from Multan, or a kofia from Comoros.)

Anything that enhances life.

Fundamentally, nevertheless, this project is primarily an aesthetic endeavour driven by the senses, by community and by a shared elation in existence, in all its wonderful plurality.

We travel as human beings in order to step outside the parameters of our births, to experience life as other and as all.

There are some projects out there that are thematically aligned; for instance:

But I’m hoping that over time this will grow to be more complete and rounded.

I don’t believe there’s any real substitute for travel: no picture of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel will ever do it justice, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t all still enjoy the fruits of each other’s cultures.

In fact, I’m suggesting that we can easily do just that, starting from this project right here.

Obviously, I’m entirely reliant on you to provide recommendations with which we can start to build the Atlas out.

Each of us brings something to the table, so please: think about where you’re from, who you are, whatever you identify with, and add something to the Atlas that you feel is beautiful or emotive or insightful about what it’s like to be you. (It doesn’t have to be high culture, only an aesthetic or instightful representation of the culture. I guess, the Numa Numa song counts as much as Dies Irae does.)

Add recommendations here

If you have a recommendation, add it to the relevant tag on the Raw Hedonic Atlas for now or fill out this Recommendation Form.

Please add links wherever possible, rather than just text names. So links to youtube or spotify for music, links to pdfs or to amazon for literature, and wikipedia or imdb for films.

Please don’t delete or maim anybody else’s recommendations for the time being. Feel free however to correct any typos or clarify, if you can, in good faith.

(I ought to automate this, but I think there’s still some value in curatorship. If the corpus of information grows, it might even be worth bringing in local experts or countrymen to help curate.)

Disclaimer

In the absence of the IT skills needed to make this look prettier, I’m going to start with these manually updated google sheets lists, and restructure as this page starts to fill out, as I hope it will.