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Originally Posted by theBruiser500
hey i went to thailand and they had so many massage parlours everywhere and it was $4 for an hour so it was pretty amazing. in nepal i got a massage a random barbaershop where i just needed a shave, in china there was a lot of places for massage, in australia there was a lot of street massage, etc. Yet in Bolivia there are no places that offer massage. in a big city there are literally one or two places that do it and it was awful. $13 for half an hour (very expensive) and they just used a ton of oil and were terrible. i feel like in the US masage isn't even that big, all the massage places are on an appointment basis and hidden away.
do you have any thoughts on this and massage as it relates to culture? like in asia it seems to be a huge part of culture. here not so much, and in south america it is just non existent.
Very good question, and yes, massage is absolutely tied in with culture. To understand this, I will have to give a brief history,
All eastern massage and traditional medicine is derived from the concept of Ayurveda, which originated in India. This truth is strongly objected by Chinese culture in general. Ayurveda loosely translates to "study of life," and that involved spiritual as well as physical. Fun fact: On of the earliest treatises of Ayurveda was written by a one Chakara (get it? Chakra?).
India was one of the great conquerors of the known world, and with it, spread the concepts of Buddhism, Ayurveda, and of coarse medicine and masszge. In massage, and in Ayurvedic medicine in general, it was believed that we are able to manipulate the energy fields contained in our body. Even Yoga is based on stretching and sqeezing these energy fields, commonly called meridians. Meditation is also based on manipulating the energy that makes up our body.
So, with the spread of Indian ideas derives various forms of energy manipulation, such as using "hot and cold" foods, medicines, needles, and what-have-you. This is a very important part of the history of most, if not all, Asian cultures, as evidenced in using massage, toungue diagnosis, and pulse reading. But each culture changed it for what was available locally, tradition, and beliefs. For example, the plants found in the Northern China are gong to be very different from plants used in Southern China. Accupuncture originated in Central China.
Many of the massages that use Ayurvedic concetpts are Shiatsu, Anma, Thai, Indonesian spiritual healing, and the list goes on, but they all have a common beleif of manipulating the various energies within the body, normally expressed as meridians, Chi, Ki, chakras, triple heater, etc.
In Western Europe, massage has a very different history. It was very common back in Grecian and Roman times, but was repeatedly banned due to sexual misconduct (nothing changes...), so it was pushed into the underground and basically considered the work of the devil.
Enter in the time of Bolivia. For starters, many of the great civilizations of South and Central America were collapsed or on the verge of collapse. This was helped considerably by the strongly Christian European conquerors, who famously spread diseases by using disease blankets as gifts, and what-have-you.
As the old saying goes: To destroy a race is to destroy it's language. I am sure if the conquerors had the means to destroy the Mayan pyramids they would have done that as well. However, they did call the culture Satanic and commenced to destroy all written materials on the religion, math, science, and culture. Now mind, that the same things that were illegal in Europe was probably now banned in Bolivia, and that would most certainly include massage.
I do believe that there are certain needs every human has after the basics are taken care of. This would be knowledge and some way of explaining the world. The second is human caring and healing, if through touch, love, and healing. Surely, many South Americans were well advanced in many ways, evidenced by skulls that has had brain surgery.
Finally, in the late 1800s, Massage started hitting the mainstream again, say thanks to two doctors who created the strokes of Swedish, and massage techniques created by doctors is the norm that continued. By this time, our medicine was well Westernized, and of course the concepts of energy was essentially tossed out of massage.
Massage finally had a major break-through in WW1 whan the field nurses would use massage to attempt to recover and relax hurt soldiers. They created a manual manipulation called the Lymphatic Pump, and this technique increased the survival rate of the victims. Step in Ida P Rolf, who attempted to prove that by stretching and manipulating fascia and muscles, people would inherently perform better. Milton Trager created his approach to body work but went to medical school so that his work would have more respect. By combining the concepts of Lymphatic Pumping (which spawned a technique called lymphatic drainage), Rolfing, Trager, and add in some rehab, we end up with physical therapy.