Chairs are in every sense fundamental to us. Curiously though, they are neither essential nor especially healthful even in industrial and postindustrial societies -- even if a few activities probably do demand them. Until relatively recently, the majority of the world's people rarely used chairs, and many still do not. Yet chairs have spread inexorably around the world, occasionally promoted deliberately by Western rule or influence but more often spontaneously adopted. The change has been one of the most thoroughgoing and apparently irreversible in the history of material culture. Essential parts of this spontaneous technology transfer are still obscure. But in every sense, the fortunes of the chair illustrate human malleability -- and society's construction, reconstruction, and misconstruction of the human body. Once people begin to spend most of their lives in chairs, they are removed as though by ratcheting from their original ground-level ways; individual return may be hazardous, and social reversal has been unknown. Whole civilizations, in adopting chairs, literally change not only their posture but their point of view.
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Thank you, Casey.
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