Q. Odds are overwhelming you spent the better part of your waking day doing this, without giving it a thought. Chairmen and chairwomen do it plenty, as do others in seats of power, from county seats to embassy seats to seats on the stock exchange. But prestige and social status aren't the story. Even the lowliest among us do this in dozens of places daily, at work, at home, with family and friends, or alone. Yet the "we" here is NOT the world we but the Western or Westernized we. So what ARE we doing?
A. Sitting on chairs, says University of California- Berkeley sociologist and professor of architecture Galen Cranz, author of "The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design." As inevitable as this sedentary posture might seem, it is far from natural and not even done in half the world. "A Chinese man might squat to wait for the bus; a Japanese woman might kneel to eat; and an Arab might sit cross-legged to write a letter." And not because they can't afford chairs: Many throughout the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Polynesia just prefer not to buy one.
Chairs are cultural, invented long ago by anonymous would-be-off-the-ground sitsters. If the king's throne has come to symbolize "really high sitting" in the West, the bathroom "throne" is a joke, signifying low-status sitting.
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