Culture
Teaching Anthropology “In The Field”
Re-posted from Savage Minds. This is a view of the building where I work. The College of Indigenous Studies at National Dong Hwa University, in Hualien, Taiwan. And here is a picture of the view (on a more typically cloudy day) looking back, from the balcony near my office. Most of the people who live [...]
Happy 牛 Year!
Taipei Biennial ’08
Shashwati and I finally got to the Taipei Biennial, on the last weekend before it closed. That means we missed most of the site-specific pieces around Taipei, but we did get to the main exhibit at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which was surprisingly busy – perhaps because admission was free. The highlight of the [...]
No Smoking
I’m glad that Taiwan is going smoke-free in public spaces and offices, but this PSA just made me laugh. Its so Taiwanese somehow …
Music from Liquor
Yesterday Chhara playwright and documentary filmmaker Dakxin Chhara posted a short “musical documentary” to YouTube which shows an original composition by the children of Budhan Theatre. What isn’t revealed until the end of the film is that the musical instruments they are playing are entirely composed of utensils used to brew liquor. Brewing liquor is [...]
Technologies of the Self
If you google the letters “GTD” you’ll get seven million hits back. GTD stands for “Getting Things Done,” a time management book, method and philosophy promoted by David Allen which has spawned a huge array of self-help blogs and task management webservices. Wired magazine described it thus: Allen’s approach is not inspirational. Instead, it is [...]
Happy New Year!
A very happy year of the (Mickey) mouse to everyone from Taiwan! PS: Its worth noting that this is not a pirated product, but an authentic Disney product marked with a hologram to that effect. Disney must be raking it in this year!
Understatement
It bears no relation to the main point of his article, which focuses on how economic ideology led the Fed into the current “unmitigated disaster” known as the subprime lending debacle, but Paul Krugman chose this interesting quote as the lead-in to his article: When announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his [...]
高一生
The other day I went to see an interesting performance built up around the life and work of Gao Yi-sheng 高一生. Who is Gao Yi-Sheng? There isn’t much about him in English on the web, but here is a short blurb from the Taipei Times: Better known by his Chinese name of Kao Yi-sheng (高一生), [...]
KUSO
If you walk around Taipei these days you’ll be sure to see the word KUSO written in big letters all over the place. For instance, this summer there was a city-sponsored cultural festival in Ximending called “KUSO Ximending.” But what does “KUSO” mean? Luckily, Wikipedia is there to help us out: Kuso is the term [...]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
