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People in India are very easily ashamed, disgraced, annoyed, angered and outraged by dirty streets, overflowing garbage, mountains of landfills that grow mound by mound over a pond, a lake, a river, and turn what could have been sites of repose and proximity to the natural world into hellscapes that remind us of our banishment from paradise here on earth. Imagine my surprise, then, on finding no trash cans on the streets of Taipei. Intuition leads us to believe that the absen

Urban apartments are modular prisons where we incarcerate ourselves for most of our lives. In search of livelihood, a roof over our heads, a sense of security and a bed to fall asleep on, there is much that a city-zen gives up. When our homes lack a window into the world, a balcony that sits somewhere on the edges of inside and outside, and the glimpses of trees whose branches dapple with light and sway in trance with the dance of the breeze, our sense of incarceration produc

Empires come armed with explorers, geographers, map-makers, ethnologists and anthropologists, or should I say, the latter arrive first as harbingers of empire to follow in their wake: empires of guns, germs, and steel, yes, but more so, the empires of mind. Japanese ethnographers who scouted the plains and mountains of Taiwan divided the people they met, the tribes they encountered, into the “raw” and the “cooked”. Those who were willing to work with the new arrivals, learn t