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The Anthropologist

Philosophy
History
Arts
Listening to others. Taking them seriously. Fashioning the world.


Where is “the Way”? The Mencian Discourse as Ritual Site for Imaginative Reconstitution of Social Categories
How did we come to imagine the world in the ways that we do? How did we begin to use the categories we use? How did these concepts and categories acquire “meaning” so that using them we can make “sense”?
Shashwat


Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and the Ritual of Garbage Collection in Taipei (垃圾車來了!)
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
Shashwat


Jian Guo Holiday Flower Market (建國假日花市): Where Fuming Desires Metamorphose into Fragrance
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
Shashwat
Essays


Where is “the Way”? The Mencian Discourse as Ritual Site for Imaginative Reconstitution of Social Categories
How did we come to imagine the world in the ways that we do? How did we begin to use the categories we use? How did these concepts and categories acquire “meaning” so that using them we can make “sense”?
Shashwat


Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and the Ritual of Garbage Collection in Taipei (垃圾車來了!)
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
Shashwat


Jian Guo Holiday Flower Market (建國假日花市): Where Fuming Desires Metamorphose into Fragrance
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
Shashwat
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