Yearly Archives: 2018 As cosmopolitan a city as Bangkok is, there are still spaces where one feels as though one has been transported into the distant past. The old community of Bang Khun Thian – established around 1867 – is one of the 50 districts (เขต – khed) that the huge and sprawling city is divided into. Tucked […]  When I think of Oslo, Norway, I think of sculpture: sculptured spaces and sculptured figures and objects. I had seen pictures of the famous Vigeland installation of Frogner Park, Oslo in an inflight magazine years ago, and this had coloured my expectations before my visit to the city in May. I didn’t arrive under the best of circumstances: my […]  (Double click for: Afro Celtic Sound System – Big Cat ) Self-billed as “Australia’s premier contemporary blues & roots music festival”, the annual five-day festival of international blue-, roots-, and any-other-kind-of-music held over the Easter long weekend on Tyagarah Tea Tree Farm – 120 hectares just north of Byron Bay in NSW Australia – has never disappointed […]  What is “culture”? That was the question for our first assigned essay in “Culture Myth and Symbolism”, an upper-level anthropology course I took at university, many, many years ago. Deceptively simple, the “answer” – if there is one – became increasingly layered and complex the more I delved into tomes written by the notable ‘modern’ […]  “A fast horse and a soaring eagle are the wings of a nomad.” –Kazakh proverb The animals in Western Mongolia are as wild as the landscape: the horses are unruly and the hunting eagles are never fully tame. I suspect that the ethnic Kazakhs who live there prefer it that way. The Kazakhs are descendants of […] |
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