Chaos As Social Order

research showing that every basin contained pieces of other basins.  Connecting trails to other attractors in the social order of Taipei can be found in a small portion of that order, e.g., a classroom, a living room, or a bus stop.  For example, while bus riders in Taipei usually do not line up for the bus door, students in school uniforms, although off school grounds and out of the jurisdiction of school disciplinarians, often do line up.  However, relations among attractors and pieces of attractors are rarely linear; they are fractal in the sense of having fractured or fractional relations among parts rather than being integrally related in linear dimensions.  Porous social space is holofractic.  The possibility of prediction within a particular basin of attraction, such as a family or a school, decreases with the increase in porosity of the social life in which the smaller basin is embedded.

            Taipei has been one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Asia for almost a century.  A decrease in older indigenous Taiwanese or imported Chinese patterns has been happening simultaneously with an increase in patterns from other ethnic sources, whether these be technology, language, dress, dance, manners, religion, or marriage customs.  In language, for example, the written Chinese used in Taipei has become more complicated both because of the differing kinds of characters used there and on the mainland and because of the accretion of elements from other languages.  Again, as in Interior Alaska, a contraction of phase space, which signals the dying out of certain trajectories of practice that do not span the attractor of social change, happens together with an expansion of phase space as a birth in new contexts of new

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