I see that the U of Washington Taiwan Studies Program has posted some videos of its "Pioneering Taiwan Studies" workshop from last November. Last night, I watched the one where Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang presented about the history of Western anthropologists in Taiwan. The conversation afterwards among the senior anthropologists (such as Hill Gates, David K. Jordan, Stevan Harrell, Robert Weller, etc.) was interesting and at time entertaining. (At one point, Jordan complained about the IUP "Stanford" Chinese language program at National Taiwan University, which he claimed was very unfriendly toward University of Chicago folks.)
I'm looking forward to watching some of the other videos, and I've decided that I'm going to put Long Ying-tai's book aside in favor of the book Yang introduced (and co-edited), Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies: American Anthropologists in Cold War Taiwan. It's an oral history, and it looks really interesting.
One thing I wonder about (which I imagine no one brings up) is possible connection between these anthropologists and the Oberlin Shansi reps at Tunghai University. I know that William Speidel, former Shansi rep to Tunghai, ran IUP in Taipei for five years from 1975-1980. Maybe some of the later anthropologists in this book ran into him. Would love to hear from anyone who knows anything about this.
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