Studying Taiwan before Taiwan Studies: American Anthropologists in Cold War Taiwan was a relatively easy book to read, as most oral histories are, I suppose. I read the English half of it, though I suppose it might be useful to look through the Chinese half at some point to see if there's anything different about it. I enjoyed reading about the anthropologists' experiences in Taiwan and the challenges that many of them faced when trying to do anthropological research there.
One challenge that came up several times involved language issues. Many of the anthropologists interviewed were quite transparent about how linguistically unprepared they were to do their research; in fact, it was almost assumed that they would not be able to do the research without the help of local assistants. One reason was that they often didn't have the opportunity to learn Taiwanese (Hokkien) at the Stanford program at National Taiwan University, which sounds like it was dominated by teachers with Beijing Beiping accents. Then they'd go into the "field" and find out that no one there spoke Mandarin like that (or spoke much Mandarin at all!). Stevan Harrell expresses his admiration for Emily Ahern/Emily Martin because of how good her Taiwanese was. He contrasts her to Arthur and Margery Wolf, who were not fluent in Taiwanese and had to "hire lots of assistants." (Note that he says both Martin and Wolf "had a big influence" on him.)
Another interesting point about their methods came up in Harrell's description of Wolf:
Arthur was also very shy. Every time he would interview someone, he would bring along [his assistant] Little Wang, the hoodlum. Every time he went out, he went with Little Wang. Wang would go to the front and speak, and Arthur would shyly stand in the back and smile. He didn't directly ask questions.
After reading this, I felt a little better about my own stumbling efforts at interviewing people for my dissertation.
Another anthropologist, Burton Pasternak, tells about his first attempts to engage in fieldwork in a rural village after he had spent some time trying to find a village that he could work in. There's an amusing anecdote about him walking into a government office and asking for detailed maps of the area's villages. As he puts it, considering this was in the middle of the martial law period, "It's a miracle I wasn't tossed in the clink right off." He found out that he had to go back to Taipei to get a letter of introduction from the Academia Sinica. Then when he found his village (Datie, 打鐵, in Pingtung County), he and his wife moved in. He writes,
Here I was, a young and inexperienced anthropologist (in waiting) with meager Mandarin skills in a Hakka village. I suddenly became acutely aware that I had no clue where to begin. I knew virtually no one in the village apart from my incredulous but generous hosts.
So when morning arrived, I took my notebook and tentatively left the compound, like a young bird finally leaping from the nests on his first flight. There I was in the street. People stared at me, and I looked back. So what's next? Fortunately, our hosts had anticipated all this and instantly took me under their wing. They brought me back into the house and suggested that perhaps they could introduce me to some villagers just to get me started, which they promptly did. And those people introduced me to others. So gradually, I met and interviewed every family in Datie. With very few exceptions, they were to become friends. Gradually, they came to believe that I was harmless, and, in return, I was provided a constant source of amusement.
(Hmmm... I don't know if he means he was amused or if he means he was amusing. From my own experience, I'm guessing the latter!)
There are a lot of other interesting and entertaining anecdotes and observations in the book, but I want to end by mentioning something that Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang and Derek Sheridan write in their introduction to the book--mainly because it echoes something that I wrote about in my dissertation about the Oberlin Shansi reps in Taiwan. Yang and Sheridan contrast the experiences of the American Cold War-era anthropologists ("in waiting," as Pasternak writes) with the suggestion by some critics that as Americans, they were "lackeys of American imperialism." "In fact," they write, "it was sometimes the opposite" since they were often critical of the US role in Asia. Yang and Sheridan continue,
So much has been said about the relationship between "power" and knowledge production." Yet this sort of abstract theorization usually falls short of illustrating the complex processes that actually took place on the ground, processes that involved a web of intricate personal relations, individual choices, and delicate human emotions.
This reminded me of something I had written in a paper about the Oberlin reps at Tunghai, that there is a danger in automatically mapping individual encounters between people onto a template of international relations; it's that danger of "situating [an individual's ]acts of cultural translation solely within a framework of American attempts at global expansion—a framework that risks considering those acts predictable in their motivations, their contents, and their effects. Unpredictability, or surprise, is an important element of encounters, as [Oberlin rep Judith Manwell] Moore describes them, as these experiences open up possible futures just as they are made possible by people and institutions with multiple, overlapping histories." While the Oberlin reps weren't anthropologists (at least most of them didn't have that kind of training), like anthropologists, they were attempting to understand others and communicate that understanding to "other others." I think they would agree with Yang and Sheridan's observation that "what individual anthropologists [or Oberlin reps] learned and experienced in their field sites is often more complicated and profound that the information published in their works."
Back to Long Ying-tai's book now? Hmmm... I actually have an urge to read this book I've had for a while about the history of Taiwan's No. 1 Provincial Highway.
