Description
Book SynopsisAnthropologists have long sought to extricate their work from the policies and agendas of those who dominateand often oppresstheir native subjects. Looking through Taiwan is an uncompromising look at a troubling chapter in American anthropology that reveals what happens when anthropologists fail to make fundamental ethnic and political distinctions in their work. Keelung Hong and Stephen O. Murray examine how Taiwanese realities have been representedand misrepresentedin American social science literature, especially anthropology, in the postWorld War II period. They trace anthropologists' complicity in the domination of a Taiwanese majority by a Chinese minority and in its obfuscation of social realities.
At the base of these distortions, the authors argue, were the mutual interests of the Republic of China's military government and American social scientists in mischaracterizing Taiwan as representative of traditional Chinese culture. American anthropo
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“The authors make several good cases against anthropological studies of Taiwan. . . . They also show the earlier anthropologists’ inability or failure to differentiate between legacy of the colonial Japanese, Taiwanese tradition, and KMT policy. . . . They also give credit where credit is due.”—Sylvia Li-chun Lin, China Review International
