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
Trade Review
“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
Table of Contents
I. Introductory Material 1. Experiences of Being a "Native" Observing Anthropology - Mechanics of the Book; 2. A Brief Overview of American Anthropologists' Investigation of "Others" Before 1955; 3. A Brief Overview of the Governing of Taiwan II. American Social Scientists' Complicity with Domination 4. A Case Study of Pseudo-Objectivity: The Hoover Institution Analysis of 1947 Resistance and Repression; 5. Some American Witnesses of the KMT's 1947 Reign of Terror on Taiwan; 6. Studies of KMT-Imposed Land Reform; 7. American Anthropologists Looking Through Taiwan to See "Traditional" China, 1950-1990 III. 1990s Anthropological Writing Based on Research in Taiwan 8. A Taiwanese Woman Who Became a Spirit Medium: Native and Alien Models of How Taiwanese Identify Spirit Possession; 9. The Non-Obliteration of Taiwanese Women's Names; 10. The Aftermath: Fleeing Democratization
