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Chapter 8: American Anthropologists Looking through Taiwan to See “Traditional” China, 1950–1990
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122 8 American Anthropologists Looking through Taiwan to See “Traditional” China, 1950–1990 with KEELUNG HONG Taiwan is a small, densely populated, and now highly industrialized island on which American social science research on “Chinese” culture and society was concentrated from the late 1950s through the late 1970s, at the same time as Taiwan was rapidly industrializing. Japanese and Chinese anthropologists working on Taiwan prior to the 1950s studied the aboriginal enclaves in the mountains of Taiwan or on smaller, neighboring islands. Bernard and Rita Gallin (1974b) recalled that they found sociologists at National Taiwan University, not anthropologists, interested in their work during their first trips (during the late 1950s and early 1960s) to do fieldwork in rural Taiwan. Arthur Wolf similarly recalled that, into the 1960s, “Chinese and foreign anthropologists studying Taiwan practiced a strict division of labor. The Chinese studied the aborigines , and the foreigners studied the Chinese [from the context, it is clear that this meant Taiwanese, not refugees from the Kuomintang (KMT) defeat in China]. The two groups exchanged reprints and dinner invitations , but when they went to the field they went in different directions to study different problems” (1985:3). American anthropological work has focused almost exclusively on rural Hokkien- (Holo-) and Hakka-speakers whose ancestors left behind the elaborate lineages of southern China, mostly between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries—prior to Japanese occupation in 1895. “Taiwanese” includes those of Austronesian descent (which, to some degree, most Taiwanese are) and the children of those born in China who arrived on Taiwan during the late 1940s (referred to as “Mainlanders ”), between the defeat of Japan in World War II and the final defeat and evacuation of surviving remnants of the KMT bureaucracy and army American Anthropologists Looking through Taiwan 123 from China in 1949. There is a great deal of anthropological literature, if hardly any in English, on aboriginal tribespeople;1 scarcely any on Mainlanders’ children and grandchildren who identify themselves as Taiwanese. Our review of representations by American social scientists recapitulates the concentration on Holo- and Hakka-speakers but is not intended as endorsing the narrowing of the category “Taiwanese” to exclude anyone born on Taiwan who identifies as Taiwanese. Arthur Wolf and the Unthinkability of “Taiwanese” Arthur Wolf was one of the first American social scientists to do fieldwork in rural Taiwan. His publications and those of his wife during his early fieldwork on Taiwan, Margery Wolf, are the most frequently cited anthropological work dealing with Taiwan and have considerable recognition outside East Asian/West Pacific studies. Having found what he was not originally looking for—a predominance of “minor marriages” in the southwestern portion of the Daiba (“Taipei”) basin—he related his research on the implications of this phenomenon to a wider audience of social scientists than those interested in East Asia or in Pacific islands such as Taiwan. The high levels of daughters-in-law adopted at early ages (simbû’a) and of uxorilocal residence, which Wolf and others found to have been very common in northern Taiwan (41 and 15 percent, respectively), do not fit with the norms for the “traditional patriarchal Chinese family” at all (as A. Wolf and Huang, 1980:125, 318 acknowledged ; also see Pasternak 1989). The high rate of uxorilocal marriage, however, should not have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the scant literature about Taiwan that was then available in English, since George Barclay (1954:228–29) had reported that 15 to 20 percent of Taiwanese marriages between 1906 and 1930 were uxorilocal. Division of household assets (pun ke-hoe) during the lifetime of the father would seem to constitute another anomaly to “traditional China .”2 Such patterns, though later attenuated, would seem to evidence important cultural differences between “traditional Taiwan” of the first four and a half decades of the twentieth century and mainland “traditional China.”3 That these patterns anomalous to patriarchal Chinese family structure have been the central focus of Wolf’s work makes his practice of promoting a view of a single Chinese essence all the more startling to those unacquainted with the investment of the (KMT) regime that welcomed Wolf had in being the preserved “Chinese tradition.” [107.23.85.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:15 GMT) 124 American Anthropologists Looking through Taiwan Wolf, who continues to find the archival records of the Japanese Empire the best place to study traditional (imperial) China, asserted that only historians “still insist on treating China as though it had...