- Looking through Taiwan: American Anthropologists' Collusion with Ethnic Domination
Anthropologists-American and others-have been accused of many things, such as aiding colonial governments in suppression and exploitation and harboring contempt for the "Natives" while pretending to be objective observers, among other egregious breaches of professional ethics. In their co-authored book, Hong and Murray argue that American anthropologists colluded with the ruling Nationalist government-the minority-in its domination of the Taiwanese majority. A serious accusation indeed, particularly since collusion implies active and secret participation to achieve a common goal. The authors' major argument can be summed up as follows: unable to do research in China, American anthropologists went to Taiwan, where they conflated Taiwanese and Chinese; consequently, "publications of fieldwork done on Taiwan obliterated recognition of anything Taiwanese in order to claim the more prestigious object of study, Chinese culture." By failing to distinguish and underscore the differences between Taiwanese and Chinese, that is, to refer correctly to their subjects as Taiwanese, American anthropologists helped maintain the status quo.
The readers of Hong and Murray's study can be forgiven for concluding that American anthropologists were merely complicit in furthering the agenda of the ruling Nationalist (KMT) government. On the other hand, it is difficult to ascertain when complicity slides into collusion, since the anthropologists needed permission [End Page 133] and facilitation, and sometimes received funding, to work with people in a totalitarian state. It is a dilemma that has confronted many anthropologists and continues to affect the objectivity and neutrality of their work. In Hong and Murray's view, there is a twist in the case of Taiwan: in the early days, when fieldwork in mainland China was impossible, American anthropologists settled in Taiwan, where they turned a blind eye to the KMT's abuses of human rights and denigration of local Taiwanese culture. Then, when Taiwan was undergoing democratization, they flocked to China, giving the impression that they were fleeing democracy, preferring to work in yet another totalitarian state. The anthropologists were searching for an "authentic" China, which is often synonymous with an obsession with "primitivism"; that is, their earlier research on Taiwan (e.g., on religion, family structure, and healing practices) was itself narrowly focused (although one has to consider the possibility that the KMT would probably not have permitted them to work on anything too sensitive), but then, when the PRC opened up, most of them swarmed to the mainland. There were two reasons for this: one, of course, was that the PRC was now available to them; the other was closely tied to an anthropological focus tinged with a bias against studying such subject matter as the changes that took place during a democratization process.
While one can understand their frustration with current anthropological trends, there are, nevertheless, several problems with Hong and Murray's study. The first concerns chapter 4, in which they criticize "the Hoover Institution Analysis of 1947 Resistance and Repression," published as A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947, by Lai Tse-han, Ramon H. Myers, and Wei Wou (Stanford University Press, 1991). The uprising, commonly referred to as the 2/28 Incident, started as a protest against the KMT government's brutality against a woman cigarette vendor, and escalated into an island-wide demonstration against corruption, abuse, and discrimination against the Taiwanese, to which the Governor-General responded with the indiscriminate slaughter and mass arrests of Taiwanese in March. Hong and Murray's criticism of the biased statements and analysis in A Tragic Beginning is valid and well grounded. For instance, Lai et al. claim that the "tragedy was a reflection of China's struggle in the 1940s to turn itself from a traditional society into a modern one, with an efficient, democratic government" (Lai et al., p. 11). "Knowing little about what had happened on the Mainland during World War II, many Taiwanese never appreciated the seriousness of the problems confronting the Nationalist government in...