The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan (review)

It is a well-known fact that during the Cold War era, scholars (especially in North America) studied Taiwan as a way of understanding the cultural roots of Communist China. Thus, scholars of Taiwan often have to justify why Taiwan is worth studying by and for itself. Is this because of Taiwan's Chinese heritage, which marks Taiwan as part of China? Is it because the history, culture, and politics that shape Taiwan as a nation have yet to be understood on Taiwan's own terms? Or is it simply because common human issues are much larger than the geopolitical boundaries of Taiwan or mainland China? This book represents one way of addressing these questions. It examines Taiwan's history, religion, public sphere, economy, and forms of entertainment, and on the whole offers an account of daily life in Taiwan that not only answers these questions but also offers insights into one popular culture in an era of globalization.

The book is intended as a textbook for American college students. It consists of five parts, divided into ten chapters, plus a short preface, a glossary of Chinese characters, a list of special terms, a bibliography, and an index. From a teacher's perspective, the book covers a range of topics that should be interesting to American students: religious rituals ("chicken-beheading" and representations of "hell"), economic practices (direct selling, night markets), work (immigrant workers), leisure (television, film, and sports), political ideologies (nationalism, racism, and sexism), and identity politics. A short editorial comment provided for every chapter is very useful. In addition, most of the authors have made a conscious effort to relate to a cultural context with which American students are familiar. For example, Alice R. Chu compares Taiwan's public-call-in shows with similar shows in the United States; Chien-juh Gu's discussion of direct selling in Taiwan is compared with direct selling in America; and Marc L. Moskowitz' analysis of the Hong Kong film A Chinese Ghost Story (Qian nü youhun) makes reference to Hollywood Westerns. The individual chapters, based on in-depth historical, ethnographic, and sociological studies, provide excellent details on popular culture in Taiwan.

The book begins with Andrew D. Morris' outline of a historical context for understanding daily life in Taiwan. Morris focuses on key historical eras that have shaped Taiwan's present: Taiwan's original inhabitants (yuanzhumin), the Dutch presence (1622-1661), the regime of the Zheng (1661-1683), Qing rule (1684-1895), the Japanese occupation (1895-1945), and the Republic of China period (1945-present). He shows that two historical factors are especially relevant for our understanding of Taiwan's popular culture. The first is that international relations between China and the Western colonial/imperial powers (the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States), especially in the Cold War period, have always been critical to shaping events in Taiwan. For the external powers, Taiwan has merely been a stepping-stone on the road to regional political and economic hegemony. The second factor is the way in which those who live in Taiwan deal with various external cultural, economic, political, and military influences. Thus, Taiwan's relationship with China is only one issue floating on the surface of Taiwan's history. A more crucial and fundamental issue is how the interaction between the local and the global (or external) influences the development of a historical consciousness that is reflected in everyday life.

Part 2, on the "mental furniture" (p. 50) of daily life covers two religious practices: "chicken-beheading rituals," involving the making of an oath (lishi) accompanied by the ritual beheading of a cockerel (zhan jitou) or young male chicken (p. 36), and representations of "hell" (diyu) and "filial piety" (xiao) in paintings, sculptures, comic books, and films. Paul R. Katz' discussion of chicken-beheading rituals focuses on seven cases: four in Taiwan in the...