In his Introduction to this volume, Paul-François Tremlett suggests that Taiwan's unique position in the world vis-à-vis its precarious nationhood and its contested “Chinese” and Taiwanese identities provides the perfect setting to explore the issues raised in the seminal text edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (University of California Press, 1986).
The first chapter adheres most closely to this goal. In it, Fang-Long Shih explores the history of Western scholarship of Taiwan and its biases. She notes that most scholars in Taiwan are trained in the West and/or actively engage with Western scholarship. The result, she suggests, is a pervasive treatment of Taiwan's religions as “Chinese” religions, which distorts our understanding of Taiwan's religious practices and beliefs. She juxtaposes this by positioning herself as a Taiwanese feminist activist and explores the potential biases that this also poses for her research.
In the next chapter, Paul-François Tremlett also problematizes scholarship that treats Taiwan's religions as Chinese. His main focus, however, is to outline the ways in which burial grounds are being pushed out of urban spaces to make room for parks and high-rise buildings. Tremlett asserts that because the government plays an increasingly large role in regulating this, grave sites are transformed from an emblem of tradition to one of a global secularization of space. A bit more attention might have been given to distinguishing between the formal legal control of space and the symbolic uses of those same locals among religious practitioners, the grieving, and the populace at large. In doing so, one might question just how secularized these spaces really have become. Yet Tremlett provides a range of important insights into urbanization and its implications in Taipei, and his chapter is one of the strongest in the volume.
Edward Vickers and Felix Schoeber both write on museum culture. Edward Vickers examines the localization of museum exhibits from early KMT-era attempts to emphasize a shared Chinese history to later endeavours that highlight a distinctly Taiwanese history. Felix Schoeber provides a nice comparative point to Edward Vickers's chapter in that he examines modern art in Taiwan as both global and local culture.
Mark Harrison examines the experiences of Taiwanese people who visit Fujian province to find their ancestral homes. This leads to emotional ambivalence and often contradictory conceptualizations of this experience in terms of personal, ethnic and national identities.
Three chapters address the issue of language and identity. Scott Simon's chapter explores the somewhat Orwellian language wars one must engage in to write about Taiwan. He provides specific examples ranging from presenting on Taiwan's indigenous people in a conference in the PRC, to the politics of appropriating the Canadian term “First Nations” in Taiwan, to the necessity of presenting oneself as a “China Scholar” if one hopes to thrive in Western Academia.
Henning Klöter examines a different linguistic paradigm as he traces the history of Taiwan's governmental policies concerning Mandarin and Hokkien dialects of Chinese. Chris Berry examines the shifts in Taiwan's cinema from KMT-endorsed Mandarin productions that proclaimed a Chinese state to the paradox that Taiwan's cinema is gradually admitting localized dialects and culture at the same moment that it is increasingly becoming part of a transnational cooperative production.
Spring-boarding off from Klöter and Berry's chapters, Stuart Thompson examines a range of cultural implications of Taiwan's educational system that includes modernization, state building, Confucian ideologies, worker discipline, conceptualization of children, and a range of other cultural implications.
Stephan Feuchtwang's afterword provides an important re-examination of the earlier chapters in the context of religious change, class analysis, and issues of cultural and political identity. Feuchtwang helps the reader to review the individual chapters' strengths and weaknesses as well as highlighting the many ways that they hold together as a unit.
Although each of the chapters in this volume addresses the issue of national identity, representation (and misrepresentation) in some way, the ideas of (re)writing culture and writing about cultural change tend to be conflated. Less than half of the chapters deal with reflexivity or the implications and pitfalls of academic writing on culture as might have been expected from the title and introduction. Several of the chapters do not even mention Clifford and Marcus's work.
Yet if the volume as a whole is not consistently concerned with the problems of academic writing on culture, each of the chapters does explore discourses or representations of culture. Themes of state building, modernization and ethnic identity unify the chapters even further to create a text that hangs together extremely well. Each chapter is exceptionally well articulated, full of important insights, and presents a profoundly interesting range of issues relating to Taiwan's historical and cultural change. For these reasons, the volume stands out as an important contribution to Taiwan Studies.
