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Introduction
Discourses of history
Elections
Austronesian
Elections
Early Colonialism
Qing Society
Japanese Takeover
Baseball
2-28
Little China
Democratization
Environment
Museums
Religion
Family and Marriage
Local and National
National and Global

ANTHROPOLOGY 469A/JSIS 484F

TAIWAN: CULTURE, SOCIETY, HISTORY

TOPICS AND READINGS FOR FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12

TOPICS
In the 1960s and 1970s, when I lived in Taiwan for extended periods, it was two societies: A rural Taiwanese (Hoklo and Hakka) society still much like the Han peasant societies that had occupied much of East Asia for thousands of years, though more prosperous and literate; and an urban society, ethnically mixed but dominated Mainlanders, that tried to create a "Little China" in Taipei and its suburbs. Some people participated in both. I will present my own experiences in both societies, and talk about how the distinction has faded over the past four decades.

READINGS
  • Gold, Thomas B., Chapter 1, Explaining the Taiwan Miracle, and Chapter 8, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, from State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe), pp. 3-20 and 123-133.
  • Harrell, Stevan. 2014 [1982]. Preface and Chapter 2, The Changing Nature of Work, from Ploushshare Village (Seattle: University of Washington Press), pp. ix-xix and 64-84.
  • Chang, Bi-yu. 2015. Chapter 4, Home is a Foreign Country, in Place, Identity, and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan (London: Routledge), pp. 155-204.
ASSIGNMENT
By 8:00 a.m. on Friday, February 12, please post 200-400 words on the psychology of the "Little China" society of Taipei in the postwar period, and whether you think people "believed it" or not.