Taiwan: Marriage and the Family

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CLASS SCHEDULE
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, MARCH 4

TOPICS
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, everyone married, often by arrangement (at least in the rural society) and the average Taiwanese woman had 5 or 6 children. Now arranged marriage is unknown, a lot of Taiwanese women never marry, so Taiwanese men take brides from China, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, and the average Taiwanese woman has about 1.1 children. What happened?

READINGS

Basten, Stuart, and Georgia Verropoulou. 2015. A Re-Interpretationof the 'Two-Child Norm' in Post-Transitional Demographic Systems. PLoS One, August 2015.
Friedman, Sara L. 2014. Marital Borders: Gender, Population, and Sovereignty Across the Taiwan Strait. In Deborah S. Davis and Sara L. Friedman, eds., Wives, Husbands, and Lovers (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 285-310
Tseng Hsun-hsün-hui. 2015. Gender and Power Dynamics in Transnational Marriage Brokerage. Cross-Currents 4(2): 519-45.

ASSIGNMENT
By 8:00 a.m. on Friday, March 4, please post 200-400 words on why you think Taiwan has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. If you like, you may include the other so-called Confucian Societies (ROK, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and urban China) in your analysis. This is only an option, not required.