Teaching Anthropology “In The Field”
Re-posted from Savage Minds.
This is a view of the building where I work. The College of Indigenous Studies at National Dong Hwa University, in Hualien, Taiwan.
And here is a picture of the view (on a more typically cloudy day) looking back, from the balcony near my office.
Most of the people who live on the East Coast of Taiwan reside in a narrow valley between the Coastal Mountain Range (top picture) and the larger Central Mountain Range (bottom picture). The valley starts in Hualien city, and continues down about about a hundred miles, to the next coastal city, Taitung. About thirty miles south is the village where I did my fieldwork. Apart from the great scenery and the chance to improve my Chinese, that is one of the main reasons I took this job. But it is now four years since I came here and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve made that thirty mile trip. That’s what I’d like to talk about in this post. I think the reasons give some insight into what life is like as an expat professor in Taiwan, what it means to teach near your field site, as well as some of the unique aspects of my current situation.
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Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!
We are happy to finally be able to share the trailer for our new film, Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!
See our website for more info.
The Paranoid Style
Image by AdamThinks.com
There has been something of a debate among the American Left as to the true nature of the anti-healthcare reform movement. One position is that while there have always been crazies on the Right, the current era represents something new, in which the crazies have taken over the party, backed by unprecedented amounts of money, not to mention the corporate support provided by FOX News. Krugman, wistful for the Nixon era, when “leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy” puts it this way:
the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence.
“Born Criminal” Found Not Guilty!
Activist and playwright Dakxin Bajrange was arrested on May 11th, 2003 for allegedly assaulting Prahlad Chhara. The real reason? Performing plays critical of the police. News of his arrest motivated Shashwati and I to go to India and make the documentary film, Acting Like a Thief. That trip changed our lives – and while Dakxin has gone on to become an award winning documentary filmmaker, even as he continues his work in the community, his case has not gone away. For years the case has dragged on through India’s notoriously slow legal system. Until now. I’m happy to say that today I received word that Dakxin’s case has finally been settled and he has been cleared of all charges. For a member of a community once declared “Born Criminals” this means a lot.
Our new film, with brings the viewer much deeper into the life and work of Budhan Theatre members and their families, including Dakxin, will be completed later this year. To stay up to date, please sign-up for our newsletter and stay tuned for major website updates later this summer.
Want to help Chhara kids? Help sponsor the Chharangar Library!
Crossroads
Photo by Ereine
Former Clinton White House adviser and prominent blogger, Brad DeLong says: “We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to revive our economy, or do we want to punish the bankers?” But critics of the Geithner plan are not saying he’s being too soft on the bankers because they want to see blood. They are saying it because the bankers are the problem and as long as they are calling the shots we won’t be able to revive the economy. Take a look at the following charts:
The charts come from an excellent article by Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, who blogs at Baseline Scenario. If you are still trying to make sense of the financial crisis I recommend starting with his Financial Crisis for Beginners page (the radio programs he links to now have their own page as well). When Johnson worked for the IMF it was his job to tell countries what they had to do to get out of a financial crisis:
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Happy 牛 Year!
Understanding Gaza
In this clip ’self-hating Jew’ Jon Stewart points out the obviously one-sided and mobius-strip like quality of mainstream American news coverage of the war in Gaza. Together with help from Kiven Strohm and other friends on Twitter and Facebook, I’ve compiled a list of resources about Gaza, with the aim of providing an alternative view. You don’t have to agree, but please take the time to look through the resources on our site.
Taipei Biennial ‘08
Shashwati and I finally got to the Taipei Biennial, on the last weekend before it closed. That means we missed most of the site-specific pieces around Taipei, but we did get to the main exhibit at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which was surprisingly busy – perhaps because admission was free.
The highlight of the show was a film about a portrait of Stalin by Picasso by Lene Berg. The film is based on a handmade book she made about the subject (also on display at the exhibit). The caption for the above photo says: “If they had been here I would have looked down on both of them – even without heels.” The film can be watched online on Vimeo.
My second favorite piece was “Undercooled,” a photography project by Onejoon Che, who took some amazing portraits of military installations hidden or buried in the modern cityscape.
There were lots of video installations, many of which were interesting as ideas but poorly executed. However a few stood out from the rest. Tsui Kuang-yu’s (崔廣宇) “Invisible City: Taipari York” (隱形城市：台八里‧約克) was a humorous look at cosmopolitanism in which tricks of scale played on our expectations. Lovers kissing in front of the Eiffel tower turn out to be an owner petting a dog, a couple sipping wine in front of the New York skyline turn out to be waiters cleaning up at a Taipei restaurant in front of a wall-sized photo, etc. Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova had fun with Dialectics of Subjection #4 (available on YouTube) in which two women engage in pillow-talk about the relative attractiveness of various world leaders. More seriously, Liu Wei spent the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre asking people in Beijing “Do you know what day it is?” in his film A Day to Remember / 忘卻的一天 and in “Rocks Ahead” Yochai Avrahami created art out of the no man’s land between West Bank checkpoints in Israel. There was also a good Yes Men display, including my favorite, the SurvivaBalls.
RIP Donnell Library
I wrote my first serious research paper in high school; about ethnographic film. In 1988 the only way to see many classic ethnographic films was on film. You know, the kind of thing which comes in big metal canisters and has to be fed through a movie projector. It would snap and break on occasion, in which case you had to splice it back together with tape. It was scratchy and noisy, and more to the point: incredibly expensive. I simply would not have been able to do such a project if it wasn’t for the Donnell Library across from the Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan.
I remember the small viewing rooms, the helpful librarians, and the thrill of treating film like it was a book: rewinding, viewing scenes over and over, taking notes. Nothing you couldn’t do at that time with a VHS tape, but one rarely got a chance to handle a film reel in the same way. I was pleasantly surprised that the city of NY would allow me to do so. It allowed me to overcome the awe of being a spectator in order to critically examine these films in a way that, in those days, would not otherwise have been possible.
I read about the Donnell closing its doors nearly a year ago, but the above picture, taken by an archivist who worked there during the library’s last days, of those film canisters being packed up gave the story added poignancy.
(via BoingBoing)
End of Year Campaign
(Reposted from the Vimukta blog.)
Each year we raise $1000 to help fund the Chharanagar library. This library is much more than a library, its a community center and an informal school as well. But its first and foremost a library – and a very good one at that! It houses a large collection of (mostly donated) books in three languages: English, Hindi, and Gujarati.
We’ve already raised $700 towards this year’s goal. Please help us raise the last $300 before new year by using the widget below. Thank you!
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
