It’s also forbidden to bestow non-Icelandic or foreign-sounding names upon Icelandic children. Even foreign immigrants must take on Icelandic names before citizenship will be granted. The only exception ever made was for conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy (which led a subsequent immigrant to request the new Icelandic name ‘Vladimir Ashkenazy’!).

(Thanks to John Emerson for pointing out the percentages.)

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.

There are a number of reasons why I spend so little time at my old field site. One of them is that, as they say, “you can’t step in the same river twice.” It’s been a decade since I did my fieldwork, and the people I knew there have mostly moved on. I worked in an elementary school, and few people stay in the same place for more than four years. Some I’m still friends with. A teacher who teaches in the mountains south of Taipei, a baseball coach who is currently staying at my cousin’s house in Ohio has he studies for his Ph.D., and a few others I see now and then. But there are only a few people I know still living back in the village.

The other reason is that I’m busy. Taiwanese teachers typically have a 3-3 teaching load, as well as the usual advising and bureaucratic responsibilities. Since I arrived here I’ve developed over eleven new course syllabi – all of which I teach in Chinese. I mention this because it means I need to spend about four times as long preparing my courses as I would if I taught in English. The knowledge that almost all of my colleagues completed Ph.D.’s in Western Universities keeps me from making too much of my language situation. One get’s a lot more leeway teaching in a foreign language than one gets as a student, and I certainly couldn’t write a dissertation in Chinese, not to mention a term paper. Even now, for academic promotion, my colleagues are expected to publish and present papers in English whereas I can get by without having to write much Chinese at all.

The thing is, when I came they told me that I could teach in English because the government is trying to promote more English language classes. I tried it for a semester, but soon gave up. For one thing, less than a fifth of the students had sufficient English skills to follow me. Another reason is that we need at least ten students to get full credit for an undergraduate class. Although Taiwanese teachers get double credits for teaching in English – the same doesn’t apply to me as a foreigner, even though the problems I face are the same. But, over time, I’ve gotten better at it. The Ph.D. Cultural Theory course, which used to be the one class I did teach in English, I taught in Chinese (or Chinglish) this year. I still depend mostly on English language texts (giving my students translations when possible), but this semester was the first time I used a Chinese-only text in one of my classes, something I hope to slowly increase over time. [See this post I wrote some time back about the lack of texts in translation.]

But the biggest reason that I return to my field site so rarely has little to do with how busy I am teaching, and everything to do with how busy I am when I’m on break. Just at the time I got this job I was embarking on what turned out to be a four year project working on a documentary film in India. This has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done in my life, and I don’t regret it for an instant, but it does mean that when I do have a break I’m often jumping on board a plane to India (as, indeed, I’m doing again in about ten days time).

Despite everything I’ve said, I don’t mean to imply I haven’t been doing new research here in Taiwan. I have! About a year ago I started a series of posts on learning an endangered language and after that I interviewed some indigenous language teachers. While that work has been on hold over the past few months, I hope to take it up again as soon as we return from India. There is a paper I want to do on the subject and my New Year’s resolution is to get a first draft done by the end of the summer, and to turn it into a research proposal by the end of the year (when the National Science Council research deadline is).

Speaking of papers. Although it took me about three years to get into a schedule that works for me, I have lately also begun to figure out how to crank out those papers – something I need to do a lot more of if I’m going to pass the six year review required of all Taiwanese academics. Although there are the first inklings of a shift towards book-length manuscripts at some research institutions, here the focus is still on academic papers. A lot of credit is given for journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index which is annoying, since so many great anthropology journals aren’t listed there. My department has been supportive in giving me some credit for my online and multimedia work as well. I’m hopeful that the documentary film will be able to be included in my review.

One thing I’ve had to cut back on is conferences. It is just too costly and too time consuming to attend too many conferences from here. The school and the National Science Council do give faculty some support, but as much as I’d like to go to more conferences, I need to spend that precious time working on getting those papers out. I think, in general, this is true for junior faculty no matter where you are – but the distance (and jet lag) makes it even more true. To the extent possible, I have been trying to attend regional conferences, which can often be an exciting way to explore the region and (of course) network.

So, that’s why I don’t spend much time in my field site. But I’m learning a lot just by living and working here. For one thing, about half the students in our college are Taiwanese Aborigines, which is quite remarkable when you think that less than two percent of Taiwanese are Aborigines. Being a good teacher and advisor means learning from my students, which means being a good ethnographer. (Hopefully I can write some of that down in another blog post sometime.) Whether it is student term papers on indigenous issues, or problems advisees are facing at home, I’m picking up a lot about indigenous life by osmosis.

Below is video of a graduation day ceremony featuring cultural traditions from many of the different indigenous communities represented at our university:

In a way, I feel like I am now, a decade after I finished up my dissertation field work, finally ready to begin the task I started at that time. I feel that my first four years teaching here have given me a very special kind of training. And the learning process has made being a junior faculty member that much more exciting than it might have been otherwise. So even though I rarely go back to my old field site, it has still been a fantastic learning experience for me. Even though there may be limited opportunities for Ph.D.s to get academic appointments within the US, with the increasing globalization of higher education there are more and more opportunities abroad. I hope that this post might help others decide if doing so is right for them.

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.

I’m glad that Taiwan is going smoke-free in public spaces and offices, but this PSA just made me laugh. Its so Taiwanese somehow …

This summer we are heading back to Chharanagar for the fourth time. We always look forward to our trips, but this one is special. It will be the tenth anniversary of Budhan Theatre, and we will be there for the celebrations. We also plan to show a rough cut of our film to the community for their feedback. But one of the main purposes of our film is to record some music for our soundtrack. We will be joined by the multi-talented musician John Plenge.

There are three kinds of music we wish to record: folk songs still remembered by the older generation, popular songs sung by some of the community’s professional musicians, and music by the members of Budhan Theatre, like what you see in Dakxin’s music video.

If you wish to support Chhara youth, please consider making a donation at Vimukta.org.

If you google the letters “GTD” you’ll get seven million hits back. GTD stands for “Getting Things Done,” a time management book, method and philosophy promoted by David Allen which has spawned a huge array of self-help blogs and task management webservices. Wired magazine described it thus:

Allen’s approach is not inspirational. Instead, it is detailed and dry. But within his advice about how to label a file folder or how many minutes to allot to an incoming email there is a spiritual promise. He says there is a state of blessed calm available to those who have taken careful measure of their habits and made all the changes suggested by reason. Nirvana comes by routine steps, as an algorithm drives a machine.

I have personally found Allen’s approach tremendously beneficial. I don’t think I could get through the week without the Mac OS X application, Things. Things makes it a breeze to implement GTD without having read David Allen’s book. Before Things I relied on a variety of paper lists, my e-mail inbox, files on my desk and my computer desktop, bookmarked webpages, sticky notes, etc. to try to keep track of all the various tasks I was expected to do. Now I immediately file everything into Things and forget about it. Things allows me to distinguish between those tasks which are current, those which are due at some future date, delegated tasks, and tasks which can be put off indefinitely. Related tasks can be grouped into projects, but the design of Things prevents projects from becoming unwieldily. If you need a “sub-project” just create another project and group it in the same “area” or easily attach keywords (“tags”) to link them together.

Task management wasn’t such a big deal for me before, but since I started teaching full time it has become a necessity. Each class I teach requires the logistical planning of a military campaign. On top of that I have numerous administrative duties, and then on my “free time” I’m supposed to do original research and writing. Not to mention producing a feature length film, running a non-profit, and blogging. I haven’t even mentioned trying to negotiate the local medical bureaucracy, taking care of a dog, and the million other things that everyone has to do to get through daily life anywhere, but which are a bit more of a challenge when you aren’t a native speaker of the local language.

For this reason I’ve tried out just about every task-management application or approach I could find. You name it, I’ve tried it: paper-based, Palm OS, online and desktop GTD applications, etc. Then I found Things. Things just works. I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to spend a lot of time categorizing things or fiddling with tags and categories. The most important thing about such a system is that you trust it. If you don’t have complete faith in your system you won’t use it, or you’ll end up keeping multiple lists. I don’t. My e-mail inbox is completely empty, which is about as close to “a state of blessed calm” as I’ll get.

Despite how beneficial it has been for me personally, I am troubled by GTD and the cult of efficiency which surrounds it. Foucault talks about “technologies of the self” by which he means those “technologies imbued with aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects and averting certain undesired ones” (Rose, 1999, cited in Wikipedia). At the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Taylor developed the theory of “scientific management” which is one of the quintessential technologies of power. GTD is both scientific management for the digital age and a technology of the self for the IT crowd. Rather than having management standing over us with a clock, counting how many seconds it takes us to finish each task, we monitor ourselves by entering each of our daily tasks into a program like Things.

There exists an alternative approach in the slow movement: slow food, slow living, slow travel, and even slow writing. The Slow Manifesto states that “multi-tasking is a moral weakness.” (Also see this TED talk by Carl Honore, a journalist whose popularized the slow living movement.) That’s all well and good. We should all spend time on what’s important. But who has time to do so? Not people working minimum wage who have to hold down two jobs just to make ends meet. I think going slow should be thought of as a right rather than a priviledge. Personally, I’m busy by choice. Or perhaps by genetics. My parents, both in their seventies, still multitask. But I don’t think GTD is necessarily incompatible with slow living. I actually find it easier to take time off to play with the dog when I know exactly what has to be done today, and what can be put off till later.

RELATED: I forgot to mention a recent post on Savage Minds about some of the other tools I recently added to my workflow.

A very happy year of the (Mickey) mouse to everyone from Taiwan!

PS: Its worth noting that this is not a pirated product, but an authentic Disney product marked with a hologram to that effect. Disney must be raking it in this year!

It bears no relation to the main point of his article, which focuses on how economic ideology led the Fed into the current “unmitigated disaster” known as the subprime lending debacle, but Paul Krugman chose this interesting quote as the lead-in to his article:

When announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his decision as follows: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

This quote is meant to be a humorous example of understatement. While the atomic bombs get most of the headlines, the firebombing of Tokyo killed at least as many people. Japan was in ruins. But, having read a little Japanese sociolinguistics, I know that Japanese discourse can often sound very indirect to English speakers, even though Japanese speakers would not necessarily hear it that way. I wondered if something similar might be going on here.

I immediately thought of blogger Matt Treyvaud of No-Sword and Néojaponisme, and so I wrote him asking what he thought. His answer was more thorough than I could have hoped for, although it wasn’t what I had expected:

First, Matt directed me to the original document, original document (also here), from where we can find the quote mentioned in Krugman:

…. But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State, and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people – the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

The context of this statement is his praising the Japanese people’s devotion during trying times, not an explanation for the decision to surrender. Indeed, the main reason he gives for his decision is in the following sentence, where he discusses the atomic bomb:

Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

There’s no beating about the bush here.

Matt’s second point which is that the speech was given in the semi-archaic courtly variety of Japanese, which has two important implications. The first is that translation is difficult:

since the speech was in court Japanese (obscure even in 1945), exactly how to interpret this line is not clear. Some modern commentators do
accept the “understatement” reading that Krugman uses. Some people claim that that passage…’means “things have definitely not gone well for us” (usage of 必ずしも, the key word corresponding to “not necessarily” in Krugman’s version, has changed slightly over the years), some say it means “[despite everyone's efforts] things will not necessarily improve for us”.

I lean towards the latter interpretation myself. By the time Hirohito delivered this speech (via a recording broadcast over the radio), central Tokyo had already been burned to the ground; I don’t think that even the Japanese leadership of the time could seriously have written a speech that could call this “not necessarily to [our] advantage”. Implicitly admitting that things are going badly, and then adding “and, contrary to expectations, they are not likely to improve” seems much more likely.

I also seem to recall hearing that the original version of this line was something like “the war situation gets worse every day”, so it could just be the tortured result of a fierce edit war within the bureaucracy.

The second is that most Japanese in 1945 would have found the Emperor’s announcement very difficult to understand in the first place. Even those who were comfortable with classical Japanese were “much more used to reading language like that than hearing it spoken.” The low quality of the recording did not help either. Supposedly there was a follow-up broadcast which explained the announcement in plain-everyday-Japanese, but that is harder to track down.

This means that it is hard to tell how ordinary Japanese would have “understood” the speech. Presumably, at the time the main message was that the war was over, although Matt says that there was some confusion as to whether Japan had even surrendered, with some people believing that they had to prepare to fight a land-invasion.

As far as how the speech is remembered today, according to Wikipedia’, the most well remembered phrase in Japan is this one:

… it is according to the dictates of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable.

The other day I went to see an interesting performance built up around the life and work of Gao Yi-sheng 高一生. Who is Gao Yi-Sheng? There isn’t much about him in English on the web, but here is a short blurb from the Taipei Times:

Better known by his Chinese name of Kao Yi-sheng (高一生), Uyongu Yatauyungana was the mayor of the Tsou Aboriginal township of Wufeng (吳鳳) — since retitled Alishan Township (阿里山) — in Chiayi County.

Yatauyungana was born in 1908 when Taiwan was under Japanese rule.

Although it was difficult for native Taiwanese students to receive a higher education under the Japanese system, he was able to attend the Tainan Normal College through his connections to the Japanese authorities.

He later returned to the Tsou people’s mountain communities, bringing with him new ideas and processes that assisted in modernizing the Aboriginal communities there.

During this time, he also composed many pieces of music and accompanying lyrics.

After World War II, Yatauyungana began promoting the idea of Aboriginal autonomy. When the 228 Incident erupted in 1947, however, he coordinated a group of Tsou tribesmen who joined Chiayi locals in fighting against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) forces, eventually trapping them inside Chiayi’s airport.

Because of his ideas and actions, he was jailed by the KMT government and executed in 1954.

Gao was a prolific writer of poems, letters, and songs, which have been published in book and CD form. The performance, which included many students from our college, mixed traditional Tsou 鄒 songs with Japanese era melodies, and songs written by Gao or adapted from his letters, as well as some Western pieces which his daughter had performed when she worked as a night club singer for US soldiers in Taipei. Many of the performers were Aborigines from other parts of Taiwan who had to learn Tsou and Japanese for the show. They did a great job! Still, while the songs and dances were great, the storytelling was unrelentingly melodramatic in that particularly Taiwanese fashion. They could do with a healthy dose of sarcasm and irony …

I also worry about the overly nostalgic representation of the Japanese era. While it is true that many of the Aborigine elite did well under the Japanese, there were tens of thousands more who were killed and displaced in genocidal military campaigns. (We only have the records of the number of Japanese soldiers killed, which were in the tens of thousands. Presumably many times as many Aborigines died, and many still suffer as a result of being displaced from their land.) Still, it is a fascinating piece of Taiwanese history and we really enjoyed the show.

You can see a different performance of some of Gao’s songs, done by Tsou singers, on Google Video: here and here. There is also a three part documentary on Youtube (in Chinese): here, here, and here. Some more songs here. And this beautiful gif-animation (unfortunately the sound is not very clear, but it has subtitles).