David K. Jordan is one. He has been at the University of California San Diego's Department of Anthropology since its founding in 1969. The book--his first--is called "Gods, Ghosts & Ancestors."
In his preface, Jordan described the book as an effort "to present an overview of folk religion as it is lived by farming people." Based on fieldwork he did between 1966 and 1968 in a village in southwestern Taiwan, "Gods, Ghosts & Ancestors" has chapters devoted to ancestor worship, exorcism and divination.
As he recounted in the preface to the 1985 edition of the book, the illegal printings of his book continuously found enthusiastic readers, and this led to a new legal edition.
While doing fieldwork in Taiwan, language was "by far the greatest problem," Jordan recalled June 1. "At the University of Chicago, where I was a graduate student, the Mandarin teachers argued that there was no particular reason to learn spoken Mandarin. All that mattered was to be able to read. Worse yet, anthropology graduate programs then, as now, were extremely unsympathetic to students taking time out to study foreign languages, including fieldwork languages," he said.
Jordan, who has been a professor emeritus since retiring in 2004, took summer courses in Mandarin at Stanford University before leaving for Taiwan. These, he found, were "not nearly enough."
"Arriving in Taiwan with way too little of the language, I then went to live in a village where the normal language was Holo, for which there were few dictionaries and textbooks," he said. "I tried to be as careful as I could and to double-check everything I could double-check, but my poor competence in Mandarin, Holo and written Chinese was a stumbling block."
For Avron A. Boretz, a professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, the language problem was somewhat different.
"The main challenge was getting my Holo up to speed. I was already proficient in Mandarin, but the communities I was working in were mostly Holo-speaking," he said June 4. "Of course, most of my informants could understand Mandarin, and most under 60 could speak it reasonably well, but preferred not to. I did some formal training, but it still took several months in the field before my Holo was useful for more than just breaking the ice."
Boretz said that during various fieldwork projects in Taiwan between 1990 and 2005, he never encountered resistance or opposition from officialdom.
"Although all of my Taiwan fieldwork was conducted during the period of martial law, I found that I had nearly unrestrained freedom to go anywhere and talk to anybody," Jordan said. "I was able to hire research assistants as needed. And there was no interference in sending research materials home."
In the 1970s, Jordan researched various sects. One of them, Yi Guan Dao, was outlawed yet flourishing. It remained banned in Taiwan until 1987, and is still proscribed in mainland China
"I was curious why Yi Guan Dao in particular was technically illegal [but not repressed]. I wrote to the Ministry of the Interior to see if I might manage to get an interview with someone who might be able to explain the logic of the law to me, but I never heard back," Jordan explained. "However, I had an interview with the head of a Kuomintang office of social work and his very well-informed subordinate, and they were most solicitous."
"When I finished my fieldwork in 1976, I addressed a letter to [then] ROC President Yen Chia-kan expressing my appreciation to the government and people of Taiwan for the excellent experience I had had conducting fieldwork there. His gracious reply is still framed on the wall of my office," Jordan said.
Younger anthropologists have also found Taiwan an especially easy place to work in. "Taiwan is a pretty open and freewheeling place. The people are nice," Jeffrey Martin, an assistant professor in the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Studies at Chang Jung Christian University in south Taiwan's Tainan County, said Aug. 1.
Martin pointed out that, because Taiwan is socially diverse and politically pluralistic, whatever an anthropologist's interests, he or she is very likely to find local people or groups whose concerns mesh with the researcher's.
"Taiwan's a bit better than mainland China in that respect," he remarked. "You can always find an NGO that exists to criticize the status quo or present independent information. Those people aren't scared to speak up."
Martin has long had a personal connection with Taiwan. His wife, whom he met in the United States 12 years ago, is a native of southwest Taiwan's Yunlin County.
The Michigan native majored in mathematics during his undergraduate years. He backpacked around mainland China and the Middle East, and later entered the field of anthropology largely because of his interest in East Asian cultures and philosophies.
"I came to Taiwan to visit my wife's family before I'd even thought about what to focus on at graduate school," he recalled.
During that summer in Taiwan he met several police officers and a martial arts expert. These encounters sparked an interest that remains strong: Martin researched Taiwan's police for both his master's degree and doctoral degree theses at the University of Chicago's Department of Anthropology.
He is currently doing fieldwork with grassroots volunteer police units--known as "civil patrol teams"--in Tainan County, as well as writing a book about the history of policing in Taiwan since 1895. This June, he presented a paper detailing his findings to the 14th Annual North American Taiwan Studies Conference in Seattle.
Marc L. Moskowitz's interest in Taiwan also came about by accident.
"I came to Taiwan for the first time in 1989 when I left [mainland] China after the Tiananmen Square protests. After that I fell in love with the place," recalled Moskowitz, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina, June 29.
"If you add all the time I've spent in Taiwan, it would come to approximately eight years. I think of Taiwan as a second home as much as a place to study. I was an English literature major as an undergraduate, but I decided to switch to anthropology so that I could better understand Taiwan," he recalled.
Moskowitz's first book, "The Haunting Fetus: Abortion, Sexuality, and the Spirit World in Taiwan," was published by the University of Hawaii in 2001. He said the book's subject--an investigation of the belief that an aborted fetus may return to haunt its parents--is an example of how "topics choose me, rather than the other way around ... I tend to stumble into things and say, 'Hey, what's this all about?'"
"I had already lived in Taiwan for a year and a half before I heard about [haunting fetuses], but once I started asking people about it I discovered that every Taiwanese person I knew had already heard of the ghosts. This process of discovery is what makes studying Taiwan both fun and interesting for me," said Moskowitz, who has spent time as a visiting scholar and visiting research associate at Academia Sinica's Institute of Ethnology.
According to Boretz, now that mainland China has become accessible to Western social scientists, anthropologists are beginning to neglect Taiwan.
"It's a trend that started in the 1990s and continues unabated today. It's quite noticeable when attending professional conferences like American Anthropological Association meetings. Taiwan has been thoroughly marginalized," he said.
"Fewer and fewer doctoral students are expressing interest in doing fieldwork in Taiwan. One problem is that Taiwan Studies is still subsumed under China Studies in most Western institutions, and research in Taiwan is largely quite anachronistically and, I believe, mistakenly represented and perceived as merely an alternative to research in China," Boretz explained.
Jordan, however, is not convinced that Taiwan is losing out in terms of anthropological attention.
"Many of the anthropologists who worked in Taiwan in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s would probably have selected other regions if access had been possible. In most cases this was because they wanted to study Chinese society and simply didn't know very much about Taiwan," he said.
"Once the mainland became available some of [those who started in Taiwan] continued to pursue Taiwan studies, some of them shifted entirely to mainland work, and some have split their time between these areas."
"With the opening of the mainland to limited social research by foreigners, I think more graduate students in anthropology and sociology are finding Chinese research appealing, and some of these people will, sooner or later, discover that lots of interesting research can be done in Taiwan," Jordan said.
"In total numbers, Taiwan may be getting more attention than before from American researchers. At the same time the emergence of a vigorous and very competent cohort of anthropologists in Taiwan itself far more than compensates for any shift of interest among Anglophone field workers."
According to Jordan, the current generation of anthropologists does not face a lack of topics deserving of study.
"Some of the topics are obviously different from what they once would have been. For example, the end of martial law has brought a legitimacy to Holo and Hakka in far more public spheres of life than previously."
"Similarly, the legalization of more kinds of religious organizations has allowed people in Taiwan to undertake a level of religious experimentation and innovation that was always an impulse but is now a remarkable phenomenon."
"It is probably culturally significant that popular views [in mainland China] of Taiwan include the notion that it is a fashion leader in sphere after sphere of artistic expression. Thus pop culture, linked to globalization, seems like an especially rich area for anthropological research in Taiwan," Jordan said. Pop culture "was not part of the anthropological vocabulary when I was in graduate school," he added.
Moskowitz has written about Chinese-language pop music and Taipei's nightlife.
"Because of the rapid evolution of Taiwan society, some features studied in the past can be worth restudy," Jordan remarked.
As life changes, so do religious practices, for example. "People will be 'mining' Taiwan for anthropological study in the foreseeable future."
Copyright © 2008 by Steven Crook
Write to Taiwan Journal at tj@mail.gio.gov.tw