The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan. Edited by DAVID K. JORDAN, ANDREW D. MORRIS, and MARC L. MOSKOWITZ. [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. vii+278 pp. ISBN 0-8248-2800-3.]

Extract

From the early 1990s, the study of Taiwan has flourished into what is almost a field in its own right. Yet, despite this growth, Taiwan Studies remains an unstable and inchoate area of scholarship. Beyond key issues like democratization, national identity and the “miracle economy,” it has no dominant problematics, discursive structures or proscribed methodologies. And, unlike Chinese Studies, it is too small a field to be clearly demarcated into sub-fields.

As a result, the study of Taiwan is unusually open to any and all possible topics for study. Indeed, the free play of the range of subjects in Taiwan studies is one aspect of the continuing establishment and consolidation of the meaning of “Taiwan” itself, and of a Taiwanese identity, over the last ten to 20 years.

The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular culture in Taiwan is in the first instance an excellent contribution to this developing field, but it is also indicative of the challenges to producing legitimate academic knowledge of Taiwan.

The book begins with a review of Taiwanese history, which, even now, is a necessary opening step to establish the discursive boundaries of a scholarly project on Taiwan. The introductory chapter presents what has become a received history of Taiwan, organizing it by ruling regimes over the last four centuries. This history was established most clearly in English by the work of Thomas Gold in the mid-1980s and here it is filled out with much detail and nuance.

The body of the book is divided into four sections organized into generalizing categories: religion, the public sphere, economic life and popular entertainment. The methodologies include social history in Morris's chapter on baseball, anthropology in Katz's work on chicken-beheading rites, and media studies in Chu's chapter on talk-back television. Simon's work on gay and lesbian identity and Chin-ju Lin's chapter on Filipino domestic workers in Taiwan also add important critical dimensions.