The story she’s referencing has already been trotted out by websites like Jezebel, about how late in Santorum’s wife’s fourth pregnancy something went catastrophically wrong, her body went into septic shock and doctors recommend an abortion. Because the procedure collided with “their” worldview (I’m assuming that her beliefs coincide with his) the mother risked her life despite the fact that doctors predicted her child would die regardless. In the end the mother survived but the baby died.

What really stands out to me in the passage is the great wit that Hrdy marshals in her description of Santorum on the senate floor, not easy to do given the circumstances, recontextualizing the abortion debate as something older than politics itself. It’s a testament to what a talented writer can do with words and how one anthropologist contributed to the discourse by deconstructing it.

Hrdy. 1999. Mother Nature. (pp.5-6)

The abortion issue is notorious for generating so much “heat” and so little “light.” On this particular occasion, one of the senators debating the issue (Rick Santorum, Republican from Pennsylvania) became “so emotional” that the blood vessels leading to his stomach constricted, while those leading to his heart and brain dilated. Responding to signals from the most ancient portions of his brain, his pounding heart caused the face of this deeply threatened mammal to flush “crimson” in preparation for a fight. His voice rose to such a pitch that colleagues had to intervene.

…

The abortion debate is ultimately about what it means to be a mother; and the senator, like many humans before him, had his own unusually clear notion of what mothers were for. The couple already had three young children, but this fourth birth was given clear priority over his wife’s well-being as well as that of her other children. Fortunately, the mother survived. But, as doctors predicted, the new baby died shortly after birth.

As the debate unfolded, the rush of blood and pounding heart beneath the senator’s coat and tie spoke volumes about motivations far deeper, far older, then members of Congress ordinarily consider. Like all humans, and indeed as is typical of the entire Primate order, the senator exhibited an intense, even obsessive, interest in the reproductive condition of other group members. Like other high-status male primates before him, he was intent on controlling when, where, and how females belonging to his group reproduced. One former member of the House of Representatives, however, sensed that there was more at stake than just the issues under debate. “It’s very interesting the issues they select,” observed Patricia Schroeder of Colorado. “They don’t want to intervene in the bodily functions of men.”

Schroeder’s quip goes to the heart of the matter. Passionate debates about abortion derive from motivations to control female reproduction that are far older than any particular system of government, older than patriarchy, older even than recorded history. Male fascination with the reproductive affairs of female group members predates our species.

I’m pretty sure I had a quote from Hrdy about Newt Gingrich too. If I find it again I’ll add it to the comments. Finally, the ‘90s are going retro! That’s good. I was getting sick of all this ‘80s crap: Ronald Regan, Don Henley. Bring back the culture wars and A Tribe Called Quest.

In assessing Seediq Bale’s historical accuracy it’s helpful to distinguish between subjective and objective: between 1) immediate, indigenous perspectives on history as it unfolds as current event on the one hand, and 2) distantiated, contextualized interpretations of historians on the other hand.

At a promotional event I attended, the director Wei Te-sheng said he wanted the audience to forget everything that has happened since 1930. I take him to mean that he wants to transport us back in time and give us subjective perspectives, mostly indigenous perspectives, on the Wushe Incident. This subjective history includes a knowledge of tribal politics and more basically of the Seediq worldview, of Seediq belief.

First, what I’m calling “tribal politics,” with no disrespect or evaluation whatsoever intended in the use of the term “tribal.” It’s true that Mona Rudao and other indigenous characters in the film have a concept of the Japanese as an “alien race” or “foreign tribe.” Yet primarily Mona Rudao’s political world in the film remains one of territorial tribal alliances and antagonisms, involving in particular Toda and Tkdaya Seediq and to a lesser extent the Truku. Mona Rudao hates the Toda chief Temu Walis more than he hates the Japanese, and his hatred is more enduring.

Would the film’s take on tribal politics satisfy a historian? A historian would probably be impressed without being able to accept the film as history. It seems to me that, the film’s alliances and antagonisms don’t shift. They kind of freeze. This makes it easier for the audience to understand. There’s even a poster for the benefit of the audience that lays out the different agents and their relations.

A historian would have a sense of an evolving not a static political system. More problematically, the film reduces the number of historical agents and simplifies their relationships in order to produce good drama. Too many characters and groups would confuse the audience, and make it harder to determine who to identify with. A film needs a hero, or at least a single or a couple of main characters to pay attention to. That’s why Wei Te-sheng put Mona Rudao at incidents he never attended (人止關 and 姊妹原), to keep him in the spotlight. He has to be in the spotlight, because he’s the main character in the main plot.

Main and supporting characters and main plots and sub plots are how we structure our works of narrative art and to some extent how we think about our lives. Historians can use these same tropes to produce narrative history, but historical narratives are always more complicated in history books than in novels or films. The narrative models a historian would build of the Wushe incident would regard individual motivations in the evolving system of tribal relations. People today don’t understand the system; they don’t have too much patience to learn about it. It’s much easier for Wei Te-sheng to present “interpersonal” relations not in the context of the system, but rather in terms of “love” and “hate.” In the film Mona Rudao hates the Toda leader Temu Walis. The audience gets it: Mona Rudao really doesn’t like the guy. The feeling becomes mutual, and that’s why Temu Walis agrees to go after Tkdaya warriors during the reprisal like a bounty hunter or a gun for hire. The actual relationship between the two men could not have been so simple. They went to Japan together several decades before 1930 (meaning that Temu Walis was not quite as young as he is portrayed in the film – see the promotional poster below)!

Second, the Seediq worldview. In his review of the film in the Taipei Times, Pastor Michael Stainton, who has worked with the Seediq people for decades, claims that the account of Seediq belief in the film is compelling. As Mona Rudao reminds us over and over again in the film, and as he was taught by his father, a seediq bale – a real man – has headhunted. If he arrives at the rainbow bridge of the afterlife with blood on his hands he can cross to the happy hunting ground on the other side. A woman can be a seediq bale as well, by mastering weaving and presenting her callused hands for inspection on this side of the rainbow bridge. Both men and women have the right to receive facial tattoos when they become seediq bale. (I should note that Professor Stainton and Professor Guo Pei-yi have both reminded me that the practice of gaya was more than just headhunting and weaving). In the film this seediq bale belief is presented as the most significant cause of the incident. Mona Rudao wants to give the young men of the tribe a chance to become Seediq bale by driving out the foreign race that has occupied and exploited the ancestral hunting ground. It is the desire to become a real man more than hatred of the Japanese that motivates the decision of each individual warriors. After all, in the happy hunting ground of the afterlife, the headhunters and their victims will be reunited as friends.

How compelling would this explanation be for a historian or an anthropologist? I’m not sure. It’s plausible. But where’s the evidence? Check out this picture of Mona Rudao:

Can you tell if he has scars? You sure can’t tell whether he believes in a rainbow bridge to the afterlife. I am ignorant, but if anyone promised to vouchsafe me certain knowledge on Mona’s motivations, I would have epistemological reservations. The only records we could have of Mona Rudao’s beliefs are from Japanese hands. We could interview very old Seediq people and ask them what they grew up believing or what Mona Rudao believed if they knew him, but their statements would be contaminated by the eight intervening decades. Japanese anthropological records would have to be used carefully. So a historian could consider the role of traditional belief in the incident, but would not be able to use belief to advance a certain explanation of the incident.

A historian’s lack of certainty or even ignorance about many things is the result of historical distance. No historian would write history about a current event. If he did he’d be a reporter. History can be written only with historical distance. This distance in theory allows for objectivity, but it also creates ignorance. When all you have is documents there will be many things you don’t know. Oral history can be problematic, our faith in the horse’s mouth notwithstanding. Historical distance must inspire a sense of humility. It might seem disappointing or embarrassing to admit that we just don’t know, but it’s the uncertainty, the room for discussion and provisional interpretation that makes history interesting.

Seediq Bale displays no such humility and narratively it’s kind of boring. The way Seediq Bale tells the story, everything is presented as truth, as how it happened not how it might have happened. In the first scene, Mona Rudao takes down a mountain boar. There is one major flashback in the film, when Mona Rudao remembers his father telling him about the Seediq worldview. Otherwise it’s just one damn thing after another. Sometimes there are twin narrative strands proceeding together in time; otherwise not much besides endurance is demanded of the audience. There is no objective perspective from a standpoint of historical distance.

By contrast, other literary adaptations of Wushe have begun in the present and reimagined the past. Dana Sakura, the miniseries about Wushe that played on public television in 2003, presented the frame story of a young Taiwanese man, a graduate student in history, who goes to Wushe and to the village of Qingliu, where the survivors of Wushe were moved in 1931, to try to understand the role of a relative in the incident. In A History of Pain Michael Berry sees this as a Taiwanese appropriation of the incident and that may be so. But it also introduces the historical distance of a frame story. That’s what frame stories do, create distance. The miniseries presents a reimagining of Wushe based on interviews the graduate student conducts. We get a sense of what it might have been like, of what might have happened. The same is true in the recent indigenous film Finding Sayun, which reimagines the story of Sayun’s Bell while reminding the audience: this might be how it happened. In another notable presentation of Wushe, Wuhe’s novel Remains of Life, which Professor Michael Berry is translating, all we have is the frame story; Wuhe refuses to reenact history in his imagination; his concern is the contemporary village of Qingliu.

Contemporary perspectives on Wushe are not necessarily objective. There’s a fuzzy boundary between subjective and objective. We try to be objective about the subjective. And being objective is really hard. Chinese and Taiwanese historians have interpreted Wushe according to their own worldviews, and in some sense it’s impossible not to, as we always write from a limited perspective; that’s what Gadamer was on about with the fusion of horizons (though alas it’s so often the confusion of horizons). I don’t think contemporary indigenous ideas about Wushe are necessarily more objective. Indigenous peoples have historical distance but might not like the humility that has to go along with it. At the same time, indigenous people’s views deserve special respect. It’s more their history than anyone else’s. I’ll try to critically discuss three indigenous perspectives on Seediq Bale in the context of my discussion of subjective and objective history in Seediq Bale.

Indigenous Perspectives on Seediq Bale

First, Seediq people argue that Mona Rudao would never have shot at his womenfolk because it goes against Gaya. I’m a bit skeptical. What Gaya was in 1930 was not written in stone. From my limited experience reading Taiwan aboriginal fiction, people are not always in agreement about what their tradition is. In Rimui Aki 里慕伊．阿紀’s stories, for instance, women don’t always agree with male interpretations of Gaya. Also, even if Mona’s act was against Gaya, the relationship between social rules and contact is complicated. People in Taiwan joke about how a red traffic light is for reference purposes only when they don’t want to wait for the light to change. People take the rules into consideration, but as Bourdieu argued behavior is constrained not determined by rules. What’s more objectionable about the scene in question is, again, that we don’t know whether it happened, and Wei Te-sheng presents it as if it actually did happen.

Second, in the aftermath of Wushe, the Japanese paid Toda warriors to slaughter the Tkdaya rebels. This is historical fact. I’ve already noted that the fact has to be understood in the context of intertribal relations not in terms of interpersonal animosity. Also, there are still Toda and Tkdaya people alive today and some of them are not pleased that the historical conflict between them has been dragged out and displayed in the light of day. I know where they’re coming from. But I don’t think that the Toda leader Temu Walis is portrayed negatively in the film. He’s played by the heartthrob actor Ma Zhixiang (Umin Boya). Umin Boya is himself a Toda Seediq. He’s one of the most interesting characters in the film; he’s very tormented by the fact that his traditional belief has been commodified by the Japanese. He’s not presented as an evil character.

Third, a related matter is the presentation of the “hero” of the film, Mona Rudao. In Seediq Bale he’s, well, heroic. He conceives an irrational hatred of Temu Walis, but heroes don’t have to be nice according to some small minded concept of how people should behave. In the film Mona Rudao is larger than life. But not all contemporary Seediq see him that way. The Toda especially have their own views of chief Mona, and not all of them are positive. Not all of them are all that heroic, either. Hero-worship does not make for a good historian, because heroes belong in myths and legends not in history. Individual achievements may seem heroic, but the glory fades when you understand them in context. Mona Rudao was taken on a tour of Japan. He remained chief for so long because he had Japanese support, because he was a pawn in a complicated field of power. The Toda historian Kumu Tapas has, by compiling oral history, been gathering materials by which a more balanced picture of Mona Rudao might emerge.

For eighty years, Wushe has been represented from Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese perspectives. Now that indigenous people have started expressing their own perspectives, non-indigenous writers, filmmakers, or novelists have to be more careful. They can’t just make things up. And hopefully someday soon, we will have an indigenous fictional narrative version of the Wushe Incident.

Seediq Bale is often described as a shi3shi1 史詩 – an “historical poem” – the typical Chinese translation of “epic.” The original epics were oral historical poetry, but orality and poetry are no longer essential features of epic. Maybe history isn’t essential either; epic is sometimes used with the simple meaning of “grand.” But I’ll be assuming a more complicated and interesting definition “a grand, repetitive mytho-historical narrative of conflict that begins in the middle (in medias res) captures the imagination of posterity because it bears on identity, both individual and collective.” It seems to me that Seediq Bale articulates an epic identity at odds with our modern notion of personal identity.

The most obvious meaning of epic is simply very long, and Seediq Bale is indeed very long. At four and a half hours, it is the longest Taiwan feature film by about half an hour. (Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer’s Day, to my knowledge the second longest, was a very different kind of film!). At a budget of 25 million USD it is the largest Taiwan production ever. The director Wei Te-sheng has plans for a three part epic treatment of Taiwan’s Dutch era (1624-1661), from Dutch, Chinese and Siraya plains aboriginal points of view. This would be another eight hours of epic filmmaking. After the theatres take their share of the gross, Seediq Bale is likely to remain in the red by a few million USD, so it’s not clear whether Wei Te-sheng will get the chance to make another epic film.

Seediq Bale also has many large battle scenes, involving large numbers of actors. The large battle scene is one of the defining features of the film epic. The way the battle scenes are filmed reflects an epic contrast of perspectives. Now we see the scene as a whole, from an objective perspective, now we switch to a close up in the heat of the action, from the perspectives of an individual hero.

Epics involve “epic machinery,” the world of gods above the world of men. In oral epic, the spirit world can be powerfully evoked, but film deals in images, and images of the numinous can be fantastical or just plain silly. It is usually better to suggest, not directly represent, the otherworld in a film. Seediq Bale tends to represent the spirits directly. Sometimes this works, as in the duet between Mona Rudao and the spirit of his father at the waterfall. Sometimes it does not work, as when the host of dead warriors appear walking on a rainbow cloud near the end of the film, first in profile, then head on. The CGI in the film, especially the animals, is generally pretty good, but the awfulness of the cloudborn warriors scene is universally acknowledged. The world of the gods in Seediq Bale is inhabited by the ancestors, which provides a justification for all seemingly objective shots, which is to say shots that do not represent the subjective POV of some character or other.

Like an oral epic, in which the same epithets are applied ad infinitum to fill out the metrical form, Seediq Bale is extremely repetitive. The violence of the film is repetitive, as in Homer’s Iliad. One could also complain about the repetitiveness of the (excellent) score and of the imagery. Mona Rudao’s CGI bird familiar appears half a dozen times, for instance. I don’t know how many times Mona Rudao mentions the rainbow bridge across which true men, men who have headhunted, can cross to reach the rich hunting ground of the afterlife – a dozen times at least. Repetitiveness is not necessarily a flaw in a work of art; it is arguably a feature of the epic form, especially since epic tends to be oral. Films are more oral than novels, and we tend to tolerate oral repetition more than we do in writing.

Starting in medias res is one of the defining features of the narrative structure of an epic. The Iliad starts not with the beginning of the war or the causes of the war but with the theme of Achilles’s wrath in the final year of the story. Seediq Bale starts in medias res with a scene in which Mona Rudao hunts a wild boar. But this scene is near the beginning; the only flashback is when Mona Rudao remembers his father teaching him about the traditional beliefs. Otherwise, the narrative structure of Seediq Bale is temporally straightforward. The action sometimes divides into several strands, but these strands proceed together in time and are linked by crosscutting.

Epics are stories of conflict that seem significant to posterity because of the role they play in identity construction. Conflict is after all a wonderful catalyst for identity, because it forces one to take sides. Some war stories are no longer significant for identity construction, because they seem somehow too far away, yet they still capture the imagination. The Spartan resistance to the Persian advance at Thermopylae, the story of 300 defending a pass against an army of thousands, is a good example. The most recent retelling of this story is the film 300. This film seems to have a lot in common with Seediq Bale. Like 300, Seediq Bale is a film that aestheticizes violence (by juxtaposing the breathtakingly beautiful sakura bloom with images of gore, for instance) and which was adapted from a comic book (see the cover of the comic book which inspired Seediq Bale below). I think Seediq Bale even alludes to the Spartan resistance. The Japanese general who leads the reprisal is stunned that three hundred indigenous warriors could resist thousands of highly trained troops of a modern army with planes, Howitzers, and poison gas.

But like an oral epic, and unlike a purely commercial film like 300, Seediq Bale seems to have a contemporary meaning. That contemporary meaning has to do with identity construction, both individual and collective.

First, what does the film say about individual identity? Mona Rudao’s concept of identity has a wonderful simplicity: he has an unambiguous external marker of his individuality. Like Odysseus, Mona Rudao bears a scar, a scar on his cheek as a result of a hunting accident. This serves as visual proof of his identity for everyone he meets. It allows the audience to identify Mona Rudao as a young man and a middle aged man – he’s played by two actors. His scar reminds me of Erich Auerbach’s great essay “Odysseus’s Scar.” Auerbach argued that identity in Homeric epic is externalized, in contrast to the internalized identity of Biblical narrative. Odysseus returned home after years of wandering and was recognized by his wet nurse because of the unambiguous mark on his thigh. Classicists and biblical scholars debate Auerbach’s interpretation; but it seems to me that “an unambiguous externalized identity” applies to Mona Rudao.

For Mona Rudao does not just have a single scar. He also has the scars of the tattoos on his chin and forehead. These scars attest to his status as a “real man,” a seediq bale, a person qualified to cross the rainbow bridge into the happy hunting grounds of the afterlife. These scars mark his status as an adult male, a warrior. How easy it is to tell a real man from a child, in Mona Rudao’s world!

In this respect Mona Rudao is an impressive but ultimately rather uninteresting character. His concept of identity is more status than identity. It’s either/or, and it’s externally marked. In Seediq Bale Mona Rudao relates to the child warrior Bawan Nawi that he visited Japan in the 1900s. He seems to have returned to Taiwan with only a technological concept of modernity. He knew the Japanese had powerful weapons, but didn’t get any idea of psychological modernity. His sense of himself remained ancient. According to Wei Te-sheng, he lauched the attack on Wushe as a headhunting ritual for a generation of young Seediq men who had not had the chance to become bale.

Mona Rudao’s concept of identity as externalized status is juxtaposed in the film with a more modern concept of personal identity. The most interesting example of a modern identity in the film is the Dakis/Hanaoka brothers, especially the elder brother Dakis Nobin or Hanaoka Ichiro. The brothers suffer from a more modern complicated idea of self. Born Seediq, they were educated to be Japanese. They were caught between Japanese modernity and Seediq tradition. In the film they are bullied by their Japanese colleagues and rejected by their own people. In this scene at the waterfall, Mona Rudao asks the elder brother to choose: are you going to the Shinto shrine when you die, or will you walk across the rainbow bridge?

Conflict catalyzes identity because it forces a person to choose, as if who you are is which side you’re on. The brothers want to claim both Seediq and Japanese identities. Nobody lets them. For them, the conflict becomes psychological, internal. In the end brothers can’t choose which side they are on. The brothers let Mona Rudao launch the attack against the Japanese at Wushe but don’t participate in it. They commit suicide together, one by seppuku, the other by hanging, the one according to Japanese, the other according to Seediq tradition.

Together they embody a modern psychological conflict. Alongside Mona Rudao’s unambiguous, lofty, epic concept of identity is a more confused, conflicted, contextualized idea of identity. The psychological conflicts of the brothers, which are conflicts of identity, enrich Seediq Bale. Yet they are not typical of epic. Epic conflicts are between sides or within a side, not within the individual. In the Iliad the Greek side spends most of the time fighting amongst themselves before they finally get their act together and defeat the Trojans by stealth. This might be called epic identity construction.

The notion of epic identity construction brings me back to the issue of Taiwan identity. The reader will recall that The Economist linked the film to Taiwan identity. It’s indisputable that the film is about identity. It even advertises itself as a comment on identity. The preview released at the end of August tells us right off the bat that we’ll be transported back to “an era of confused identities” (認同混淆的年代). People who know the story will think of the Dakis/Hanaoka brothers. They each had a confused identity. It’s clear that the film is commenting on individual identity. Is it also commenting on group identity, in particular Taiwan identity?

I think so, but in this respect Wei Te-sheng deserves credit for some degree of subtlety. Previous filmic or fictional treatments of Wushe have often overtly linked Wushe to Chinese and Taiwanese national identity. In his A History of Pain, the scholar Michael Berry has shown how Chinese nationalists saw Mona Rudao as participating in the national Chinese resistance against Japan (抗日), while Taiwanese nationalists viewed Mona Rudao as symbolically willing to defend Taiwan’s territory at the cost of his own life. Both kinds of nationalists identified with Mona Rudao and often inserted a Chinese or Taiwanese character who serves as Mona Rudao’s big brother or trusted adviser. In other words, in these works, there is Chinese or Taiwanese identification or close association with Mona Rudao and the Seediq rebels. This may remind students of American popular culture of the Mohawks at the Boston Tea Party and of James Fenimore Cooper’s oft-retold tale Last of the Mohicans. Americans also identified or closely associated with indigenous peoples, at an early stage of settler nation building.

There were Americans pretending to be ungovernable “revolting” Mohican Indians at the Boston Tea Party, and Leatherstocking, the main character in the works of Fenimore Cooper, America’s first national novelist, is bosom buddies with Chinggachgook. As the last of the Mohicans, Chinggachgook rather conveniently leaves the country to Leatherstocking’s people, the “Americans.” Seediq Bale, by contrast, is less overtly nationalistic. There are no Chinese or Taiwanese characters in Seediq Bale pretending to be Seediq or associating with the Seediq. In fact, there aren’t any significant Chinese or Taiwanese characters in the film at all.

That doesn’t mean that Seediq Bale doesn’t have anything to do with Taiwan identity. In the past two decades there has been an Wushe comic book and, inevitably, an album by the black metal band CthtoniC that went on to tour the States with Ozzy Ozborne. Both works come out of Taiwan nationalism, but in neither case is the link between Wushe and Taiwan identity made overtly within the work.

So what would a Taiwanese nationalist interpretation of Seediq Bale be like? The simplest nationalist interpretation of the film would be to identify Mona Rudao with a future Taiwanese leader and the Seediq rebels with this leader’s supporters. The Japanese would represent a potential invader. Let’s assume this invader is the PRC. To put it crudely or bluntly (and this is a crude and blunt interpretation) from a Taiwanese perspective, the film is, on this interpretation, saying that the Taiwanese people will defend their territory. They’d rather die than submit.

There are some problems with this interpretation. To begin with, if the Seediq in Seediq Bale represent the Taiwanese people, then the film seems to be saying that the Taiwanese public is hopelessly fragmented, because the Seediq in the film are hopelessly fragmented. Not everyone would rather die than submit. Mona Rudao was Seediq, but he didn’t lead a united Seediq resistance against the Japanese. Rather, he arranged a coalition of six Tkdaya Seediq tribal villages. Tkdaya is the name of a subgroup of the Seediq linguistic or cultural group. Mona Rudao was a leader of a Tkdaya village called Mahebo in alliance with other Tkdaya villages. Not all the Tkdaya villages participated in the Wushe Incident, only six of twelve. Other Seediq groups were antagonistic to the Tkdaya. The Toda Seediq, for instance, led in the film by Temu Walis, cooperated with the Japanese during the reprisal that followed the Wushe Incident. Not all of the Toda villages participated. The Japanese promised the participating Toda warriors so much money per Tkdaya Seediq head, and so the Toda went after the Tkdaya. In other words, Seediq Bale is a story about internal divisions more than an epic tale of anticolonial resistance.

Maybe the fragmentation in the Seediq body politic is not really an interpretive problem, because Taiwan’s body politic is hopelessly fragmented (which country’s isn’t?). At this point in the argument, some knowledge of Taiwan’s political scene is necessary. Identity, as opposed to social justice or the environment, has been the main political issue in Taiwan for decades, arguably since the Japanese period. After 1937 the Japanese implemented a policy of imperialization: everyone was taught to be an imperial subject. The KMT Chinese nationalist policy was similar: everyone in Taiwan was taught he or she was Chinese; the national myth was the reconquest of mainland China. Since the rise of a vocal Taiwan nationalism in the 1980s, identity confusion has become overt. There are some who feel they are Taiwanese and Chinese, some insist they are Taiwanese not Chinese. And with the missiles pointed at Taiwan, militant mainland Chinese rhetoric, and American vacillation, it’s not hard to see why identity is the main issue in local politics. If cross-Strait relations heated up, there would be a corresponding political polarization. At that time, through a process of “epic identity construction,” Mona Rudao’s either/or statement of status (“I am Seediq!) would come to seem even more compelling, and the Dakis/Hanaoka both/and idea of identity (“We’re both Seediq and Japanese…”) even more wishy washy.

Unfortunately, the ending of Seediq Bale does not give Taiwan nationalists cause for comfort. That’s the problem with choosing this particular historical incident as a nationalist myth, because the ending is predetermined by the history of Wushe: the Seediq lose. If we’re applying a Taiwanese nationalist interpretation to the film, whatever would this ending mean? In the film the warriors of the rainbow reunite in the afterlife; we see them striding on the clouds. This is hardly going to satisfy people for whom Seediq traditional belief is not a living religion. The fact is that almost everyone dies. Maybe like Achilles they die gloriously, but maybe it would be better not to die. Unlike Homer’s Iliad, Seediq Bale does not have a happy ending from the protagonist’s persective. And we can’t argue that Wei Te-sheng is telling the Taiwan people: this is what will happen to you if you don’t unite. If the Seediq in the film – all 12 Tkdaya tribes plus the Toda tribal villages - had united against the Japanese, the result would have ultimately been the same.

At the end of the film, four hours and twenty minutes in, we are reassured that the Seediq people have not been wiped out; they will recover. They will have Seediq children and those children will have children. But when you think about this, it’s not all that comforting. Those children would grow up under the Japanese and those grandchildren would grow up under the Chinese. Last time I checked Taiwan was not postcolonial from a Seediq perspective, because the Taiwanese people who like to identify with the Seediq – like the Americans who identified with the revolting Mohawks in 1775 – are running the island. So ultimately I still resist a Taiwan nationalist interpretation of the film. The Wushe Incident has to be understood in terms of 1930. I don’t think it has much to teach us about Taiwan identity today. The collective identity the film seems to express does not seem, as The Economist puts, empowering, certainly not in a contemporary context. There is a collective action in the film, but the action is doomed to failure and only half of the collective participates in it. Epic identity is impressive, but the modern, wishy-washy identity also has its place. Epic requires conflict; I pray for peace.

Maybe Wei Te-sheng does too. On a talk show Wei Te-sheng said he realized the film was about a conflict of belief, the people who believe in the rising sun and the people who believe in the rainbow bridge. What if the Japanese and Seediq, Wei naively wonders, had realized that the sun and the rainbow hang in the same sky, in the same heaven? Maybe it took the Wushe Incident for them to realize it. I hope it doesn’t take another incident for us to realize the same thing today.

The screenplay of Seediq Bale was translated into Seediq. Eleven years ago, the director Wei Te-sheng won an award for the screenplay:

The original Chinese language screenplay was translated was translated into Seediq by Dakis Pawan (Guo Mingzheng).The same kind of situation applies to films like Dances With Wolves and Apocalypto where a director of a dominant language – in both these cases English – wants to present the illusion of linguistic authenticity by having part or all of the screenplay translated into an indigenous language. Guo Mingzheng is a Tkdaya Seediq, belonging to the same group as Mona Rudao, the hero of the film; he has written a Chinese language book about his experience as translator and adviser to the director.

There are two basic ways to consider what Seediq Bale means: in Seediq and in foreign languages like Chinese or English.

There’s a lot to say about what seediq bale means in Seediq. Seediq is what anthropologists call an endonym; it’s a designation the Seediq applied to themselves. It means, “we, the Seediq people.” Traditionally it did not cover all humanity, as does the term “people.” Bale means real or true. It also means “authentically local.” Sama bale means “authentic, local vegetables.” Rodux bale means locally raised chicken. Bnga bale means locally grown yams. The scholar I discussed the meaning of Seediq bale with, Iwan Pering 伊婉.貝林, provided the following notes on what a seediq bale is:

1. An insider, someone belonging to the group. Seediq bale is boundary between in group and out group.

2. A local person, born and bred.

3. Headhunting was not the whole of the meaning of Seediq bale, but if a man headhunted while defended his territory he would automatically be considered a Seediq bale.

4. A person who follows Gaya is a Seediq bale. Gaya is the ancestral teachings, the social norms, the ritual practices, the “laws of life” (Stainton), the “moral tradition” (Guo Peiyi) which maintains the relationship between man and cosmos. That’s something that is said of someone with the highest ethical standards. This is an ideal towards which Seediq people aspire and may only achieve in old age, which is why young people learn from their elders.

In mythology, when a Seediq person dies, he or she must walk over the rainbow bridge, but guarding the bridge is a crab spirit (Utux karan) who will inspect to see whether men and women have red marks on their hands, indicating that they were able to protect their families as men and clothe their families as women. People who can cross the bridge are Seediq bale.

Now I want to consider different ways of translating seediq bale into Chinese or English.

In Chinese there are two translations of seediq bale, one a Chinese transliteration: 賽德克巴萊 sai-de-ke ba-lai. People in Taiwan are familiar with sai-de-ke (Seediq); they just have to learn “ba-lai” or bale. The other translation explains what “ba-lai” means: 真正的人 zhen-zheng-de-ren, or true/real person. To my ear, zhenzheng de ren has a strange, slightly off quality. zhen-ren 真人 is better, or less odd sounding, but then it’s not exactly common parlance. It means a Daoist master, someone who has achieved the way or the son of heaven. In English, I think “real person” and Prof. Stainton’s suggestion of “true human” both sound odd. I’m responding as a translator; to me, these translations seem literal, as if something’s been lost in translation. In both English and Chinese people say “a real man” (真正的男人) or “a good person” (好人) or “a good man,” but not “a real person” (真正的人). That’s not to say that zhenzheng de ren or “real person” are meaningless. They kind of make sense, or one can try to make sense of them. But they’re odd. If you’re a Chinese person, try casually slipping it into conversation, and not in reference to the film Seediq Bale. It’s not easy to do. It’s even harder to do this with “true human.”

The strange, slightly off quality of literal translations is part of a translation strategy called foreignization. A foreignized translation is not a bad translation or a mistranslation. A foreignized translation tries to draw the reader towards an alien culture, to get the reader to understand a strange culture on its own terms. A nativized translation, on the other hand, draws a concept in a foreign linguistic culture towards the reader, normalizing it. My own preference as a translator is for a foreignized translation; as a translator, I find foreign linguistic cultures fascinating and want to share my fascination with the reader. I originally assumed that seediq bale might simply mean “adult” or 成人, that this might be a nativized translation of the term. That’s not the case. Seediq bale is not one of the stages in the regular progression of life: infant (rabu), child (laqi), a young person who has come of age (riso), and an elder (rudan or baki). Seediq bale is an objective of fulfillment of the whole person, a concept with a spiritual, religious or philosophical meaning. Prof. Pei-yi Guo (in the comment below) suggests “ideal person,” which sounds like a term from abstract philosophical discourse to me, and would also not make a good title for a movie. “Seediq hero” (賽德克英雄) would be a nativized translation, familiarizing a foreign concept, and indeed in the short promotional film Wei Te-sheng made in 2003 to raise money for Seediq Bale he uses the term hero. In the English poster for the film, the problem of what seediq bale means is avoided entirely: Seediq Bale: Warriors of the Rainbow, implying that seediq bale means “warriors of the rainbow.” When Wei Te-sheng had the chance to go back to Seediq Bale he opted for the more literal, foreignizing translation of zhenzheng de ren or “real person.” But whether a foreignizing translation is effective depends on the reader, who has to do the work of understanding. Wei Te-sheng does not provide the kind of detailed analysis a person would need for a “true understanding,” and it seems to me that most people will come away from Seediq Bale with a romantic image of what a seediq bale is: Mona Rudao on the mountaintop, shot from below.

A dose of linguistic reality is therefore in order. Seediq is now spoken by a few thousand people. I’ve read that the excitement of Seediq Bale has gotten people interested in learning Seediq. This is heartening. But learning a language is a long haul. Despite Seediq Bale it’s not likely to be spoken by as many people fifty years hence. We need linguistic Seediq bale, heroes and heroines of the Seediq language, but there aren’t too many of those around and don’t expect an epic film about one anytime soon. Linguistic seediq bale are people who prefer foreignized translations, who try to think things anew through a sustained encounter with the linguistic other. Taking a class isn’t enough to do that, much less going to see a movie. Few can see the glory in becoming a linguistic seediq bale, including I imagine Wei Te-sheng himself. If he had he would have learned Seediq instead writing a Chinese language screenplay about the Wushe incident and turning it into a movie. But in making the movie he has offered us the opportunity to remind ourselves of the imperiled state of Seediq and Taiwan’s aboriginal languages in general.

NOTE: as this blog post seems to be the only treatment of the issue in English, I’ve rewritten it after consultation with a native speaker and after receiving Guo Pei-yi’s feedback below. It just goes to show that when you go out on a limb sometimes the limb breaks. Having written and revised this blog post I feel anew the need to begin learning one of Taiwan’s aboriginal languages. I have not fully explained the issue of tattooing and will do so when I sort that out.

In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility by Dinah Rajak: How has this book not been getting more play? An ethnography of Anglo American (!) a prominent mining company, which starts in London boardrooms and ends in the mine itself. What I’ve read so far is well-written, intelligent, and very ethnographic. A great account of how morality and the market interpenetrate in new ways under CSR which manages to show, rather than tell, the sinister side of this phenomenon in a balanced way.

Going Abroad: Traveling Like An Anthropologist by Robert Gordon: That’s right, a travel book by an anthropologist. Bob Gordon is a superb ethnographer with decades (and decades and decades) of experience working in highly politicized situations (think: Namibia) and who has developed exquisitely tuned bullshit detectors as a result. He is also like a superathlete who can climb over mountains just by looking at them. So when he tells you what sort of shoes to pack or how to ask who is benefiting from the political economy of your touristic encounter, you should probably listen. Great for tourists, and I’d even give this one to graduate students heading into the field.

Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics by Graham Harman: When this first passed my radar I thought ‘good lord a secondary source on Latour?’ and then I felt a little queasy. But in fact when I started reading this book I found it to be absolutely marvelous. It’s clearly written in some thing like Latour’s style, and does a superb job of covering Latour’s work from Pasteurization of France to Pandora’s Hope (i.e. missing a lot of the more recent stuff), although to be honest it’s not like these books are hard to read. In particular Harman ties Latour to broader philosophical conversations, which is really helpful, although some readers might not be interested in how Latour takes issue with Aristotle’s theory of substance. More useful is the way this orients the reader to the hopping philosophical circles that Harman moves in, and for the biographical and characterological notes on Latour himself. It really, as they used to say in the eighties, ‘lifts the kimono’ on a lot of this stuff. Plus best of all it is available free for download as an open access PDF. Let he who has ears hear.

Uh… I think that’s it for now. What do you all have on your reading lists for the next couple of weeks?

It seems to me that rather than declare the mainland Chinese presence in Finding Sayun irrelevant we should try and make sense of it.

So what does the Chinese presence in Finding Sayun mean? Yukan, the “star” of the film, hopes to go to university, perhaps in Taipei, but if he is a good enough soccer player he might end up in China. There are a roughly million Taiwanese people in China – about 3-4% of the population – and Yukan might eventually join them. China’s part of the lives of Taiwanese people, including aborigines. Or Yukan might end up somewhere he’s never heard of. At the same time, Taiwan’s aborigines have become part of the lives of the people of the PRC, initially through broadcasts of Teresa Teng’s rendition of the song “Gaoshanqing” (High Mountains Green):

高山青 High mountains green

澗水藍 Blue rivers rill

阿里山的姑娘美如水 Maiden of Alishan, lovely as a stream

阿里山的少年壯如山 Young man of Alishan, solid as a hill

The mainlanders go to Alishan, and why shouldn’t they go to Nan-ao? Chinese tourists will tend not to be very sympathetic to indigenous causes in Taiwan. According to the PRC, Taiwanese indigenous peoples are not indigenous peoples at all; they are collectively the smallest of China’s fifty-five official minorities, the gaoshanzu. The PRC can happily approve the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples because the PRC calls its indigenous peoples “national minorities.” The claim that Finding Sayun is Taiwan’s first film by an indigenous director could only be made on the Taiwan poster.

But I don’t wish to drag cross-Strait politics into this discussion of Finding Sayun. The point being made in this film is that things Taiwanese, including Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, are on Chinese people’s radar, and vice versa. The film “builds bridges” as the cliche has it, represents Taiwan’s indigenous people (or more specifically the residents of the village in Nan-ao in which the film was made), to themselves and to outsiders in Taiwan, China and possibly the rest of the world. Better for curious outsiders to learn about Taiwan’s indigenous people by watching a film like Finding Sayun than a film like Waiting for the Flying Fish. Tourism is part of the marketing strategy of the former; the latter seemed like feature length tourist brochure.

If Laha Mebow seems to be wearing rose colored glasses in Finding Sayun, she put them on herself. There is unhappiness in the movie, but it’s focused on the young widow and mother whose husband dies at the beginning of the film in a work-related accident. She becomes a symbol of indigenous suffering. (Indigenous peoples tend to work in DDD (dangerous, dirty, degrading) jobs, if they can get jobs at all; indigenous unemployment has risen as a result of the “guest workers” policy.) Finding Sayun is otherwise a generally upbeat, positive film. It’s described as a 溫馨片, a “heartwarming film,” which seems to be a film genre. But given the incredible variety of indigenous experience, negativity can’t be one of the criteria for the determination of where a film is on the indigenous continuum or whether it’s authentically indigenous. Rather than arguing that Finding Sayun is heartwarming out of generic conformity, it’s just as convincing to argue that it’s upbeat because Laha Mebow wanted to share a positive vision of her own people.

In the end the Chinese director’s film, the film within the film, does not get made. Finding Sayun, the indigenous director Laha Mebow’s film, is a work of which the director and her community can be proud.

In an article on the recent Orchid Island film Waiting for the Flying Fish, which is about but not by Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, Prof. Anita Wen-hsin Chang called for funding for local films by indigenous directors. Finding Sayun, directed by the indigenous woman Laha Mebow, claims (on the film poster) to be the kind of film Prof. Chang has been waiting for: a local film with an indigenous director. Therehas been significant indigenous involvement in other films, including this year’s “epic” about the Wushe uprising in 1930, Seediq Bale. A better example is The Sage Hunter, starring the Taiwan indigenous writer Sakinu and based on his writings.

If Finding Sayun is Taiwan’s first indigenous film, it is Taiwan’s first contribution to the growing corpus of global indigenous film. According to Houston Wood, the author of Native Features: Indigenous Film from Around the World, the first indigenous film was Richardson Morse’s 1972 adaptation M. Scott Momaday’s novel House Made of Dawn. The first feature by an indigenous woman was the Australian Tracey Moffat’s beDevil in 1993. A Chinese/Atayal language indigenous film with limited distribution (even in Taiwan) like Finding Sayun is not likely to make it onto the radar of a scholar like Wood. This is not a criticism of Wood, who had his work cut out for him trying to cover indigenous films in English speaking countries.

But what does it mean to claim that a film is indigenous?

It seems to me we have two ways of determining whether a film is indigenous, by a continuum and making an either or determination. There is a kind of continuum from non-indigenous representations of indigenous peoples to indigenous representations of indigenous peoples. Features such as screenwriting, cast (are the actors indigenous?), crew (especially whether the film used a “community production” model, involving local people in production), direction, production, the language of the film, and the content – whether it conforms to Hollywood expectations, whether it is an authentic presentation of local people – place any given film somewhere along the continuum.

At the same time it’s still meaningful to claim that a certain film either is or isn’t indigenous. The boundary separating indigenous film from non-indigenous film is fuzzy; in most cases the determination will seem straightforward, while in others the film will seem to sit on the fuzzy boundary and there will be more room for debate. When push comes to shove, the either or decision is usually made based on the identity of the director: if the director has an indigenous identity that is accepted by an indigenous community, then it’s an indigenous film.

This approach assumes an auteur theory, spotlights the role of the director in the making of the film and leaving the rest of the production in the shadows. Some auteurs might be able to do everything they want, but most directors aren’t in this position. They have to negotiate their visions with writers, actors, investors and distributors, and of course with the public as well. An indigenous director would have to negotiate with the local people and with the indigenous community. As a result of this hidden complexity, we must be careful interpreting films we accept as indigenous in the either or sense because they have indigenous directors. Wood argues that the producers of the first “indigenous hit” Smoke Signals, as well as Mirimax, the distributor, put pressure on the director Chris Eyre to provide a feel good ending resulting from the positive attributes of the main characters. In other words, they pushed for conformity to Hollywood expectations. This puts the authenticity of the film into question. This makes one wonder about Finding Sayun, especially because of the unexplained mainland Chinese presence in the film. I’ll address this issue in a separate post.

Spotted at Downtown Books & News, Asheville, NC – The Rejected Quarterly, fine literature rejected at least five times. Interesting idea that may or may not play out in the sciences. Still, you gotta love the moxie.

I guess the proof is in the pudding: I didn’t actually buy it. Went with Creative Nonfiction, #42, instead.

It is widely acknowledged that Habermas idealizes the era of 18^th century bourgeois Europeans inhabiting markets and coffee houses deliberatively dialoguing on the future of the nation, markets, religion, and the species. Those halcyonic days quickly gave way to our present situation where the public sphere is colonized by corporate media, where our dynamic and eventful two-way chatter about the fate of the planet is replaced by the one-way monologue from the culture industries. This is our present day inheritance, and, according to Habermas, all networked communication technologies are tools of capital propaganda. Yes, the notion of the public sphere is monolithic and universalizing; ignores counter-publics of gender, ethnic, and class minorities; and has little to say about the specific affordances of contemporary networked communication technologies. The ‘political sphere’ should certainly be a plurality of spheres and publics.

One thing Habermas did get absolutely right was that in the context formed at the confluence of culture, power, technology, and the public sphere there is a historical transformation from open to closed systems, to borrow a perhaps reductive idea from internet scholar Tim Wu. I want to discuss three cases in regards to the two stages of the public sphere. I will conclude by attempting to show how future theorization of the public sphere and of social movements need to consider the media ecologies that consist of social media, cable television, hacktivism, and grassroots activists sleeping in solidarity in city parks.

Habermas uses the unfortunate term bourgeois to describe the class of the people in his ideal public sphere.  Occupy and Anonymous both would likely detest this term to describe the methods of their political action, but Habermas saw the bourgeois against the specter of feudalism and monarchism. To him, the bourgeois were a uniquely liberated people, who braved ostracism to speak freely. If we must discuss Occupy and Anonymous in Habermas’s terms we might do well to think of these “bourgeois” activists resisting corporate feudalism. In a fascinating interview ending with him walking off stage right, Occupy activist and journalist Chris Hedges describes the financial “criminal class” as involved in “neofeudalism.” His is such an excellent example of cable television functioning, against Habermas’s dystopic views, as a public sphere that I typed it out for you:

Those who are protesting the rise of the corporate state are in fact on the political spectrum the true conservatives because they are calling for the restoration of the rule of law. The radicals have seized power and they have trashed all regulations and legal impediments to a reconfiguration of American society into a form of neofeudalism.

Habermas use the term “refeudalization” to describe how the public sphere was colonized by corporate propaganda. The point is that Occupy is an attempt to defeudalize what remains of the middle and working classes through modeling a laterally-organized direct democracy in their General Assembly. Here is an excellent video of the General Assembly using its structure to discuss the role of hierarchy in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

An article describes anthropologist David Graeber’s work at Occupy establishing the horizontal General Assembly as opposed to the vertically organized leader-based organization:

A ‘general assembly’ means something specific and special to an anarchist. In a way, it’s the central concept of contemporary anarchist activism, which is premised on the idea that revolutionary movements relying on coercion of any kind only result in repressive societies.

A “GA” is a carefully facilitated group discussion through which decisions are made — not by a few leaders, or even by majority rule, but by consensus. Unresolved questions are referred to working groups within the assembly, but eventually everyone has to agree, even in assemblies that swell into the thousands.

Occupy’s General Assembly is not unlike how Anonymous and LulzSec make their decisions on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) systems. The IRC process is a bit more chaotic but similar to the GA in that both are laterally organized, allowing for leaderless deliberation and action. Direct democracy is a messy practice; one that has confounded mainstream consolidated news media looking for a dominant agenda. But as we shout in the streets: “This is what democracy looks like!” (I am one who believes there is a single issue perfectly described in the included photo above I took at Occupy LA.)

The question on many media pundits’ lips as well as those keyed in to Habermas’s revelation regarding the historical transformation of the public sphere is: when will this open, deliberative public sphere of Occupy’s General Assembly or Anonymous’s IRC space of praxis give in to formalization and consolidation? Perhaps the techno-structure of the GA or the IRC prohibits such integration and institutionalization, or perhaps the power of persuasive culture assists participants in resisting leadership and agenda aggregation. I don’t know but I will provide an example of an open, laterally organized corporate public sphere giving way to a non-participatory, top-down corporate public sphere. Yet, despite this, and in counter-distinction to Habermas, I argue, a public sphere perseveres in this example from Current.

The progressive and independent television news network Current originally was founded on the idea of media democratization which they attempted to achieve through creating a lateral network of documentary video producers (Viewer-created content producers or VC2) working through the central hub of Current as a television network that showcased the work, a social media destination current.com used to discuss the documentaries, and a corporation incentivizing participation through payment. While enmeshed within a for-profit media system, Current saw itself as a formal critique of consolidation and the “refeudalization” of the public sphere. Indeed, the network’s chairman, Al Gore was apt to quote Habermas in his book Assault on Reason.

But by 2011, this specific media democratization project was over at Current, replaced by pundit-based, ratings driven news programming led by the return of Keith Olbermann to cable television news. Now it might be convenient to criticize this transformation of the deliberative bourgeois public sphere of the VC2 model to the for-profit refeudalization of what was once a vibrant public sphere. But a wider look at the role played by Olbermann and progressive media punditry exhibits how various elements work in consort to produce the educative conditions for the public sphere. What remains under-theorized and documented in both Habermas and in regards to the social movements of the present, are the ecological dynamics between various constituencies that produce the conditions for a progressive public sphere. I call upon the General Assembly of Occupy Research to empirically document the Occupy movement within its cultural context that includes hacktivists, television newscasters, as well as boots-on-the-ground Occupiers.

For most of us too busy (in our non-market activities) to be sleeping at the various liberation parks around the nation and globe, we know the Occupy Movement as #occupywallstreet, or #occupyla. It is something we know less through the experience of inhabiting a space in protest but more as something known through sitting at home and engaging with social media. For others, we know the Occupy Movement through cable television news–Fox, MSNBC, CNN, or Current. Cable television is a networked communication technology with specific cultures of consumption. Unlike those reading about Occupy through Twitter and its hashtag #occupywallstreet, cable news viewers have few options of engaging with the material through the media itself. Habermas, who correctly prioritizes two-way, dialogic engagement over top-down listening, thinks this form of political mediation expressed by cable news is part of the problem of democracy—passivity and propaganda.

Again, Habermas misses the point of active cultures of consumption and how information can lead to action. For instance, Cenk Uygar of the Young Turks, and formerly of MSNBC, announced in Zuccotti Park the political action committee (PAC) he is forming, Wolf-PAC, with a sole focus of getting a 28th US Constitutional Amendment limiting personhood to people not corporations. Via YouTube and soon via his up-and-coming cable TV program on Current he will continue to encourage political action. While scholars have wondered if the rich dialogue that occurs in the public sphere ever actually leads to democratic action, mainstream cable television, despite lacking two-way engagement, exhibits the conditions of an attenuated public sphere by encouraging political action.

What is the cause for these emergent horizontal organizations? Yochai Benkler, in his new book, claims that humans are essentially selfless and collaborative; the open architecture of the internet is just helping that gene to express itself. It’s a provocative argument he makes with quite a bit of social, psychological, and biological anthropological data. Perhaps, but the point is that horizontal organizations exist as temporal and transitional boundary objects impacted by technology, power, and culture from all directions. Likewise, power, culture, and technology are mediated by forces within the media ecology, some of these forces are laterally while others are vertically ordered—this is the mediated context for the present social movements.

The conference was transformative. I feel like those hundred or so women that I went to that conference with are my posse now, and it is exciting to imagine that in six to ten years, we could, all of us, be tenured. I felt supported and appreciated by the folks who ran the conference, and was simply amazed at the fierceness and brilliance of both the organizers and speakers (Katie Pope and Beverly Davenport Sypher now rank among my Favorite People Ever). I finally got to meet the great Alice Pawley, and was struck by her warmth, her intelligence, and her strength. I came away with several concrete ideas to improve my chances for tenure… and a lot of unease about this process that will not leave me until I hear final word, a few more years from now, about whether or not I get it.

And here’s a little sneak peak at Clancy’s third lesson:

But those of us who insist on playing with our toys in the academic sandbox need to be radicals. And I do think a lot of the ways we need to be radical involves how we perform our job: we need to set boundaries so that we aren’t always doing the service work no one wants, we need to make our passions our scholarly interests in the face of some who would invalidate it, we need to perform our confidence in front of people who might undermine us. We need to get tenure.

Clancy also talks about some of the conundrums of academia, including the continued practice of gauging the merit of scholars based upon, well, some outdated metrics:

But are peer-reviewed publications, read and cited by only by a select group of those peers, the best way to assess influence and importance? They are certainly no longer the only way. My 2006 paper on iron-deficiency anemia and menstruation has been cited by six other papers; my 2011 blog post on this paper has been viewed tens of thousands of times and received almost sixty comments between its two postings.

There’s a lot more she has to say.  Check it out, here.

Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted.

The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication.

Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions, which can cost up to $25,000 a year for some journals or hundreds of dollars for a single issue, are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. Individual articles are also commonly locked behind pay walls.

Read the rest, here.  More about this soon, but I just wanted to post this and see what others think about these developments.  Check out some of the discussion in the comments section as well.  Very, very interesting…

*Hat tip to Justin Shaffner for sending this my way.  Thanks!

She had this to say:

I call them the Anthro Foxes. They are the undergrads, graduate students, enthusiasts, and, occasionally, professors, of anthropology that visit my blog, fuckyeahanthropologymajorfox.tumblr.com, every day. Anthropology Major Fox got started in March of this year, at the same time as all of the other, more famous, Animal College Major memes got their start; English Major Armadillo, Art Student Owl, History Major Heraldic Beast, Science Major Mouse, etc. I, being interested in anthropology, ended up asking the moderator of Science Major Mouse whether they would be accepting anthropology macros. When they said “Only the more science-related ones, like biological anthropology”, I knew something had to be done. So, I chose my own animal, the clever and industrious fox, and started my own College Major blog. Within 24 hours there were over 150 other anthropology lovers following the blog. The basics of the “College Major Memes” are simple. Make a macro (mine is a fox on a six-piece pie style color split alternating purple and green), and insert two-part jokes about the field. The jokes ran from complaints about classes to witty puns regarding famous anthropologists and anthropological finds. Popular culture is often worked into the memes; I find Doctor Who is a favorite TV show amongst Anthro Foxes, whereas the tv show Bones and the Indiana Jones movies are a commonly reviled (but secretly loved) subjects. I started out making many of the macros myself, but soon there were dozens of submissions every day.

Nutrition has been medicalized in the West, but humans enjoy the taste of food as well, ensuring that food and nutrition have become part of consumer culture. Each time we sit down to a table, or put something in our mouth we do so in the context of this culture. There are good foods (vegetables, fruits, organics, whole) and bad foods (fast food, convenience food, GMO’s, pesticides). Western society also has a somewhat collective understanding of snack food and comfort food, healthy food and unhealthy food, food for babies and food the elderly. There are foods that men eat, and foods that women eat. This is food, but this is NOT food.

Biological necessities such as food and nutrition do not develop outside of the context of culture and human interaction. In fact, we can probably say that one of the roles of “culture” has been to modify these biological dispositions, and the most rudimentary ways we do this is through categorization. George Lakoff explained in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things “…the chain of inference–from conjunction to categorization to commonality–is the norm. The inference is based on the common idea of what it means to be in the same category: things are categorized together on the basis of what they have in common”. Creating and understanding categories helps us reaffirm our shared identity that is culture.

There are multiple and contradictory categories of food and nutrition globally. Because nutrition and food are inextricably linked both politically and economically to health, however, what foods are categorized and why, matters. Food and nutrition are packaged and marketed for things like taste and enjoyment. But food is also packaged and sold to promote health, oftentimes by corporations with the blessing of global health organizations. This is primarily done through our understanding of the biomedical model of nutrition. Worldwide, however, traditional categories of what foods are healthy and why do not always integrate well into this model.

Food Categorization in China
In the dominant Chinese medical paradigm, food and nutrition is used as an integral part of health and healing that is much different from this biomedical paradigm of the West. The categories of protein, carbohydrates and fat make sense to Chinese people, who understand the biological and chemical premise behind these concepts, but are much less important to their everyday understanding of the interaction between food and health.

When many Chinese people sit down to a meal, everything on the table is there for a reason not, in fact, having to do with taste. Thousands of years of collective history dictates what is on that table and why. This one is good for your skin; this one will help calm you down. This food is excellent for your digestion, but this one you can’t eat with that one or it will cause harm. You can NEVER eat that food in the summer. There are foods that increase your “qi” (energy), and ones that cause it to slow down. A menstruating woman should eat this, this and this, and not that, that or EVER that.

Because China is currently transitioning to a consumer-driven economy, this idea of nutrition as health in both a Western and Chinese sense is being sold to the masses. This article last year by the Wall Street Journal wrongly states that Chinese people are becoming “more health conscious”. What the article meant, I’m assuming, is they are becoming more aware of Western concepts of health and nutrition. In the “Western” concept, we add more to our diet and foods (vitamins, health foods, organics) in order to make ourselves more healthy. There is a belief that adding medicines, adding supplements, adding culturally and biologically defined nutrients to our everyday routine, we can make ourselves healthy, wipe out disease and increase wellness. This concept does not work in the dominant Chinese paradigm, however, as there is more a focus on balance and harmony. But because our idea of “adding more” has shaped the way we treat micronutrient deficiencies through food fortification globally, trying to integrate this in China is turning out to be problematic.

Food Fortification and Health
Food fortification is the process of adding nutrients to foods where they don’t naturally occur. The premise is by adding micronutrients that lack in the diet (for whatever reason) to foods that are widely eaten, we can decrease the incidence of these deficiencies. It has been very successful in many parts of the world, China included (see this blog post for more information). China implemented an iodine salt program a few years ago, and has essentially eliminated iodine deficiency from its populace. Outside of the iodized salt program, however, China has been unable to implement other nationwide food fortification programs for folic acid, iron, or vitamin A (among others).

To illustrate this point and its significance, I will use my current research area of complementary feeding in infants. Complementary feeding includes all foods other than breastmilk or its alternatives, and is strongly influenced by culture. Western concepts of complementary feeding, including those recommended by the American Pediatric Association, are based on our ideas of nutrition and medicine more than traditional beliefs. Here is a complementary feeding guide that I use on my own website and blog that shows what is appropriate and why. If you notice the very first food we recommend to give a child, it is iron-fortified infant cereal.

There are a variety of foods that babies need at around 6 months that breastmilk no longer provides, including iron, zinc, protein and extra calories. American companies saw this, and baby’s propensities towards allergies as a business opportunity and created iron-fortified cereal. While I won’t go into the small details of why they recommended iron-fortified cereal (or some of the problems associated with this), it has turned into a cultural norm in the U.S. to feed your baby iron-fortified cereal as the first food.

This has not worked in China for a number of reasons, but first and foremost is the way the dominant Chinese paradigm has categorized foods. There is no straight concept of “baby” food; this has been created by corporations in the Western world and has only been introduced to China recently. There is no difference between “baby foods” and “adult foods” intrinsically; in the U.S. and in other parts of the world, “baby foods” are in a jar and pureed and labeled by “baby food” brands. In China, “baby foods” are categorized by other things, including texture and traditional food ways.

For now, “baby food” has not gained popularity in China for a variety of reasons. But because of this, coupled with the dominant global model for preventing vitamin deficiencies being through fortification of baby foods, iron-deficiency anemia remains a problem in all areas of China. In other words, the way we have categorized foods has shaped how we prevent “disease”, but these categories do not exist in other parts of the world. The question nutritionists and physicians are grappling with in China, then, is how do we prevent iron deficiency if the dominant paradigms for prevention it (i.e. fortification and supplementation) aren’t widely accepted?

There is much value by scientific categories assigned by the dominant Western biomedical model of nutrition and food. More than a few researchers, Chinese and Western, however, are mystified at how to integrate these cultural systems created from categorization. It is not news that food is culturally relevant, and it is not news that public health campaigns need to be more localized to be successful. But the last 30 years has seen the integration of China, India, and other parts of the “non-western” world into the global market. This is not only affecting consumerism of food products globally, but also how food and nutrition interacts in global public health programs.

In China over the last thirty years, many political, economic, and social changes have occurred to affect breastfeeding rates. This includes women entering the workforce, family planning policies, migration and the “left-behind child” phenomenon. While I have never spoken to a Chinese person who isn’t adamant that yes, breast is clearly best, the decision making process around infant feeding remains much more complex. While mothers remain the main caregivers for infants in Western countries, in China it is other family members (mainly grandparents) who shoulder the responsibility for infant feeding and caretaking.

Breastfeeding and Biomedicine in *The West*
Cultural contexts of breastfeeding do not, of course, start and end with infant health. Breastfeeding has been medicalized, moralized, commoditized and embody-tized. Infant nutrition research is often seen as an objective, neutral science, but of course has its own discourse and cultural history.

In the U.S and many Western countries, for example, motherhood is seen as an intensely personal, individual duty that women must take on. Westerners live in social patterns that focus much attention on individuality, and “good mothering” campaigns use this to their get their message across. Mothers are easy targets for any campaign promoting good parenting, and are judged by society before the child is even born. Are they drinking alcohol? Smoking? They want to have their baby where? I’ve heard sentiments equating formula feeding to child abuse, pointing the finger staunchly at the mother for subjecting her suckling babe to the horrors of “that poison” (true story).

In breast is best-esque campaigns in the West, the emphasis is always on the baby’s health. Society is less than concerned with structural barriers set up against mothers in these campaigns, and more concerned that women just do whatever it takes to breastfeed that baby!

Breastfeeding in China: A Family Affair
As my interest lies in infant feeding patterns, I have spent many an afternoon in breastfeeding support group meetings in China, both among ex-pats and Chinese people. Among the ex-pats, women and their infants show up to these support groups, where they typically sit in a circle (with the baby’s playing with toys or simply crawling around in the center), discuss issues of breastfeeding, and swap advice on how to deal with this or that associated with breastfeeding and child-rearing in general. It’s casual, it’s relaxed, and we usually end up brunching afterwards.

Among the Chinese breastfeeding support group, however, women and their children are accompanied by husbands, grandpas, grandmas, aunts, housekeepers, and other family members who’s relation I am never quite sure of. It is held at a hospital, is more lecture style, very formal, with a physician at the front discussing the benefits of breastfeeding. It includes Q&A, where family members ask questions regarding night feedings, going back to work, allergies and milk supply. Fathers, surprising to me, are active participants, and discuss “let-down”, mastitis, and hind milk without batting an eye.

Historically in China, breastfeeding was commonplace up through twelve months and later. In recent years, however, there has been a decline in breastfeeding rates in both rural and urban areas, even as the BIB campaign has gained momentum here. Because of this, many factors involved in infant feeding and outcomes research are currently being explored in China, including inadequate household resources, economic constraints (i.e. the mother is working outside of the home and is unable to breastfeed), migration, the effects of the media, and a lack of policy and educational programs directed toward the public.

But something that is not quite being explored here is the notion of self and personal responsibility. Because in China, a mother does not raise a child; the family does. The Chinese society rests on the principle of the yin and the yang, where nothing exists independent of anything else. Through these manifestations, Chinese mothers are entrenched in a system where they are part of a whole.

In a study I’ve been observing for the last eight months in an urban Shanghai clinic, upwards of 40 percent of infants are exclusively fed by grandparents. Another 30 percent are fed jointly. When discussing this with my Chinese colleagues at Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine, they thought that rates in rural areas might be even higher, that the mother would have even less resources to be able to breastfeed or be involved with the care of her infant, if she’s there at all.

Interesting note about some of my observations in this clinic: adult to infant ratio was pretty stable day-to-day at about 3.5 to 1. And that’s an average. Once I counted 14 adults in the room for 3 babies. Not including the physicians. When discussing breastfeeding with these families, the physicians I work with would many times elicit the response “Mother stopped breastfeeding due to work/not enough milk.” All the while grandma was holding the baby, grandpa was holding the baby’s things, and nanny was answering the questions.

When perusing the Internet to find Chinese language information on breastfeeding and breastfeeding promotion, it is also interesting to note that most websites talk about “Western science” and “women in Western countries”. This website shows a European woman breastfeeding, although the site is clearly geared to a Chinese audience. While it’s unclear how Chinese women as a whole view these breastfeeding campaigns, it is obvious to me that the jury is still out on the future of breastfeeding here. Many families are terrified at recent milk scandals and go to great lengths to nurse their infants.

New Paradigm For Infant Feeding
Western concepts of motherhood, family, and “the individual” continue to have little to do with everyday reality of the Chinese mother. Not that breastfeeding is a “Western” concept anyways. Breastfeeding is, of course, a biological way to feed a baby. And Chinese mothers are by no means passive players in the decision-making process surrounding infant feeding. Believe me, Chinese women have much to say about their experiences in child-rearing. But Chinese society has undergone some incredible changes over the last thirty years, and traditional practices may no longer hold relevance in their new economic, political, or social system. Add to this a terrifying infant milk scandal, the rural-to-urban migration of young women, and family planning policies where there is one child, 2 parents, and 4 grandparents, it is unsurprising that a new discourse of infant feeding is currently taking place in Chinese cities, villages, clinics and businesses.

In Dorinne Kondo’s 1990 ethnography Crafting selves: Power, gender, and discourse of identity in a Japanese workplace, Kondo speaks about the socially constructed “concept of self”, and discusses how identity is a “creative process”, where “human beings create, construct, work on, and enact their identities…”. In China, this self is always “crafted” in relation to the family, to the collective, to the whole. Yes, women are the ones who breastfeed, and no, usually grandma’s and husband’s can’t breastfeed for them. But the fact of the matter is in China, infant caregiving remains a communal activity. In the face of economic constraints, busy work schedules, and little social support outside of the family system, grandparents are taking over the role as primary caregiver.

Having grandparents and primary caregivers doesn’t mean that mothers in China can’t breastfeed. Of course, millions of women in China breastfeed, and find the support of their families to be incredibly comforting in the face of the many fast-paced challenges and changes happening in their country. Any woman will tell you, breastfeeding is never easy, and never what they expected. How much better if your husband, mom, aunt, husband’s mom and the nanny were with you to support you and shoulder this responsibility with you?