Why is this statement so hard to write? Well, for one thing, I think it makes us painfully aware of the gap between our teaching ideals and our actual classroom practices. We can talk all we want about various teaching philosophies, but much of what most teachers do in the classroom is essentially the same. Even Mike Wesch, who wrote here about his theory of anti-teaching, has more recently written about “why good classes fail“:

In fact, the few truly fantastic classes I have stumbled into were just as likely to be “sage on the stage” lectures as they were to be based on more participatory methods. And the disheartening reality has been that a really bad lecture doesn’t fail as badly as a really poorly executed participatory class. Many of these professors seem to do everything “right.” They ask their students questions, pause and let them discuss with their neighbors, show YouTube videos that relate to their own experience, and invite discussion. But disinterest and disengagement still reign. Why?

I appreciate Wesch’s thoughts on this, and I strongly recommend reading the whole piece. (And look forward to his forthcoming book on teaching.) There is also an article about his re-think in the Chronicle. I mention it because it gives me comfort in the more modest approach I’ve taken in my own statement of teaching philosophy. I talk, for instance, about making my goals explicit. This may not seem like much, but in practice I’ve found that it is very difficult to do well and also very helpful to students when done properly. It isn’t the kind of thing that gets one written up in the Chronicle, but it is something I’ve thought long and hard about. It isn’t just about writing a good syllabus, but about spending time in class teaching one’s expectations and the reasons behind them. (In my case we actually created a whole new course to accomplish this goal.)

I hope my document is useful for others working on articulating their own teaching philosophy. I also think it highlights some of the unique challenges I face teaching here in Taiwan and might be interesting even for those not planning on writing such a statement anytime soon.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Throughout my teaching career, whether as an adjunct professor at Temple University, a visiting professor at Haverford College, or as an assistant professor at Dong Hwa University’s College of Indigenous Studies, I have sought to develop my teaching skills in such a way so as to keep students with divergent backgrounds and skill levels engaged and challenged by the same class. One way I’ve found to do that is to articulate a range of goals I wish students to acquire, and to articulate those goals clearly to students. Not only does this give the less well trained students something to work towards, but because goals are not necessarily acquired sequentially, even the more advanced students are able to discover gaps in their training which they should focus upon. This approach has two advantages. First of all, being explicit about one’s goals helps compensate for the way educational institutions tend to unfairly advantage students from privileged backgrounds. As Bourdieu and Passeron famously noted, educational institutions often indirectly reward practices which the privileged members of society have already inculcated in the home: language, self-presentation, literacy practices, etc. By clearly defining expectations, and by breaking these skills down into their component parts, I believe I am able to create a more equitable classroom environment. Because a single class is insufficient to compensate for the marked differences , I also worked with my colleagues at Dong Hwa to develop a class in “Basic Study Skills” which is now required for all first year students in my department.

The second advantage to defining a broad range of goals for student performance is that it allows for students to engage with the material in different ways. While I strongly believe in the central importance of reading and writing in developing critical thinking, I have found that many students who have difficulty engaging with the written word can perform very well in other kinds of exercises: oral presentations, oral exams, group discussions, and even producing short plays or films for class. Inspired by Howard Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences,” I try to ensure that students who might otherwise feel shut-out have a chance to engage with the class material in ways best suited to their own style of learning. Many of our students at the College of Indigenous Studies come from rural areas where they lacked access to the cram schools so common in Taiwanese urban environments. Many have spent a lot of time engaged in church activities, where there is often a more performative approach to learning. By valuing orality and performativity within the classroom , these students are at less of a disadvantage. Having a wide-range of goals can be just as important for Ph.D. students as it is for undergrads, albeit for different reasons. Graduate students tend to have strong reading and writing skills, but can often lack the performative skills which make for an effective teacher or communicator. Working on these skills is an essential part of their professional training.

As a foreigner in Taiwan, I’ve faced some unique challenges. The poor English ability of many of our students has meant that I’ve had to become an effective lecturer in Chinese. I’ve long prided myself on my ability to explain complex concept in simple, direct, language, but I’ve had to complement that by working hard at creating visual presentations which help illustrate my ideas so as to avoid any chance of confusion. I’ve also had to become a keen student of popular culture so as to find examples students can relate to. But lecturing has been only part of the challenge. Classroom practices which had been effective in American classrooms did not work as expected with Taiwanese students. Students here are often far more reluctant to express strong views or ask questions in class. I’ve dealt with this in several ways: I assign groups to come up with questions collectively, so no one student is put on the spot, I ask students to talk about the topic in terms of their own experience, so that they don’t feel there is a chance that they will make a mistake in public, and I’ve created online discussion groups for all my classes so that students can say things in writing that they might not feel comfortable saying in the classroom.

Social science requires learning how to see one’s own society as an outsider might see it, and to attempt to think about other societies as a local might think about them. For students who have little experience traveling outside their own country this can be a difficult challenge, but the best ethnographies and documentary films are designed to accomplish just such a task. Unfortunately, much of this work is produced with an American or European audience in mind. I have worked hard over the past five years, constantly revising my syllabi so as to select the materials which accomplish this goal while remaining accessible to my students. I’ve discovered that a well written English text can sometimes be more useful than a poor Chinese translation. And I’ve learned where students need some historical or ethnographic context in order to be able to meaningful engage with the material. Following my emphasis on clearly articulated goals, I also work hard to break down the process of reading an academic text into a series of smaller steps by asking students to identify the main themes of a text, the nature of the data and the methodology used. At the same time, especially when using English texts, I try to move students away from doing word-by-word translations by teaching them how to approach the text as an organic whole. I firmly believe that there is a direct correlation between the skills developed by doing close critical readings of texts, and the ability to think critically about society.

Anyway, I’m hard at work on this again, so here’s a roundup of the previous posts on the topic: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, as well as a more general post on my decision to teach in Taiwan.

Looking back at my previous posts, I realize there is much I never wrote about. So in a series of future posts I hope to write more about (1) my thoughts about language learning in general, (2) specific thoughts on strategies for learning an endangered language, (3) iOS tools for language study and (4) some of the themes of my research relating to the role that language preservation efforts play in the construction of indigenous identity in Taiwan. I hope that this time I get a little further than I did in 2009. In the meantime, leave a comment if you have any thoughts of your own, or specific questions you’d like me to address in future posts.

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.

Seediq Bale is the biggest Taiwan film ever and the story of an indigenous resistance (against the Japanese in central Taiwan in 1930). As such, it reminds one of Avatar. Having spent many childhood nights reading Call of the Wild to the light of the moon, and many days in early adulthood reading Joseph Campbell – the great Primitivist and Orientalist – I’m embarrassed to admit that I came out of Avatar starry-eyed; Avatar is calculated to appeal to people like me with a “primitivist” tendency. It speaks, in a highly commercialized, packaged, unthreatening and, on second and third viewings, irritating way to longings in the wayward heart of modern man. Seediq Bale, for everything else that one might say about it, speaks to those same longings.

Primitivism was originally a current in Modernist art. It’s been accused of complicity with colonialism. Gauguin painted girls in the South Pacific. Part of primitivism was western artists looking at indigenous girls. If that’s all there was to Primitivism one could dismiss it as colonialist decadence, but there’s more to it than that. There’s primitivism in D. H. Lawrence and Yeats, neither one a colonialist. According to Marianna Togorovnick, there’s primitivism in lots of seminal thinkers and interesting lives, from Carl Gustav Jung to Diane Fossey. Intellectually, primitivism can be a critique of individualist rationalism, while emotionally it’s a longing for a more natural and vital existence.

While we wait in line, chew our nails, fill out forms, surf the internet, we think that the actual jungle would be a more exciting place to live than the concrete jungle. We imagine that “primitives” were closer to their bodies, to one another, to animals, to nature, and to the cosmos than we are. Not just closer, but at one with; Togorovnick writes of ecstasy, not of sexual pleasure but of “standing outside” oneself, of mystic participation. Togorovnick connects ecstasy to the Freudian death wish, which from another perspective is a life wish: the monad dies and is reborn as part of the whole. Maybe in some sense all films, and all fiction, through the suspension of disbelief, give us a kind of ecstasy. At their best, Seediq Bale and other primitivist films allow us ecstasy through an idea of the aborigine. Avatar degenerates into a love story, but the group yoga sessions are ecstatic communion, the gamer premise of the “avatar” is ecstatic, and true love is potentially ecstatic as well. Neither anthropologists nor mystics will be terribly impressed by the film-going primitivist, who only has to fork over 10 bucks and a few hours of his or her time. But for most people that’s as close as we get.

Maybe the director of Seediq Bale hasn’t really gotten all that much closer, but he’s at least more imaginative than most people. At least based on his published writings, the director, Wei Te-sheng, seems to be a primitivist. Long before he was famous, Wei Te-sheng released a book about being an out of work director. In it he whines about being out of work. He’s just as good as other directors; why has success passed him by? In and among the whining is some first rate complaint about modern urban life, about the noise, the boredom, the monotony, the waste, the ugliness, the rationalized insanity of Taipei. Wei complains about the people too. The modern city is supposed to be democratic but is actually full of drones. Wei Te-sheng sounds like a romantic, but anyone who takes a trip into the Taiwan countryside will see that it has a lot of the same qualities of the city. To get away from the city Wei Te-sheng had to go into the mountains and into the past. There he found people he wanted to identify with, men like giants, seediq bale, the “true people” of the title of his film.

So how do the larger-than-life Seediq aborigines in Seediq Bale seem closer to their bodies, one another, animals, nature, and the cosmos? First of all, the Seediq in the film have wonderful bodies, all the more impressive given that they are real people not the CGI creations of Avatar. These are about the most impressive film aborigines I’ve seen. They don’t run around the mountains barefoot at several thousand meters above sea level like the Seediq aborigines used to do, but they’re in pretty good shape. They cover their bodies in clothing that would once have been made by hand by members of the local community. They look better in my eyes than any urbanite, from the guy who wears mass produced polyester to the metrosexual. They don’t have body image issues, and they don’t follow fashion.

Second, they’re closer to one another. I don’t want to resort to the cliche of communal life, but it seems apt. In the film the Seediq live in small houses in small villages. The door’s not locked, and it’s not even closed most of the time. Though fiercely territorial they don’t have private property. They hold goods in common. They drink together very lustily out of the same cup. They feast together. They dance together. They live with ancestors and enemies, literally. Each household has got a collection of skulls, of family members and victims of the headhunt. This sounds morbid, but also strangely intimate. Family members appear as visual or auditory hallucinations. The Seediq are never alone.

Third, to animals, on whom they depend for food and company. The opening scene is of a boar hunt, and it’s just like the beginning of Apocalypto. The hero of the film Mona Rudao has a CGI bird familiar that appears a half dozen times in the course of the film, to say nothing of his pet dog.

Fourth, to nature. To begin with, almost all Seediq production and consumption in the film is local, dependent on the familiar environment. They buy salt from the local Chinese trader, but the salt probably came from somewhere in Taiwan. The landscapes in Seediq Bale are sublime. The sublime, since the 18th c., has been in poetry and painting a safe opportunity for ecstasy. Kant analyzed the sublime into static and moving, but the idea was basically that your rational mind was overwhelmed. Rationality sometimes seems overrated, or at least it can’t be the whole of experience. Less than a century after Kant approached the issue analytically, Nietzsche celebrated the Dionysiac over and above the Apollonian. The closest I get to the Dionysiac is the sense of “shudder” I get from literature once in a while, and now and then the nature scenes in Seediq Bale afford a similar thrill: when Mona Rudao’s up on the mountaintop singing to his ancestors, or when he sings a duet with his father by the waterfall as a rainbow appears. Those familiar with the Japanese aesthetic tradition may find the scenes with the sakura blossoms, so reminiscent of the color of blood, similarly sublime.

Fifth, to the cosmos. I write as an atheist who’s occasionally had a sense of awe at the heaventree of stars or the Dao but is usually too busy translating and tending my garden. The aborigines in Seediq Bale have a living religion, and as I understand it one of the purposes of religion is to give a sense of the cosmos. The Seediq believe there’s a rainbow bridge, and if you cross it with the tattoos that prove adulthood you’ll reach a happy hunting ground. In his unemployed director book, Wei Te-sheng is in awe of the power of Seediq belief. It’s “the power of belief” that gives the warriors the courage to go on the headhunt and to slaughter the Japanese. This makes the Seediq aborigines sound a lot like terrorists…I suppose I don’t know enough about terrorists to comment further, but my almost completely ignorant hypothesis would be that terrorists don’t usually imagine that they’ll be on friendly terms with, or at one with, their enemies after they blow them up. The Seediq did. They performed atonement rituals after the headhunt and the former enemy became an intimate friend.

The Western intellectual’s typical response (i.e. my own typical response) is to analyze, and that’s what I’ve done above, providing an analysis of ecstasy. I could try to sum up discursively, but the power of Seediq Bale is in images. So, in lieu of a conclusion, I’ll finish with two of my favorite visual moments in the film. One of the problems with Avatar according to Slavoj Zizek was that visually and narratively it borrowed too much from other films, that it was a pastiche not a work of art. I can tell that Wei Te-sheng’s watched Apocalypto, but the following two scenes seemed original.

Mona Rudao, the future leader of the resistance and already a legend, is in front of a huge pit filled with skulls. When ordered to throw the skulls from his own collection in with the rest, Mona attacks a Japanese soldier and falls with him onto the pile of skulls, and other Japanese soldiers fall on top of them to restrain Mona, whose face is placed up against the skull of an ancestor. This was the beginning of the subjugation of Mona and the Seediq people. The Japanese forced modernity, in the form of prostitution and wage labor, upon them. As the film very obviously tells us, after Mona’s resistance, the Japanese reprisal, involving poison gas, was more savage than savage, that there’s savagery in the iron heart of industrial modernity.

You couldn’t blame the Seediq aborigines for not wanting to enter this brave new world in which everything and everyone is, through the global division of labor and the modern spatial regime, alienated. As presented in Seediq Bale, the Seediq worldview was not one of spatial and temporal separation, but of communion in space and time. The Seediq women, also true people, seediq bale, chose communion over separation. Their fate has been forced upon them by the Seediq warriors, but they love their fates. The beleaguered Seediq have nearly run out of food, and so the women decide not to be a burden. They hang themselves en masse, according to Seediq custom, hoping to join the ancestors. They’ll soon be joined by the warriors. They hang themselves from branches in a secluded grove, in a scene that blends horror with beauty.

In its combination of the lyrical and the terrible Seediq Bale is not simply entertainment, a break from the tedium of modern life. At its worst, Seediq Bale, at four and a half hours, half the time battle scenes, is another kind of tedium; but at its best it draws the individual viewer outside of himself, however fleetingly, in the manner of primitivist art.

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.

Finding Sayun is a superb new anti-aboriginal romance film by Laha Mebow (陳潔瑤), a Taiwan indigenous director. The film revisits the 1943 Japanese propaganda film Sayon’s Bell about an indigenous girl from Nan-ao, a “rural township” in northeastern Taiwan, who drowned trying to carry luggage across a river for the man she adored: a departing Japanese officer. (Sayon and Sayun are two different transliterations of the same name.) Sayon’s Bell wanted to reassure the Japanese public that, a decade after the Wushe uprising in 1930, Taiwan’s indigenous peoples had been converted to imperial subjects, and to convince aboriginal braves to fight for the emperor: it would be hard to resist after hearing Sayun singing the inspiring Song of the Taiwan Soldiers:

After the Second World War, the KMT relocated Sayun’s people from their old mountain village to a new village on the plain. Laha Mebow is one of Sayun’s people, and her new film is ostensibly about finding Sayun, but finding Sayun is not the point of the film. Instead, Finding Sayun has two aims: 1) to critique the use of romance in aboriginal films (which is to say films about but not by indigenous people) like Sayon’s Bell, and 2) to document the everyday worlds of three different generations in a contemporary indigenous village.

Avatar is only the most flagrant example of an aboriginal romance film in the past few years. In Taiwan, Song of the Spirits (心靈之歌) was about a Chinese man who falls in love with an indigenous teacher (played by a Chinese actress) in a remote mountain village, while Waiting For the Flying Fish (等待飛魚) reversed the formula: an indigenous fisherman falls in love with a swimming teacher from Taipei. How does Finding Sayun critique the use of romance in aboriginal films? First, by questioning the story told by Sayon’s Bell. Sayon’s Bell was very loosely based on a true story, a news report from 1938. Sayun’s death was celebrated as an example of imperial devotion, and a bell was erected in her honor. Sayon’s Bell introduced romance: the actress who played Sayun, Shirley Yamaguchi, acted in many Japanese imperial romance films. In Finding Sayun, episodes from Sayun’s life are reimagined several times as a “student-teacher romance” (師生戀) in sepia-filtered video:

This preview switches back to regular coloring when it returns to the present, and in the end the skepticism of Sayun’s people in 2011 interrogates the “student-teacher romance” idea. One person suggests that Sayon was carrying the luggage because she had to, while another says flat out that romance was Sayon’s Bell’s spin on Sayun’s story.

Finding Sayun also critiques the use of romance in aboriginal films by introducing a young Taiwanese casting director character who goes to Nan-ao to scout talent for an aboriginal romance film. She video auditions the local people and asks the most videogenic among them to star in her film. She even finds a high school student named Sayun! – Sayun turns out to be a fairly common girl’s name – as well as a boy named Yugan who is fond of Sayun. So far so good. But Yugan refuses to act in her film, and Sayun has her priorities straight: she’s too busy studying for the high school entrance examinations to fall in love, let alone act in a movie. As a result, the commercial aboriginal romance film does not get made. But through the device of the film pre-production within the film, Laha Mebow has already made the audience more self-conscious about how a typical commercial aboriginal romance film is constructed, and hopefully more critical of commercial filmmakers like James Cameron who cash in on a simple formula: nature+aborigines=romance, sometimes as pure entertainment, sometimes as an ideological vehicle. Yet Laha Mebow’s criticism is warm-hearted, and not heavy-handed. Indigenous peoples might well feel some hostility towards outsiders who want to commercialize their cultures, but the young Taiwanese casting director character in Finding Sayun is very likable and even somewhat perceptive. She’s not exactly a visual ethnographer, but she has a notion of “participant-observation” – she hangs out with the people in the village and adopts local customs, such as wearing rain boots (she’ll need them on the trek up to the old village).

So what kind of story does Laha Mebow offer instead of aboriginal romance? At first, there is no strong narrative line, and the casting director’s efforts soon fizzle out. Yet not every feature film needs to have a good story, just as plot is not the point of every novel. Initially, Finding Sayun seems like a fictional documentary evoking the everyday lives of three generations in contemporary Nan-ao: 1. Young indigenous students like Sayun and Yugan hoping to get into university and do something with their lives out in the wider world. Sayun plays the organ in church and Yugan is a hunter who hopes to get into college on the strength of his soccer skills. 2. Their parents’ generation tend to engage in low-pay high-risk labor, and one man actually dies in an accident at the beginning of the film (his death caught on camera by the casting director), leaving behind a wife and son to cope as best they can, relying on the support of others in the community. 3. Their grandparents’ generation has never been to the big city; rather than the wider world, their minds are on the old village. Yugan’s Grandpa, one of the original Sayun’s classmates, takes Yugan and the casting director on a final trek back up to the old village. On the way, he jokes around, saying that the original Sayun was his girlfriend so many years ago, but when he reaches the old village the only words he has are for his mother and father, for the ancestors.

Grandpa’s return to the old village is the closest thing Finding Sayun has to an Aristotelian plot with a clear beginning, middle and end, but instead of an aboriginal romance that is consummated in accordance with audience expectations, Finding Sayun gives us a web of unfinished, ongoing, interrelated stories of people in the community. For the most part, these stories are presented not through seamless, continuity editing but rather documentary style. The casting videos seem like part of a “making of” or “behind the scenes” documentary for the commercial aboriginal romance that never gets made, and the shaky footage of Grandpa’s final homecoming is filmed on a consumer video camera. Shot in standard professional quality video, the other scenes – going to church, going to school, swimming in the waterfall pool, hunting, having a drink at the bar, playing ball, chasing pigs – have some sort of ethnographic significance.

Laha Mebow’s film is an community-oriented anti-aboriginal romance film with a documentary aesthetic. That might make it sound a lot less watchable than Avatar, but in addition to being informative, Finding Sayun  is also appealing. It is poignant (without being sentimental) and very funny. It’s worth going out of one’s way to see. See it while you can!

Note: the Chinese name of Finding Sayun is “Light of a Different Moon,” which opens a page in Taiwan’s film and pop music history. In 1941 a Japanese language song called “Sayun’s Bell” was released (listen for the sound of the bell). This is the song grandpa sings on his last trek up to the old village. In the 1960s the song was remade as a Mandarin pop song called “Moonlight Nocturn.” This is what the title of the film is referring to. But Grandpa’s version is best, sung to the light of a different moon.

Note: I’ve gone and written two other posts on the film, one on the mainland Chinese presence in the film, the other on the definition of indigenous film.

Let’s start with two of the more famous songs which have been given misheard Chinese lyrics. The first is “Golimar” from the Telugu movie “Donga“:

To give you a sense of how this goes, the word “golimar” is translated as “幹你媽“ which is pronounced “gan ni ma” and literally means “fuck your mother.” The rest isn’t much more sophisticated than that.

Just to show how popular this song is in Taiwan, remember our guest post by Futuru Tsai about traditional Amis song and dance? Well, here’s footage I took of Futuru and his adopted Amis age set performing Golimar during last year’s Amis Harvest Festival:

(I highly recommend Futuru’s film “Amis Hip Hop” about the role of contemporary song and dance in the festival.)

A second, equally popular video for misheard lyrics is Daler Mehndi’s Tunak Tunak Tun, which is a popular internet meme in it’s own right.

OK. Enough context. Here’s the music video I wanted to talk about. I’ll let you watch it first:

What I like about this video is that it is buffalaxing in reverse. The song was written, in part, with the kind of fake lyrics one would come to expect from a buffalaxed movie, except those are actually the original lyrics of the song. Although, as a mainstream song the lyrics are not dirty, they are often just nonsensical (represented in the subtitles with the use of simplified and gibberish characters). Even better, the video comes with Hindi subtitles which I’ve been told look as if the original song lyrics were run through Google Translate.

Finally, a word about Bollywood movies in Taiwan. Unlike Indonesians or Russians, Taiwanese don’t watch Bollywood. Most of my students here would only have seen Bollywood movie songs as buffalaxed YouTube videos. However, there is one notable exception. Everyone I know in Taiwan and, as far as I can tell, the rest of East Asia as well, seems to have seen the comedy “3 Idiots.” I think the criticism of the education system in that film is felt even more strongly in East Asia than it is in India.

Here in Taiwan it’s time for the annual Dragon Boat Festival (Duānwǔ Jié 端午節), which also happens to be a school holiday. The traditional story of this festival is well summarized by Wikipedia:

The best-known traditional story holds that the festival commemorates the death of poet Qu Yuan (Chinese: 屈原) (c. 340 BCE – 278 BCE) of the ancient state of Chu, in the Warring States Period of the Zhou Dynasty. A descendant of the Chu royal house, Qu served in high offices. However, when the king decided to ally with the increasingly powerful state of Qin, Qu was banished for opposing the alliance. Qu Yuan was accused of treason. During his exile, Qu Yuan wrote a great deal of poetry, for which he is now remembered. Twenty-eight years later, Qin conquered the capital of Chu. In despair, Qu Yuan committed suicide by drowning himself in the Miluo River on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month.

It is said that the local people, who admired him, threw lumps of rice into the river to feed the fish so that they would not eat Qu Yuan’s body. This is said to be the origin of zongzi [a kind of glutinous rice snack eaten at this time]. The local people were also said to have paddled out on boats, either to scare the fish away or to retrieve his body. This is said to be the origin of dragon boat racing.

This is the version of the story which most Taiwanese learn in school, but the truth is much more interesting. I recently discovered that there is some nice work on the sociology of sports being done at National Taiwan Sport University 國立體育大學, where I found Li-Ke Chan’s paper “Post-colonial Dragon Boat Races: Some Preliminary Thoughts” [PDF]. Here’s what I learned from Chan’s paper:

First of all, it points out that dragon boat racing’s origins are probably much older than the official story suggests, having been carried out by Southern Chinese clans as part of shamanistic rituals viewed as barbaric by the Han Chinese. Moreover, conflicts between “Confucian orthodoxy with the popular ritual” frequently led to the rituals being banned. It was also banned as one of the “Four Olds” during the early Communist period.

Second, it also seems this ritual was also common in Qing-era Taiwan, such as 18th and 19th century rituals practiced by Plains Aborigines (Pingpu zu 平埔族) in what is now Ilan county (宜蘭縣). This was not a competitive event, and the author suggests that the dragon motif was absent as well, nonetheless they are sometimes talked about as “dragon boat” races in the archive. When the Japanese colonized Taiwan they tried to control these local rituals by limiting the number of days, or forcing them to adopt more Chinese-style Dragon Boat races. The Japanese were also trying to organize and control the Chinese Dragon Boat races, sometimes having them scheduled on Japanese Navy Day (which fell close to the Chinese holiday).

Finally, when the KMT took control of Taiwan after the war, they saw the Dragon Boat Festival as a means to promote their legitimacy as the true heirs to China’s traditional culture. Chan points out that this traditionalism also included an implicit modernization as the focus shifted from ritual to sports. The “race was officially organized first time under the name of ‘Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Cup.”

The article goes on to discuss the modern significance of the ritual in Hong Kong and China, but I’ll let you read that for yourself. If you can, find your local Chinatown and buy some zongzi!

The affective loop is dizzying as it moves us between distant places and local homes, political upheavals and natural disasters, raging storms and individual stories, the serious and the absurd. Unable to catch my breath between blows or steady myself according to some sense of scale, I feel like so much has happened since the tsunami struck. And yet, I don’t know what to make of any of it.  Are we just bracing ourselves for the next thing?

In an April article entitled “The Half-life of Disaster” Brian Massumi discusses how this media cycle leads us into a perpetual state of foreboding that brings together natural, economic and political threat perception in a configuration that fuels what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism”. The horror is never resolved or replaced; rather, it is archived, infinitely accessible over the Internet.  Cast into the web of other events, the unendurable tragedy of a particular event dissipates, or as Massumi says, “it decays”.  In today’s catastrophic mediashpere, observes Massumi, the half-life of disaster is at most two weeks.

Why have we let the situation in Japan recede into the background of other “big news”?  Massumi and others suggest that this “post-shock pre-posturing” increasingly delegates collective response to the national security apparatus, obscures the structural causes of “natural” disaster (Katrina as well as Fukushima illustrate this point well), and feeds the increasingly centralized global economy which capitalizes on the instability created by the very disasters it helps potentiate.

While I discussed responsibility and resistance in relation to mass-mediated affect in my last post, here I want to offer another mode of response: stepping out of the affective loop.  While feeling with others in the context of suffering is perhaps the only appropriate response when faced with the immediacy of another’s pain, undoing the social causes of suffering requires a continuously engaged critical perspective. I’d like to offer that the ongoing events in Japan are terribly important to us right now in an unfolding global context.

What’s perhaps most important about the aftermath of the disaster was not what happened in the first two weeks, but what is happening twelve weeks out.  Not only does the US public need to step out of the media-driven affective whirlpool, but we need to step back into the global conversation about energy sustainability and the political, social, economic, and environmental disasters brought about in the effort to maintain the current levels of profit.

The meltdowns at Fukushima temporarily unmask the social and environmental dangers always present in nuclear power.  Likewise, the uprisings in the Middle East reveal the grave economic disparities and instability generated in oil-based economies.  We mustn’t let these revelatory and revolutionary moments pass away.

As proposed by Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis in a letter addressed to Japan, the “international capitalist power-structure” is terrified that the disempowered will seize upon the explosive political potential of these moments.  Their letter suggests that if disaster capitalism runs on an ever-present low-level threat perception, its leading industrial sector—energy—runs on the public’s perception that everything is fine and dandy:

Company men and politicians are aware that the disaster at Fukushima is a tremendous blow to the legitimacy of nuclear power and in a way the legitimacy of capitalist production. A tremendous ideological campaign is under way to make sure that it does not become the occasion for a global revolt against nuclear power and more important for a process of revolutionary change. The fact that the nuclear disaster in Japan is taking place in concomitance with the spreading of insurrectional movements throughout the oil regions of North Africa and the Middle East undoubtedly adds to the determination to establish against all evidence that everything is under control.

Claims like these and others (insert link) about “ideological campaigns” in the name “global revolt” may be motivated by a romantic view of political agency. But the history of nuclear power in the US and Japan suggests that Federici and Caffentzis are right to expose the neoliberal interests that inform the framing of recent events.

Historically, the nuclear-friendly PR machine (with Eisenhower and the “Atoms for Peace” campaign at the helm) played a huge role in Japan’s acceptance of nuclear power.  Of course it did.  How in the world, we might ask, would a country like Japan—the only country ever gutted by a nuclear weapon—come to accept nuclear powered energy at the behest of the very country that dropped the bomb??

Historian Peter Kuznick answers precisely this question and explains the process of propaganda and acceptance in a recent essay.  Putting Japan’s nuclear history Pointo perspective, Kuznick writes: “their nuclear program was born not only in the fantasy of clean, safe power, but also in the willful forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal.”  While the human scale of suffering and loss initiated in northeastern Japan will always remain incomprehensible, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown are being fashioned at this very moment into historically comprehensible events. The social, political and economic stakes in these repertoires of fantasy and forgetting are high.

Most blatantly, perhaps, we find these repertoires rehearsed in mainstream media stories about Fukushima.  Last week President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea and Chinese premiere Wen Jiabao visited Japan to speak with Prime Minister Naoto Kan in a tripartite summit in order to discuss Japan’s handling of the nuclear crisis and foster trade relations.  The conservative Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan’s most widely circulated paper, and one with long-held stakes in the nuclear industry…from the time it conspired with the CIA to promote nuclear development in Japan in the 1950s up until the present day) wrote:

Kan was particularly enthusiastic about realizing the visit by the three leaders to a quake-hit area… Some in the government expressed anxiety over security for the leaders. But Kan said: “The sight of us three eating produce from Fukushima Prefecture will definitely be reported overseas. That’d be the best protection we can get against harmful rumors,” and the plan went forward.

Kan links “security” to “protection … against harmful rumors” and asserts that foreign press coverage will provide the protection. One must assume that these “rumors” consist of statements about the ongoing harm by radioactive materials to people in the area of Fukushima and the hazards of all forms of nuclear energy more broadly.  By using the term “rumor” Kan is delegitimizing these claims, while simultaneously taking them seriously enough to situate their threat within the discourse of national security.  Regarding the stakes at play in controlling this information dissemination, Japanese scholar Yoshihiko Ikegami writes:

The government calls the information shared on the internet “rumors” and repeatedly urges the public not to believe them. In addition, a public advertising organization called Advertising Council Japan is airing a TV commercial asking people not to believe rumors and not to buy-up. (The head of the organization is the president of TEPCO.) The commentators in news programs single-mindedly repeat similar messages.

These widespread attempts to dismiss information circulating in the public sphere as “rumors” has led some anti-nuclear activists to re-appropriate the term in explicit calls for revolution.

The linking of rumor and revolution, however, is probably not the most pertinent point about Kan’s statements.  By shifting the role of “security” from that of protecting individual human bodies (Lee and Wen) to that of protecting the nuclear industry—and by exposing these same bodies to potentially poisonous produce—Kan’s statements foregrounds the devaluation of human life that Federici and Caffentzis attribute to capitalism: “What we are witnessing, most dramatically, in the response to the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, especially in the US, is the beginning of an era in which capitalism is dropping any humanitarian pretense and refusing any commitment to the protection of human life.”

If supporting Japan and Fukushima means eating poisoned produce, it is because maintaining current economic trajectories and the continued use of nuclear energy has become more important than the well-being of individual bodies.

At the time of the meeting between the three leaders, the Japanese government had raised acceptable levels of yearly radiation exposure for children from 1 mmSv (the limit set by the WHO) to 20mmSv and was failing to pay for removal of contaminated topsoil at schools.  Children were regularly being exposed to levels of radiation allegedly higher than Chernobyl and traces of radioactive material were being found in the breast milk of women as far away as Chiba and Ibaraki.

Like those displaced by the tsunami, many of the 80,000 evacuees from the 20km radius around Fukushima lacked adequate shelter and provisions.  What’s more, if human life has been undervalued, non-human animal life even more so.   Evacuees were not allowed to take their animal companions with them when they evacuated.  Despite appeals that intensified during the weekend of the summit (and continue thousands of cats and dogs, and ten thousands of farm animals have been starving to death.  Meanwhile, according to prejudices (with historical precedent) about nuclear contamination, people with license plates from Fukushima are being refused service at gas stations and turned away from hotels. Coding discrimination as “reputation damage,” the government is able to claim that supporting the people of Fukushima means ignoring exposure and buying their products rather than worrying over their exposure and accepting them into our communities.  (Japanese Political scientist Chigaya Kinoshita writes about these dual modes of containment in an essay about the uglier aspects of civil society.) In the midst of all this, the three leaders chewed their veggies and posed for the press.

On cue, as if obliging Kan’s earlier statements and this perverse show of solidarity, the first paragraph of the New York Times’ brief coverage of the meeting reads: “The leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea publicly munched on farm produce grown near the stricken Japanese nuclear plant on Saturday in a show of solidarity with Japan’s recovery efforts.”  Nowhere mentioning that this was the fourth in a series of annual meetings since 2008 intended to foster economic relations between the three countries, the article eventually continues, “Before entering the shelter, a converted gymnasium, Mr. Kan steered the group to a table displaying strawberries, cucumbers and other produce grown in Fukushima Prefecture. The leaders, who did not appear to have been surprised by the photo op, smiled and nibbled gamely. “Very delicious,” Mr. Wen said.”

The tone of the Times’ article seems slightly bemused as it acceptingly acknowledges, along with the Chinese and Korean leaders, that this was a highly choreographed theatrical spectacle. What’s troubling in such a tone, however, is the implication that an acknowledgement of posturing somehow exempts the reporting from any responsibility to analyze the scene—both what it stages and obscures.

Why doesn’t the New York Times explain exactly how munching on cucumbers displays solidarity with the people who can’t get the government to clear away debris, rescue their animals, and remove dangerous dirt from children’s playgrounds? Of course these are the very things obscured in the staged scene.  The Times seems to capitulate to the regime of “everything’s fine” that ensures Kan’s “security”.  No matter how ironic the tone, this article portrays solidarity as participating in an anti-panic business-as-usual patriotism, exactly the sort critiqued by Kinoshita in the essay mentioned earlier. While catastrophe and panic were appealing headlines in the initial weeks of the disaster, now in the moment’s fading half-life, they seem to have no place.

Addendum:

Since writing this piece the New York Times has just published an article that exposes the government’s exploitation of poor rural towns and the means through which it makes them financially dependent on nearby reactors.  Although this coverage finally starts uncovering the secrets silence hides, the emphasis on “a lack of widespread grass-roots opposition in the communities around [Japan’s] 54 nuclear reactors” fosters the impression that there isn’t much in the way of anti-nuclear activism taking place in Japan.  Hopefully, the New York Times will start covering the massive demonstrations (of scales rarely seen in contemporary Japan) like the one on April 10^th that brought more that 17,500 people onto the streets of Tokyo.  Cries of protest from the public have brought a halt to development of the Hamaoka Nuclear Plant, and forced the government to revoke the change in acceptable radiation levels for children.  Until these stories earn headlines in mainstream media, I ask you to find projects like Japan – Fissures in the Planetary Apparatus which is translating critical essays by Japanese activists and intellectuals about the ongoing situation in Japan.

As the contours of the disaster accrete into what is undoubtedly a pivotal event, the larger frameworks within which meaning hinges are highly contested.  How the disaster, now officially called the Great East Japan Earthquake, gets spun will depend on which historical and political contexts are acknowledged, and which are ignored.

About a week later, as the scale of suffering in Japan became clearer, I became less concerned with everybody else’s questionable investments in the pain of others and more suspicious of my own hesitancy to engage emotionally.

Although I frowned and cried as solicited upon seeing the unavoidable photos of people staggering through muddy ruins, I wasn’t sure how to feel the rest of the time.  Brian Massumi’s claim that

“power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms—it’s affective”

suggests that stories and images circulate and infiltrate strategically. Even though, as de Certeau reminds us, readers aren’t fools and we employ tactics with which to play and navigate the web of discourse, we’re still stuck inside of it—and it inside of us.  Our critique of media, savvy avoidance of manipulation, and resistance to being told how to feel are themselves already the threads of discourses that have been woven into us.

Part of me wants to believe that some basic feeling for the suffering of others arises before all of this, that there’s a relational web prior and in excess to the discursive one—and that it’s woven more tightly.

But if the mass mediated means through which we gain access to others is always already shaping how we feel for those others, how can we feel without capitulating to the powers that traffic in affect? In the case of catastrophes, which seem to (fairly regularly) punctuate the passage of ordinary life with significance, how do we resist the meaning-making machines while still engaging meaningfully?

I’ll explore these questions here and in a series of posts to follow by looking into the ways various media structure our experiences of disaster and construe “eventfulness.” Considering the political and social interests at stake in Japan and the US, I’m curious about how this particular disaster is being positioned in historical time, and what such placements obscure, or displace.  But mostly, as I meditate on my own relationship with Japan and reaction to the unfolding news, I wonder how to engage responsibly with media and the “real” event.   Helpful to this project is Diana Taylor’s model of the witness who, reflecting Louis Althusser’s model of dialectic spectatorship and Augusto Boal’s “spect-actor”, serves as a

“guarantor of the link between the I and the you, the inside and the outside”and “accepts the dangers and responsibilities of seeing and of acting on what one has seen.”

This task is not easy considering how often we are bombarded with images and news of disaster.  People tell me that they either feel distant and numb to the repeating images, or else they connect to the images through identification: imagining the people in the images are one’s own mother, brother, etc.  The problem with the latter approach is that it brings the other into one’s own ideological universe and blinds one to the political, cultural, and other factors that structure the experience of the event.

These modes of spectatorship are not unlike those of hegemony and identification criticized by Althusser in relationship to theater.  However, when we are dealing with the theater of the real, and its tendency towards catastrophe, the ideological agendas organizing devastation into spectacle elicit modes of relating, as well as detaching, that register in the body.

Quoting the work of Hal Foster regarding shock and subjectivity in America, anthropologist Allen Feldman points to the double nature of the subject’s pleasure:

“in its guise as witness the mass subject reveals its sadomasochistic aspect, for this subject is split in relation to a disaster; even as he or she may mourn the victims, even identify with them masochistically, he or she may also be thrilled sadistically by the victims of whom he or she is not one.”

Feldman raises the stakes when he explicitly links the creation of the “mass subject” in modernity to catastrophe and the visual technologies through which the catastrophic is ideologically produced and distributed.  Developing a theory of the “actuarial gaze,” which he describes as

“the visual organization and institutionalization of threat perception and prophylaxis,” Feldman asserts that “the visual culture of risk reportage circulates catastrophic images as a psychosocial and, ultimately, political desire and currency.”

The visceral intensities ignited and snuffed in these visual images constitute the subjectivity from which we establish ourselves as a public, and how we, as a public, are going to relate or not.

I’d like to say that my reluctance to participate in the disaster drama stemmed solely from a refusal to let this awful thing give me any sort pleasure, masochistic or otherwise.  Or that I harbored sophisticated political suspicions of risk reportage.

But I was primarily loathe to identify with the community of spectators I imagined excitedly rallying their concern on the receiving end of the mediated image.  It was the thrill of the social—the heightened sense of occasion—that I couldn’t stand.  Nothing, it seemed, would make me feel so far away, so alienated from the thing in itself than positioning myself from this A-frame cottage in Iowa somewhere inside the Big Deal Event.  As for approaching the thing in itself, I knew of no other means than those used by the community of spectators themselves: disaster footage.  But did I really want to go there?  As elaborated by Zizek, the “passion for penetrating the Real Thing” spirals into an increasingly violent pursuit of the Real within the images that structure our reality.  I did not want to experience the tsunami as the “thrill of the Real,” the ultimate special effect.

An internet search brought me to a video of the tsunami swallowing the coastal town of Kuji where I had stayed with a family nearly 10 years ago.   The dreadful thrill of the footage did indeed flood my body darkly, excessively, like the tsunami itself.  Feeling my own footing give way, despite sitting down, I braced myself.  Had someone been next to me, however, I would have reached out to them, without thinking, to steady myself.

I wonder now about that instinct.  Why, when something awful or awesome is about to happen, or has just happened, do we tend to grab on to the people next to us?  Surely, the support sought by such a gesture isn’t merely that of balance, but of affiliation.   I hadn’t wanted to get on the drama bandwagon, but here I was: wanting to connect.

The public I imagined gaping from a safe distance was probably not the public into which my friend had been calling me when she sent me that facebook message.   Rather than use the event to elevate the drama in our lives, she may have been reaching out to me in order to ground the drama in a shared reality. This is not to say she was trying to reduce the significance of the event; the ordinary world has its own sort of eventfulness.  As Kathleen Stewart describes it,

“modes of attending to scenes and events spawn socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states and public feelings of all kinds.”

The everyday eventfulness “resonating in bodies, scenes, and forms of sociality,” spreads in whispers and flourishes in indeterminacy.  Something is happening, is going to happen, to us.  The mode is one of suspension that fastens potential significance onto the tiniest of things.  The effect isn’t of elevating reality into ungraspable proportions, but of charging reality with limitless points of connection.

While the looming risk perception propagated in the “actuarial gaze” may make and mask the ways in which we always feel vulnerable to invisible, ever-present and threatening powers, maybe it fails to displace the ways we feel vulnerable to each other.   The witness, unlike the spectator, creates a zone of proximity in the “link between the I and the you”.   Amidst the spectacular scenes of ruin, my old friend took the risk of writing me after all this time, took the risk of hearing bad news and having to respond, and took the risk of being criticized or blogged about.  In doing so she offered me the first clue for thinking about mediated models for responsible action.

Please give her a Savage welcome!

This is how others describe her:

A third year graduate student in Cultural Anthropology, Eleanor came to the University of Iowa with an M. Div from Union Theological Seminary in New York.  Before landing in Iowa with her two cats, Eleanor worked a variety of non-profit jobs from facilitating social justice seminars at the Church Center for the United Nations to assisting elderly New York and displaced New Orleans jazz musicians through the Jazz Foundation of America.   Eleanor’s interests are diverse, but she continually returns to issues of ethnographic representation, technology, desire, the (gendered, racialized, sexualized) body, and new formulations of personhood and “life”. After writing her Master’s paper on voice, language ideology, and early film narration in Japan, Eleanor continues to explore the effects of new technological forms in Japan.  For her dissertation research she will be looking into the relationships, subjectivities and affects created between humans and machines, and the ethical implications of such encounters.

The robots, which display an avatar face of a Caucasian woman, are controlled remotely by teachers of English in the Philippines — who can see and hear the children via a remote control system.

Cameras detect the Filipino teachers’ facial expressions and instantly reflect them on the avatar’s face, said Sagong Seong-Dae, a senior scientist at KIST.

“Well-educated, experienced Filipino teachers are far cheaper than their counterparts elsewhere, including South Korea,” he told AFP.

It would be a lot easier to just have a direct video feed of their Filipino teachers, but why do that when the magic of virtual reality can give you a white teacher? And unlike real white teachers “they won’t complain about health insurance, sick leave and severance package, or leave in three months for a better-paying job in Japan.”

(Via Roy Berman on Twitter)