The importance of anthropology

January 12, 2014

This blog will focus on the Anthropology of Taiwan as learned in the course ANT4105A at the University of Ottawa. The blog will examine the readings for the course to find connections between the articles, highlight the uniqueness of Taiwanese culture and anthropological research and compare history and culture of Taiwan to others around the world.

What I found particularly interesting in this week's readings was the prominence of anthropological research methods in studies that were not inherently anthropological in the early Japanese colonial period of Taiwan. The early stages of this period, beginning in 1895 after the agreement on the Shimonoseki treaty, were, surprisingly to the Japanese, troublesome. Japan had hopes of becoming a colonial power to be respected by the West; however, were met with extreme and continuous financial needs of their new colony and an incompatibility with the modern Japanese legal system and social customs and traditions of the Taiwan. To solve these issues, a commission, called the Provisional Commission for the Investigation of Taiwanese Old Customs, was created to study issues that were critical to the efficient and hopefully long-lasting governance of Japan’s newly acquired, and first, colony. 

What is interesting about the Commission was the way that research was carried out and information was collected. The Commission, focussing mainly on the Chinese of Taiwan with some research on non-Chinese, native inhabitants, conducted studies by studying historical documents and doing fieldwork, which is a main facet of the discipline of anthropology. And while the Commission did not intend to conduct anthropological studies, unlike Ino Kanori and Torii Ryuzo did at the same time while focussing on Taiwan’s Aborigines and their racial status, some of the core research was inherently anthropological. 

One main topic the Commission focussed on in order to understand Taiwanese people to maintain Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan were kinship relations. In cultural anthropology, the focus of my undergraduate degree, this is a main feature in understanding a culture.  They studied family, lineage, marriage, affine, among other things to better understand the Chinese of Taiwan. While early data seemed to suggest only a historical literature had been conduced to obtain this information, later data showed it to be based on fieldwork. The Commission also studied land systems. To do this, researchers spoke to knowledgeable people of the communities traveled to to learn in-depth and firsthand how the land systems of Taiwan worked and how the information gathered can be useful in prolonging Japanese colonial power in Taiwan. By collecting field data, it shows that fieldwork was a main component for the research of the Commission. 

The point of this focus on how the Commission collected data is to emphasize the importance of anthropology and the main features of the discipline that can be lent to studies that are not necessarily intended to be anthropological. This is why I believe the discipline to be so important. The use of fieldwork in Taiwan in just this study shows the wide range of topics that anthropological theory, methodology and practices can be useful for. 

Although the article focussing on the Provisional Commission for the Investigation of Taiwanese Old Customs went in-depth into what the Commission studied and the reports it made, while reading it I could not help but notice all the anthropological features of the studies even though it was not intended as such. This is why I have focussed on the importance of anthropology in my first blog and hopefully this emphasis will make it clear why the subject of this blog, the anthropology of Taiwan, is so important.