[Renovation] Chinese Website

Our Mandarin Chinese Website has a New Look, Please Visit

New Publication by Dr. Hui-tun Chuang

Dr. Hui-tun Chuang's article "From Snack to Cuisine: The Spatialization of Taiwanese Foods", published in the edited book Food and Everyday Life, New York : Lexington Books (Feb. 2014)


   Food and Everyday Life provides a qualitative, interpretive, and interdisciplinary examination of food and food practices and their meanings in the modern world. Edited by Thomas M. Conroy, the book offers a number of complementary approaches and topics around the parameters of the “ordinary, everyday” perspective on food. These studies highlight aspects of food production, distribution, and consumption, as well as the discourse on food. Chapters discuss examples ranging from the cultural meanings of food as represented on television, to the practices of food budgeting, to the cultural politics of such practices as sustainable brewing and developing new forms of urban agriculture. A number of the studies focus on the relationships between food, eating practices, and the body. Each chapter examines a particular (and in many instances, highly unique) food practice, and each includes some key details of that practice. Taken together, the chapters show us how the everyday practices of food are both familiar and, yet at the same time, ripe for further discovery. 

Paper Presentation

"Kitchen Cultures in Taiwan’s Immigrant Families "
  by Dr. Hui-tun Chuang
@ The 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (8.18. 2014)
For more details, please go to conference program: ASA 2014

Paper Presentation

“A Soul Tie? Commemorations of the “Japanese” Dead and Pilgrimages to Sacred Sites of Colonial and War Memories in Postwar Taiwan” 
 by Dr. Yoshihisa Amae
@ The 20th Na-tsa conference (June 2014)

For more detail, please go to conference schedule: Na-tsa 2014

Guest Lecture: Rosa Enn

CJCU, 24 October 2013. 10.20-12.10. Graduate Institute of Taiwan Studies,2nd Floor, Meeting Room.

Guest Lecture, Rosa Enn, PhD candidate, University of Vienna, Austria, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology: 

The impacts of modernity on Orchid Island’s Tao people

The people living on remote islands have to deal with the advantages and disadvantages of their geographical isolation. The indigenous Tao of Orchid Island (Lanyu) have preserved their cultural traditions much more effectively than perhaps any of the indigenous groups on Taiwan,  they were not influenced by mainstream Han Chinese society to the same extent as the other indigenous communities. However, the impact of modernity, such as rising tourism and the influences from the outside world have had far-reaching consequences for their traditional lifestyle and social structures.

The Tao have had to deal with various forms of injustice ever since Taiwan’s period of martial law. The remote location of their homeland from Taiwan became of great interest to the government in the 1970s. The appropriation of land on Orchid Island was to be used to deposit nuclear waste and that solved the government’s problem of finding a convenient and appropriate storage site. The Tao were neither informed nor included in the decision-making processes regarding this undertaking. Since 1982, 100,000 barrels of toxic waste from Taiwan’s three nuclear power plants were dumped on Orchid Island for intermediate storage.

The empowerment movement succeeded in stopping the delivery of nuclear waste barrels to Orchid Island in 1996. In addition, the islanders managed to obtain monetary compensation and social welfare. However, the Tao strongly depend on these compensation benefits nowadays. Due to having the dumpsite for more than 30 years and enjoying the respective compensation, the people had no incentive to develop a self-sufficient and sustainable economy in order to create income possibilities and, therefore, the dependency on monetary compensation remains unsolved.

This anthropological research deals with governance and environmental justice, indigenous peoples’ rights and empowerment in terms of social inclusion and participation in political and environmental decision-making. Furthermore, it looks at the transformation of ethnicity due to the influence of modernity and how the indigenous peoples interact with the issue of changing their way of life, as well as the representation of gender in ethnographic research.

CV 

Rosa Enn was born in Salzburg/Austria. She lives in Taipei and Vienna, where she is enrolled in a PhD program of the University of Vienna at the Institute of Social Anthropology. Her fields of expertise are indigenous peoples with regard to their social, cultural, and legal positions within national and international discourses, human rights, and various forms of governance. In her PhD she develops methods, together with indigenous peoples, NGOs, governmental, and international institutions, to implement environmental justice strategies among indigenous communities in Taiwan who live in remote areas and are exposed to ecological colonialism. She has conducted several field researches in Taiwan and Brazil. Beside her studies, she supports NGOs in Taiwan and Switzerland as a scientific researcher.

Workshop: Ethnicity and Gender in Taiwan

Organized by Chang Jung Christian University, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Studies, and the University of Vienna, Department of East Asian Studies/Sinology
Dr. Jens Damm, CJCU, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Studies
Dr. Astrid Lipinsky, University of Vienna, Department of East Asian Studies/Sinology

Monday, 30 September 2013, 9:00 – 17:30

Contact

Graduate Institute of Taiwan Studies
6F, 1st Academic Building, Sec. 1, 1 Changda Rd., Guiren District, Tainan 71101, TAIWAN
Office Tel：
(06)2785123  ext.4011
Dr. Jens Damm
Office Tel: (06)2785123  ext.4019
E-mail：jens.damm@fu-berlin.de

For the related lectures in Vienna, see http://tsc.univie.ac.at/upcoming-events/
The Vienna Lectures are also available as PDF download

The lecture by Jens Damm on December 18th also as PDF.

Paul Lim