Comparatizing Taiwan

Shu-mei Shih, Ping-hui Liao, Shu-mei Shih, Ping-hui Liao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317677833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teoria della critica letteraria

As the site of crossings of colonizers, settlers, merchants, and goods, island nations such as Taiwan have seen a rich confluence of cultures, where peoples and languages were either forced to mix or did so voluntarily, due largely to colonial conquest and their crucial role in world economy. Through an examination of socio-cultural phenomena, Comparatizing Taiwan situates Taiwan globally, comparatively, and relationally to bring out the nation's innate richness.

This book examines Taiwan in relation to other islands, cultures, or nations in terms of culture, geography, history, politics, and economy. Comparisons include China, Korea, Canada, Hong Kong, Macau, Ireland, Malaysia, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States and the Caribbean, and these comparisons present a number of different issues, alongside a range of sometimes divergent implications. By exploring Taiwan's many relationalities, material as well as symbolic, over a significant historical and geographical span, the contributors move to expand the horizons of Taiwan studies and reveal the valuable insights that can be obtained by viewing nations, societies and cultures in comparison. Through this process, the book offers crucial reflections on how to compare and how to study small nations.

This truly interdisciplinary book will be welcomed by students and scholars interested in Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, comparative cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and literary studies.

Part I

Taiwan in comparison

1 Comparativism and Taiwan studies

Analyzing Taiwan in/out of context, or Taiwan as an East Asian New World society

Frank Muyard

In the past three decades, the rise of the Taiwanese consciousness has been accompanied by the emergence of a new Taiwan-centered history and the development of the international academic field of Taiwan studies. Comparative research has, however, not been a significant part of the academic effort to investigate the diverse aspects and dimensions of Taiwan’s past and present societies. This paper presents some reflections about the possible objectives and use of comparativism in the study of Taiwan. Looking in particular at the issues of state, nationalism, and aboriginality, comparisons with the farther—the New World—and the closer—the East Asian region—are proposed to highlight the possible contribution of regional and comparative frameworks in drawing new perspectives on Taiwan’s historical experience. I shall start by looking at Marcel Detienne’s recent call for an experimental comparativism in historical and anthropological research, and its relevance for Taiwan studies.

The call for comparativism

An anthropologist and historian specializing in Ancient Greek studies, Marcel Detienne is one of the most active and persistent French comparativists of the past half-century. In a series of articles regrouped in his book, Comparer l’incomparable [Comparing the incomparable] (2009), Detienne calls for a renewed effort to develop a genuine historical anthropology which would be based on a constructive comparativism between historians and anthropologists. In a vitriolic critique of the current research practice and approaches in French and European historical studies, Detienne attacks the domination of the paradigm of “national singularity” and “national history.” He insists that it has not always been the case. Between the 16th and the 18th centuries, scholars, thinkers and missionaries attempted to draw comparisons between, for instance, the Ancient Greeks—the apparent everlasting model and inspiration for the European civilization—and Northeastern America’s Hurons and Iroquois, or the Chinese, and with the goal to question and understand how society, culture, political power are or can be differently constructed. Their work was to “put into perspective, confront and compare from various angles, analyze different societies in mores and customs” (Detienne 2009: 21–22).¹ One may notice that these endeavors happened precisely before the coalescence of the modern nations as we know them now. But these queries had indeed important and direct consequences on the intellectual and political debates in the European societies, for instance about the freedom of the individual, the states of nature and of society, or the role and power of the state in the society, with the “American Indians” or “Chinese” providing counter-examples, be they seen as positive or negative, to the European ways of regulating individual and social relations.²

In a similar fashion, Detienne recalls how Marc Bloch (the father of new history and the Annales School in France) tried to develop “a comparative history of European societies” in order to stop “talking eternally from national history to national history” (ibid.: 30–31). However, such projects were fast forgotten or rejected since, as Detienne writes, in the world of historians reigns the truism that “what is national cannot be compared”: the “national genius,” the nation, would be by definition incommensurable; better, “by essence, the Nation is the Incomparable” (ibid.: 31–32). While some may find the criticism exaggerated, historians often do reject comparativism on the basis that contexts would be neglected and the national and historical specificities could be overlooked under some misleading generalizations, as do anthropologists on the pretext of the unique specificity of their fieldwork or the culture that they study. For Detienne, “the main obstacle to the comparativist exercise” appears therefore to be “located in the national fact [fait national],” and in “the intensive quest for the specific, for what makes a singularity” that dominate national histories (ibid.: 61, 149). One of his late research objectives was therefore to debunk these national histories in comparing “the incomparable of the myth-ideologies of the National” (ibid.: 128).

The reluctance to open the study of contemporary national societies to meaningful comparative research is also represented, according to Detienne, by what generally passes for comparativism in most historical and anthropological studies, and which at the end tends to reinforce their restricted national and ethnocultural focus. The target of Detienne’s criticism is here the limited form of comparative study between similar kinds of society that dominates the practice of comparativism: “the comparison will be made between neighboring societies, contemporary and of same nature” (ibid.: 33). Comparativism seems tolerated but only between objects already defined as similar, under the thesis that “one can only compare what is comparable.” Detienne underlines for instance how, in the historical sciences in Europe, “it goes naturally that no extra-European society is relevant to reflect about what it means to fund a colony, produce a territory or inaugurate ways of living together in a new space” (ibid.).

Conversely, Detienne is looking for what he calls the “shock of the incomparable,” which opens new avenues, new perspectives not only on one’s research subject, but also about oneself. To achieve that, one should attempt to build “comparables” in a collaboration between historians and social scientists, in order to get out of and away from one’s own field of knowledge and research, and reconsider it from other perspectives coming from another society, another culture, another history: “The key to work together is to free oneself from the closest, the best known and the native, and to realize very early, very fast that we must know the totality of the human societies, all the possible and imaginable ways of living together, yes, up to the furthest horizon, historians and anthropologists alike” (ibid.: 43).

A main function of this kind of comparativism is to shake and undermine the “usual,” the certitudes, and the “common” categories of reflection and construction of social reality that constitute both the researchers’ social and intellectual education and the way their fields of inquiry are determined. To compare, to put into perspective, helps to question the “self-evident,” the “unquestioned” in our own culture, in our own history, be it local or national. In asking the real questions, the “operating questions,” experimental comparativism forces us “to think differently what seems to belong to the common sense and the familiar categories” (ibid.: 137). In that way, Detienne’s goal is similar to the objective of Foucault’s program of “archaeology and genealogy”: to unveil the self-evident truths that constitute who and what we are (cf. Foucault 1994). But it also echoes the self-reflexive work born by the sociological practice as promoted by Bourdieu (cf. Bourdieu 1992). For Detienne, there is indeed “an ethical value” to comparativism: “it encourages us to put into perspective the values and choices of the society that we belong to” and as a consequence to put some distance between them and oneself (Detienne 2009: 62). Because, if to compare is to put into perspective, the first thing to do is “to put oneself into perspective” (ibid.: 111).

Comparativism and Taiwan studies

If we look at the state of comparativism in Taiwan studies (or at least how I see it), a paradoxical feeling comes to mind: there seem to be many comparative case studies, for instance in politics, economics, and sociology (the fields I am the most familiar with), and at the same time a lack of comparative frameworks to shape and try to understand Taiwan’s historical development and its ancient or modern societal change.

In Taiwan we will find indeed very few, if they even exist, centers, institutes, or research groups focused on comparativism or developing comparative studies on Taiwan, and few researches use a comparative approach to explore Taiwan’s socio-historical configurations or the major processes that led to them. Most of the research is still preoccupied with the analysis of these socio-historical developments and processes for themselves, not for how they can be related to world-wide phenomena and for what they can tell us about the specificity or commonality of their occurrences in Taiwan compared to other countries.

As Detienne observed about the comparative practice in Europe, in Taiwan also most of the comparative studies are characterized by a focus on a single historical period (often the post-World War II and the contemporary) and on either the Chinese cultural world or the Northeast Asian neighbors, meaning Japan and especially South Korea. Most comparisons relate then to the closest historical and geographical objects, and compare phenomena or societies that are already defined as sharing common characteristics or being seen as of the same nature/culture. Interestingly, it also seems as if, at the conclusion of these comparative studies, the specificity of Taiwan and of the other countries and their differences were highlighted, and the uniqueness of their development, of their national history, of their national conditions were reaffirmed, ending the need to expand and deepen the comparison. The South Korean comparison case is telling. This country is by far the one most often compared to Taiwan due to their apparent parallel modern development in the 20th century: both were a Japanese colony, have been seen as a case of a “divided” country by civil war and the cold war, went through decades of right-wing dictatorship, created an economic miracle under US protection and in the footsteps of Japan, and counts among the Third wave of democracies. With the exception maybe of economic studies, however, even with all these similarities of situation and dynamics, and although South Korea is constantly seen and described in Taiwan as the country’s main competitor (in terms of gross domestic product, high technology, economic openness, and reform, or cultural development and impact), South Korean studies in Taiwan remain largely underdeveloped, and no analytic understandings or frameworks to compare and appreciate the various aspects of the two countries’ modern developments and societies, in their commonalities and dissimilarities, have been promoted.

This is not always the case: many studies have included the Taiwan case in the overview of the Third wave of democracies; in the study of Taiwan’s constitution and politics, others have developed very productive comparisons between Taiwan and several semi-presidential regimes in Europe (Wu 1998, 2005, 2011). The issue of the middle class in Taiwan compared to other developed countries, especially in East Asia, has also seen important achievements (Hsiao 1999, 2006). In 2010–2011, a whole series of seminars at the London School of Economics’ (LSE’s) Taiwan Research Programme focused on the comparison between Taiwan and Ireland in all fields of study, and the LSE Taiwan studies group directly promotes comparativism in its journal Taiwan in Comparative Perspectives. These examples actually show all the value and relevance of broader comparative studies, yielding significant insights on coloniality, language and hegemony, class structure and democratic values, or constitution-based political gridlock and conflicts that demonstrate that the Taiwanese experience is not “incomparable” but part of larger world trends and modern experiences.

Now, if comparativism is not a main practice in Taiwan studies, there are also probably a few specific reasons beyond the hyper-specialization of disciplinary research in contemporary social sciences. The first seems to be a relative lack of knowledge and expertise both in the Taiwanese academic communities about other countries, cultures, societies, histories, and languages (especially non East Asian countries), and outside of Taiwan about Taiwan in general. Even among Chinese studies scholars (a field in which I was educated), the level of ignorance about Taiwan is staggering, especially since most of the world still includes Taiwan within this field.³ But another reason is directly related to Taiwan’s post-war development of humanities and social sciences and the relative dearth of academic studies and knowledge about and centered on Taiwan proper before the 1980s (cf. Chang 2005; Chang et al. 2010; Nadeau and Chang 2003; Heylen 2001). As a result, in the past three decades, together with the rise of the Taiwanese cultural consciousness, most efforts in academic research have been focused, legitimately, on unveiling a past and a present buried under ignorance, repression, a Chinese nationalist ideology, and a politically controlled history for too long (cf. Hsiau 2000). And this task is still far from complete. It is important to remember this reality when we discuss the use and benefits of comparativism in Taiwan. Even within Taiwan studies, ignorance or superficial knowledge about other periods or aspects of the Taiwanese society and history outside the specialization of the researcher is still widespread. One reason is that most researchers (at least abroad; but it would logically follow that the situation of Taiwanese scholars, if certainly better, would not be radically different) lack the proper education on Taiwan society and history since it did not exist yet or was not taught during their formative years (and is even now still so rarely taught outside of Taiwan). What a social scientist working on contemporary Taiwan knows about the 18th and 19th century in Taiwan or even about the better covered Dutch and Chengs eras in the 17th century or the Japanese colonization is often strikingly little. A lot of analyses on Taiwan’s modern and contemporary change is therefore based on flimsy knowledg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: why Taiwan? why comparitize?
• Part I: Taiwan in comparison
• Part II: Imperial conjuctures and contingencies
• Index