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Taiwan’s first indigenous film? Continuum and either/or definitions of...
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...
View ArticleThe Chinese connection in Taiwan’s first indigenous film
In Taiwan’s first indigenous film, Finding Sayun, there are two casting assistant/cameraman characters from Beijing, as well as a director from Beijing. The director from Beijing never appears on...
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“Seediq Bale” as a primitivist film
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...
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Nativization and Foreignization in the Translation of “Seediq Bale”
The epic film Seediq Bale: Warriors of the Rainbow Bridge is of particular interest to translators because it’s in the Taiwanese aboriginal language Seediq. As a Chinese-English literary translator I’m...
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Mona Rudao’s scars: epic identity in “Seediq Bale”
Commentary on the film Seediq Bale often relates it to Taiwan identity. Leaping the fifty years from the Wushe Incident (1930) to Taiwan nationalism (1980s) might seem like a non sequitur or...
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Subjective, objective and indigenous history: Seediq Bale’s take on the Wushe...
A favorite topic on the blogosphere is whether or not Seediq Bale is an historically accurate take on the Wushe Incident. Some details, at least, are inaccurate, and people have some questions for the...
View ArticleDigital Money, Mobile Media, and the Consequences of Granularity
Nicholas Negroponte famously insisted that the dotcom boomers, “Move bits, not atoms.” Ignorant of the atom heavy human bodies, neuron dense brains, and physical hardware needed to make and move those...
View ArticleProtecting Informants in a Time of Digital Thievery
The NY Times has an article about how corporate executives and government officials leave their laptops behind when they go to China or Russia, for fear that corporate or government secrets might be...
View ArticleCaptains
I’ve never been one for visual anthropology, and I’m totally uninterested in pushing the boundaries of what constitutes ‘ethnography’. As a fieldworker, I’m fascinated by the micro-dynamics of human...
View ArticleAttention Deficit Ethnography
[The post below was contributed by guest blogger Lane DeNicola, and is part of a series on the relationship between academic precarity and the production of ethnography, introduced here. Read Lane’s...
View Article5 Documentary Films from Taiwan
Someone asked me for a list of five documentary films for an online anthropology publication, but the piece never got published so I’m sharing it here. I decided to choose is a list of five films from...
View Article2012, the movie we love to hate
The second in a guest series about the “Mayan Apocalypse” predicted for Dec. 21, 2012. The first post is here. Last summer, I traveled to Philadelphia to visit the Penn Museum exhibit “Maya: the Lords...
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Moral affect, ‘the war on terror,’ and the posthuman symbolism of Zero Dark...
Zero Dark Thirty begins with a statement that it is “Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual Events.” And then the screen goes black; you hear voices from the World Trade Center only. The theatre is...
View ArticleOn Profiling in India and the US
In describing the subject of our film, Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! we often tell people that the situation of India’s Denotified Tribes (DNTs) is very similar to the kind of profiling that happens...
View ArticleThe Digital Revolution and Anthropological Film
[The following is an invited post by Jay Ruby. Jay has been exploring the relationship between cultures and pictures for the over forty years. His research interests revolve around the application of...
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