Experiences of Being a “Native”: Observing Anthropology

In a parallel to Canada’s own residential schools, Keelung Hong (1994) was also forced into a Chinese-run residential school in Taiwan. He was not permitted to use his mother tongue and was punished if ever heard using his native language. The Chinese renamed them in their own language, and it was a rather degrading term. In order to stray from the oppression of the Chinese oligarchy, Hong studied in the US in order to better his chances.

While he was in America, he decided to learn about the history of Taiwan since that subject had been banned during his schooling. He was shocked to see that the ethnographies written about Taiwan talked about a “traditional Chinese culture”.  This was the same culture the Chinese were actively trying to destroy.  He was especially upset about the works of Margery Wolf, an American anthropologist and first wife of Arthur Wolf. She had a very ethnocentric tone in her writings. She romanized a lot of her language, but it is very unclear whether or not she is romanizing the English or the Chinese. Though Hong knew that much of what she wrote was not quite how things worked, he asked a simple favour of her to send him the Chinese characters of some of the words she used. She never replied to his letter.

Hong was also quite distraught over the fact that Wolf completely erased her (Taiwanese) research assistant’s name from her works. There is no mention of her helping Wolf to write her published work. And as someone who is seen as a pioneer for feminist anthropology, Wolf seems to erase a lot about women, especially their names. The erasure of the female names is quite the opposite of feminist anthropology. This does not give women the place they deserve in anthropological texts. This is frustrating to me as a feminist and an anthropology major because she completely misrepresents 1) women and 2) that come from a different society than her own. It seems as though she didn’t even try to make an effort on getting the full names of women or learn the native language of the village she was studying. Hong even visited a cemetery near the village Wolf studied to see if full female names were on the tombstones. Unsurprisingly, they all had full names.

This article was very frustrating to read because even though there is no possible way for me to identify with what Hong feels about ethnographic representations of his society, I still empathize with him. His society is completely misrepresented because anthropologists were too busy looking for the “traditional Chinese culture” in a society that was not completely Chinese. Yes there has been a great Chinese influence on the culture, but there are still many aspects that are uniquely Taiwanese. The native languages are one of the most important cultural aspects of Taiwan and they were almost ignored because they were not “Chinese”.

Hong says it best at the end of his article: “They [anthropologists] will continue to decide what is interesting about my native culture/society and whether insights of those properly initiated into the mysteries of representation theories should be used to make statements about villages, industrializing nations, China, humankind – or perhaps even Taiwan, the generally unthinkable level of analysis” (p. 8).

Reference

Hong, Keelung. 1994. “Experience of Being a ‘Native’: Observing Anthropology.” Anthropology Today 10 (3): 6-9.