David on Formosa

On Sunday and Monday I attended a conference in Smangus. The conference, organized by National Chiao Tung University (國立交通大學), brought together a small group of anthropologists to discuss the topic of “Rethinking environment, localisation and indigenisation.” While it poured rain on the Sunday afternoon the cafe at provided a great refuge for the presenters gave [...]

I saw the short film Msgamil: Once Upon a Time (泰雅千年) while visiting Smangus in August last year. I then saw Through Thousands Years* (走過千年) at the Ethnographic Film Festival. Msgamil is a short film produced by Chen Wen-bin (陳文彬) about the historical migration of the Atayal. Through Thousands Years, by the Atayal director Pilin [...]

The 2009 Taiwan Ethnographic Film Festival (台灣國際民族誌影展) took place from 2-6 October. I attended several sessions and saw an interesting selection of ethnographic films from Taiwan. The first film I saw was Sing It! (唱歌吧！) directed by Shine Yang (楊智麟). It tells the story of how the principal of Dongpu Elementary School in Chiayi County [...]

I visited Smangus this week to continue the research for my thesis. There were some significant changes in the village since my visit last year. The major one was the new classroom building near the main entrance to the village. Construction began in July last year and was completed in April. There are currently 12 [...]

Austronesian Taiwan: Linguistics, History, Ethnology, Prehistory was first published in 2000 and has been out of print for past few years. A new edition of the book was published to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Shung Ye Museum and the exhibition of artifacts from Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology. The new edition was edited [...]

The end of this semester marked my completion of the coursework requirements in the Master’s of Taiwan Studies program at NCCU (國立政治大學). The classes I took this semester were Political Development of Taiwan and International Relations of Taiwan. They were both great classes — Taiwan presents a vast amount of rich subject matter on these [...]