Book talk: 'Why Taiwan? Anthropological Perspectives'
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
1:00 pm to 2:30 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Main Building
- Room
- KLT
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to welcome Professor Lee An-Ru to give a talk as part of this year's Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School on the book Why Taiwan, which asks why Taiwan matters as an object of scholarly inquiry beyond China-centred frameworks.
Bringing together a range of anthropological perspectives, the book examines how Taiwan has been approached in the discipline and what becomes possible when Taiwan is treated not as a secondary case within China studies, but as a site of inquiry in its own right. Across topics including Cold War anthropology, indigeneity, religion, food, heritage, and technology, the volume considers both why Taiwan matters and how it might be studied anthropologically.
This talk will reflect on the intellectual questions that shape the volume and on the wider significance of reasserting Taiwan as a legitimate and generative focus of anthropological research.
Image credit: Timo Volz via Unsplash.
About the speaker
Lee An-Ru is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College, CUNY. Her research focuses on the Asia-Pacific region and on questions of capitalism, modernity, gender and sexuality, and urban anthropology. She is the author of In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan’s Economic Restructuring and Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan, and co-editor of Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society and the gender and women’s studies section of the Brill Encyclopedia of Taiwan Studies.
