Monday, August 22, 2011

Daily Links, Aug 22, 2011

What can we look over today?

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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

So the DPP spent how much money and how much time in coming up with a China policy that is basically (maybe 95%) the same as the KMT's?

Anonymous said...

Can somebody slap Vivien Hsu. Once for me and once for Franz Boas.

Anonymous said...

such bad english and poor headlinings--very deceptive or confusing!

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...
Can somebody slap Vivien Hsu. Once for me and once for Franz Boas.

August 22, 2011 11:24 PM
You do it yourself sissy!
Once a coward always a coward!

What did Vivien do to you? Raped you?
Busted you?

Anonymous said...

Add Link: Chinese Banks: “These Things Aren’t Banks”

Anonymous said...

Ah! I think I see what the earlier anon was getting at. After reading closely a couple times this is what I see:

"Taiwanese pop star Vivian Hsu, who plays a Seediq woman forced to adopt a Japanese lifestyle, said the aboriginal actors' lack of experience was more than compensated by their natural acting ability.

"They had that stern, killing look in their eyes," she said, referring to a crowd scene during a key moment in the development of the Seediq revolt."

Vivian Hsu, while playing an indigenous woman, embarks on traditional Han racialist tropes of the civilized vs. the savage; tropes that post Franz Boas modern anthropologists have spent decades debunking.

Her first misstep is to indicate that indigenous people possess an innate mimetic faculty in a sort of "monkey see, monkey do" fashion. By particularly isolating Aborigines apart from how she, herself identifies, it is clear there is an extant, but possibly unintended pejorative at play. The belief that indigenous peoples i.e. "savages" were naturally expert copycats was rife among European explorers and fully detailed in Charles Darwin's writing from Tierra de Fuego. European colonists and explorers used the mimetic faculty to explain how the "uncivilized" could learn to act similar to civilized man.

Vivian Hsu steps in it again when she describes the "stern, killing look in their eyes". Again, she is reinforcing stereotypes of Taiwan's indigenes as "savage" and somehow innately able to appear menacing and dangerous as if it is written into their collective DNA. Again, her focus on Aborigines apart from non aborigines to possess this "killing" faculty might suggest she lends credence to these outdated beliefs in the indigene as "savage". After all, Chinese nationalism has done little to adopt the views of post Boasan anthropologists and reject racialism and ethnic nationalism. Chinese nationalism is built upon these beliefs.

So in a way, by accepting these beliefs and internalizing them, she is helping to reifying them to the detriment of indigenes and Taiwanese in general.

James said...

Vivien Hsu is half Atayal.

Anonymous said...

So is Kao Jin Su Mei. She was raised "Chinese" and therefore probably thinks from that experience with that identity.