Professor S Feuchtwang, A613 and Dr F Shih, V1003

This course is an option for the MSc China in Comparative Perspective, but for other MScs in the Anthropology Department, it may be taken only with the permission of the director of those degree programmes and your tutor. The course is available as an outside option where regulations permit. It is also available to post-graduate research students at SOAS, elsewhere in the University of London and to students from other institutions through special arrangements.

The course Taiwan in Comparative Perspective contextualises the processes of modernisation and globalisation through cross-disciplinary studies of significant issues that use Taiwan as a point of comparison. The course will begin with an introduction to the social, political and economic development of Taiwan, concentrating mainly on the modern era in global context, and this will be compared to processes and theoretical issues relating to modernisation and globalisation in general. The rest of the course addresses a range of socio-economic and political concerns in relation to Taiwan in comparison with other countries in Asia and in Europe. The course considers the local development of economic psychology in global economic structures, and how economic activity affects the way people relate to the environment. It then moves on consider some social issues, beginning with the subject-making role of education, and how subjectivity has been affected by the social memory of national trauma. This leads into a discussion of the role of religion in constructing and contesting identities, leading to either social cohesion or ethnic conflict. The final part of the course will consider the rise of civil society and processes of democratisation, and move beyond the concerns of modernity to consider the role of transnational and virtual networks in a postmodern and globalised world.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the LT. Two hours of revision sessions in the ST.

One compulsory 10-minute presentation with text and full references, to be given in seminars. Students must complete the presentation before submitting their assessed essay. Students will also produce a formative essay of 1,500 words, to be submitted by Week Five.

Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.
Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Connerton, Paul (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dirlik, Arif, ed. (1998) What is in a Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Elliott, Carolyn, ed. (2006) Civil Society and Democracy: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J., eds, (2001) Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Introduction.
Marsh, Robert. (1996). The Great Transformation: Social Change in Taipei, Taiwan Since the 1960s. London: M. E. Sharpe.
Rubinstein, Murray A., ed. (1999) Taiwan: A New History. New York: East Gate.
Weller, R. P. (1999) Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Shih, F.-L., Thompson, S., and Tremlett, P.-F., eds (2008) Re-Writing Culture in Taiwan, London: Routledge
Yip, June (2004) Envisioning Taiwan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

One 5,000 word essay (100%).