Photo taken from here. (I’ve just discovered the hyperlink button.^^)
Hello all,
Well, of the many things I’d like to report about from my experiences in Taiwan, this anthropological conference is one of them. It was a two-day conference held in Academia Sinica, a research institute located in Taipei that conducts research on everything from biodiversity to political science. They’re Institute of Ethnology is the key point of my interest and will thus be the aspect of this institute that I focus on. Academia Sinica is far more than a research institute though and I highly recommend checking them out if you are at all interested in academic work in Taipei. (Although, most of the “good” stuff seems to be only in Chinese). It’s located at 128 Academia Road, Section 2, Nankang, Taipei 115, Taiwan.
If you’d like me to give you more specific directions (such as bus number and stop name) just let me know. From the main entrance you can get directions to any building, just ask the security people (they were very friendly with me). They don’t speak English as far as I could tell though.
So! The purpose of my visit to Academia Sinica was to attend the conference Anthropological Futures. This is not intended to be an all-inclusive review or something, just my thoughts on it. That being said, I’m gonna skip the lengthy description and just go ahead and tell you my overall impression:
-Unprofessional.
The man who organized this conference, Allen Chun, sat with his shoes off, feet propped up on the chair next to him, and leaned his upper body on the table as he slept. Another guy, Rob Wilson, purposely tried to show his disinterest by talking with others, laughing obnoxiously, interrupting the speakers (especially the only female speaker) often to insert what he believed to be quirky, warmly received, and antagonizing “jokes,” and reading his own book and loudly holding it in front of his eyes so that everyone could see that he wasn’t interested in the speaker.
The lowest moment came at the end, where instead of the initially planned closing comments section, Allen Chun decided to have an impromptu belly dancing performance by a woman who happened to be the wife of one of the presenters. Thankfully I missed this because I had left a little early to meet another friend for lunch, but my companion for the whole weekend, my good friend Reid from Michigan, stayed and reported to me via texting.
On the plus side, there was abundant food (Taiwanese style, of course. 
) and they had vegetarian meals too (so Reid didn’t starve to death!). During the breaks there were cookies and little sandwiches and whatnot. My aunt once said something along the lines of “This is how you know this isn’t a real college (referring to a particular State Uni of NY in my town): they don’t have food at the events.” For me, as a high school graduate about to start her college experience this fall, I for one am delighted to know that they serve food at events. High education is a whole ‘nother realm and I’m happy of this. ^^
-Academic douchbags really suck.
There were two men, the aforementioned Rob Wilson and a Mr. David Blundell, who are douchebags of notable disgustion (I just made that word up because I don’t know the appropriate term for that). Both of these men have what I call chronic WGIAS: White Guy in Asia Syndrom. There’s something really really horrific that I’m sure every Asian country has: this transformation of losers/nobodies/dysfunctional people/etc into self-righteous, narcissistic, obnoxious, egoistic pigs. Of course, the characteristics of WGIAS-carriers as related to the probability of developing this syndrom differ from men and women. I will not go into any more length about this for right now though (perhaps in the future).
These two men were particularly wretch-inducing because their WGIAS was aided and further strengthened by their “achievements in academia,” by other placating wussie academics feeding into, entertaining, and/or silently, hushedly allowing such chronic WGIAS (behavior commonly found in the average white person), higher education-level vocabularies, and power-inducing discussion techniques that I’ve only seen academics wield.
-Some of the papers were incredibly and surprisingly interesting.
Here is the lineup of the two days:
—————————-DAY ONE
Brave New Worlds
-Paul Carter, Material Thinking Research and Design Studio and School of
Communication & Creative Arts, Deakin University,
“Dry Thinking and Human Futures”.
-Allen Chun, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica,
“Toward a Postcolonial Critique of the State”.
Culture in Motion and Context
-Greg Urban, Anthropology Department, University of Pennsylvania,
“Supply and Demand: A Special Case of the Laws of Cultural Motion”.
-Huen Chi-wai, Divinity School, The Chinese University of Hong Kong,
“(Inter)disciplinarity as an A(nta)gonistic Field: The Possibility of an
Anthropology of the Academy”.
The Cosmopolis of Spectacle
-Michael Dutton, Department of Politics, Goldsmiths College, London,
“The Three Towers of Politics”.
-Ackbar Abbas, Department of Comparative Literature, University of
California at Irvine,
“Spatial Histories and Chinese Cities”.
DAY TWO
Iconomies of Media
-Leo Chen, Film Department, Kyoto University of Art and Design,
“‘What was the Nickel for?’?From the Economy of Images to the Iconomy of
Cinema”.
-Teri Silvio, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica,
“Notes Toward an Anthropology of Animation”.
The Ethnographic Reality of Reality Ethnography
-David Blundell, International MA Program in Taiwan Studies, National
Chengchi University,
“Ethnography of Communication: Acquisition of Language and Knowledge”.
-Kerim Friedman, Department of Indigenous Culture, National Dong Hwa
University,
“The Ethnographer’s M.O.: A Case Study in Collaboration, Refusal, and
Form in the Making of an Ethnographic Film”.
Transcending States of Anesthesia
-Lindsay Waters, Harvard University Press,
“”Rebuilding Aesthetics from the Ground Up”.
-Rob Wilson, Literature Department, University of California at Santa Cruz,
“Towards an Ecopoetics of Oceania: Worlding the Asia-Pacific Region as
Space-Time Ecumene”.
—————————
The schedule ended up being different from this and for various reasons I did not attend all of the presentations. Of the ones I did attend, here are my thoughts:
1. Paul Carter and “Drying Thinking…”
To be honest, I kinda had a little crush on this guy. ^^ (Sorry to open with this kind of sentiment.) He’s tall, white, English (I’ve had a couple of “formative experiences” with English people here in Taiwan [particularly with an Oxford graduate] so this is kinda ironic; maybe more on this later), in his 40s, I think, has white/grayish hair (or maybe blond? I don’t remember), and dressed in a form-fitting purple or blueish dress shirt (so attractive! xD). He gave off this air of mild detachment/aloofment and quiet pondering and speaks really sensually. And his name is Paul Carter. Now that’s attractive! Here‘s his university profile page. And here‘s a video of him (that does his sexy self justice) on Youtube introducing the paper I heard to a different audience earlier this year.
—To be finished in later post. ^^
