Kerim's Lifelog

Pineapple vendor in Jian

Mon, 07 May 2012 05:51:10 GMT

Pineapple vendor in Jian

Supermoon

Sun, 06 May 2012 14:37:17 GMT

Supermoon

Sunset from a car window

Thu, 03 May 2012 01:01:45 GMT

Sunset from a car window

Sunset sail on campus pond #nofilter

Tue, 01 May 2012 09:58:55 GMT

Sunset sail on campus pond #nofilter

Panorama: morning before Amis class

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:43:11 GMT

Panorama: morning before Amis class

Muddy snout

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 03:02:37 GMT

Muddy snout

Took a picture of my student's dessert…

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:21:51 GMT

Took a picture of my student's dessert…

Biking home after work.

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 10:14:28 GMT

Biking home after work.

Welcome to pig family

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 01:36:10 GMT

Welcome to pig family

Juno Burrito

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 10:13:51 GMT

Juno Burrito

La Cucaracha

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:24:59 GMT

La Cucaracha

Vegetation

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 08:51:40 GMT

Vegetation

Tally me banana

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 12:07:35 GMT

Tally me banana

Chin up

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:57:26 GMT

Chin up

The Tzu Chi campus always feels like a set for Starfleet Academy…

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 03:56:22 GMT

The Tzu Chi campus always feels like a set for Starfleet Academy…

《請別打我，長官！》即將在臺灣播映

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:06:42 GMT

Upcoming PDBMS Screenings in Taiwan

如果你居住在臺灣，但尚未看過我們的電影，不用擔心，未來幾個月內會有多場的影片播放；也都會有華文字幕。

If you live in Taiwan and haven’t seen our film yet, don’t worry: there are plenty of screenings coming up in the next few months. All these screenings will feature Chinese subtitles. [The film is in Hindi and Gujarati, so these screenings are primarily targeted at Chinese speakers.]

*4/06（週五）18:30 in Guangfu 光復糖廠的餐廳-啄木鳥
4/07 (週六) 17:40 in Taipei 板橋多功能文教館B1演藝廳 [Purchase tickets 買票.]
4/15 (週日) 17:10 in Taipei 板橋多功能文教館B1演藝廳 [Purchase tickets 買票.]
*4/24（週二）19：00 Taipei 台北政治大學藝文中心
*5/06 （週日）13：30 Hualien 花蓮慈濟大學B106演藝廳
*5/20（週日）13：30 Taitung 台東大學台東校區的演藝廳
6/02 （週六）13：30 Taichung 台中國立自然科學博物館
6/10（週日）19：00 Kaohsiung 高雄市電影館

標記「*」的場次，現場開放與導演Q&A時間，我們也會盡量爭取其他場次也能有現場互動時間。

* Starred screenings will feature a live Q&A with the director(s), and perhaps some of the other screenings as well (if we can make it).

Study partner

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:55:47 GMT

Study partner

We have posters! We have post cards!

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 07:46:12 GMT

We have posters! We have post cards!

"Taiwan is a barren rock" - Thomas Friedman

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 02:38:04 GMT

"Taiwan is a barren rock" - Thomas Friedman

sunny day, happy Juno

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 02:21:02 GMT

sunny day, happy Juno

Tractor

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 23:48:54 GMT

Tractor

Another day, another bone for the dog

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 06:48:37 GMT

Another day, another bone for the dog

Vimukta.org Redesign

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 05:34:45 GMT

Henry Schwarz, Alan Sussman, Shashwati and I created Vimukta to help support Budhan Theatre’s community development activities. For the past few years we’ve been supporting a community library and informal school in the community, but now that the film is coming out we are getting ready to support more ambitious projects. To prepare for that we needed to launch a social media campaign centered around a website redesign. For the past month I’ve been working with Kellen Parker of Spectacle Creative Media who has been very generous with his time helping me achieve what I think is a look that reflects something of the community we work with. A site that is neither generic nor corporate nor stereotypical of the numerous clichés of Indian non-profits. I hope we have achieved what we set out to do.

Before we make the site “live” however, we need to be sure that it works on a variety of computers and web browsers. For that reason we are asking people to take a look at a demo site. When you visit the demo site, please note that much of the text, the video and some of the images are just temporary. They will be updated when we launch the campaign later this month. It is also on a slow server, so be patient if things don’t open immediately. Also, because it is a demo site, please don’t link to it. That said, please click around, let us know what works, what you think could be improved, and what is completely broken. You can leave your feedback in the comments, or by email (there is a link at the top of the page). Please be as specific as possible with your criticism, and provide screen shots wherever possible.

Here is the link to the demo site. A screen shot of the front page is below the fold.

Thank you!

UPDATE: It seems the site is still not working well on ~~Firefox or~~ I.E. I will update this when we’ve addressed those problems. (The picture below shows how it should look.) [Firefox problems should be fixed now. Still working on I.E.]

Yellow Stripe

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 05:55:33 GMT

Yellow Stripe

Tailuge Bridge

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 03:43:01 GMT

Tailuge Bridge

Whig Party

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:04:52 GMT

Whig Party

LED palm tree

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:02:43 GMT

LED palm tree

We have DVDs!!!

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 07:08:54 GMT

We have DVDs!!!

Protecting Informants in a Time of Digital Thievery

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:12:31 GMT

The NY Times has an article about how corporate executives and government officials leave their laptops behind when they go to China or Russia, for fear that corporate or government secrets might be compromised by advanced spyware.

it has become easier to steal information remotely because of the Internet, the proliferation of smartphones and the inclination of employees to plug their personal devices into workplace networks and cart proprietary information around. Hackers’ preferred modus operandi, security experts say, is to break into employees’ portable devices and leapfrog into employers’ networks — stealing secrets while leaving nary a trace.

I mention this because it is also a serious concern for anthropologists I know who do research in China. We here on Savage Minds have written a lot about using digital tools for research, but it is also worth thinking about the vulnerabilities such tools create for one’s informants. There are a lot of tools one can use to encrypt data, but they are useless if some Lisbeth Salander has already hacked into your computer and stolen the password. How paranoid should we be? What steps can we take to protect our digital data? Please use this as an open thread to discuss these issues.

Everybody’s Linning

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:56:17 GMT

Jeremy Lin is the latest basketball sensation. Sports usually isn’t my beat, but I trust Nate Silver to do the statistics and he says Jeremy Lin’s recent success is no fluke. What I find interesting is how everyone seems to want to claim a piece of Lin: nerds, Christians, asian-Americans, Chinese, Taiwanese, etc. Let’s take these one by one, starting with nerds.

The New Yorker describes how Lin, a Harvard graduate, and Landry Fields “a Knicks guard from Stanford, have developed a handshake: put on spectacles, flip through a textbook—Organic Team Chemistry, we presume—take the glasses off, and stick ‘em in your pocket.” You can see this ritual here:

It used to be, before the GI Bill radically changed American higher education after World War Two, that it was common for the top athletes to come from the top schools. Now I believe it is more the exception than the rule.

The second group to lay claim to Lin are Christians, as seen in this New York Times piece:

From talking to people who knew him through the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Christian Fellowship, and watching his interviews, I have the sense that his is a quieter, potentially less polarizing but no less devout style of faith.

Not just any Christians, but Asian American Christians. And (as we will see in a moment) not just Asian-American, but Taiwanese-American. There is actually an ethnography about Taiwanese-American Christians: Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience I haven’t read it, but it looks interesting.

What does becoming American have to do with becoming religious? Many immigrants become more religious after coming to the United States. Taiwanese are no different. Like many Asian immigrants to the United States, Taiwanese frequently convert to Christianity after immigrating. But Americanization is more than simply a process of Christianization. Most Taiwanese American Buddhists also say they converted only after arriving in the United States even though Buddhism is a part of Taiwan’s dominant religion. By examining the experiences of Christian and Buddhist Taiwanese Americans, Getting Saved in America tells “a story of how people become religious by becoming American, and how people become American by becoming religious.”

About the Taiwanese bit, you really don’t need to look beyond NMA, the famous purveyors of Taiwanese animated news. There is no doubt that Lin’s Taiwaneseness is front-and-center in their take on the story, which ends with him throwing flaming basketballs at Yao Ming, who is standing in front of a PRC flag, and then cuts to Lin in front of the ROC flag.

This brings to mind the story of Michael Chang whose parents “grew up in Taiwan (though were born elsewhere) and were educated in the United States, where they met.” Also a devout Christian, Chang was similarly claimed as a hero by Taiwan. I can’t find any references to it on Google, but I believe he once caused a small storm by saying he was American, not Chinese. That didn’t stop anyone, and I see on Google that he later became involved in promoting Tennis in China. (There is also this Slate piece about how Chang “Chang didn’t defy Chinese stereotypes; he simply ushered them into the arena. He was hardworking, intelligent, humble, forever prepubescent.”)

From a Taiwanese perspective, it is notable that Lin’s Taiwaneseness is mentioned in a number of news stories, as previously he would have just been called Chinese-American. Part of this is due to a push by Taiwanese-American organizations to have people write in “Taiwanese” on the 2010 census. But the more generic Asian-American is also quite ubiquitous. I have no idea how Lin views his Taiwanese identity, but I do know that he is likely to remain front page news here for as long as he’s scoring points.

From the camera roll: NDHU stinky tofu

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 02:02:33 GMT

From the camera roll: NDHU stinky tofu

Pretty in Pink

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:45:20 GMT

Pretty in Pink

Syndromes and a Century

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:19:44 GMT

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century แสงศตวรรษ is really two films—with overlapping (but different) characters and dialog—set in two different locations. Below are pictures of the scene of a dentist and his patient (a Buddhist monk) from each of the two films.

In many ways these two pictures sum up what makes this such a powerful film. It is a reflection on space and light and location. In the first film the dentist sings a song to his patient while cleaning his teeth. In the second film the patient struggles to remove the head covering which he finds uncomfortable. It is not a film that is naive about rural life, which is shown to have its own problems—people worry about money and relationships. But it is a reflection on how space and light and location affect the nature of human relationships. The film doesn’t have any single plot or story line tying everything together, but the individual scenes are so richly observed that the film is deeply enjoyable.

Sniffing the morning air

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:51:59 GMT

Sniffing the morning air

Thinking About Research Ethics

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:24:05 GMT

I’m currently on a committee which has been tasked with developing a set of ethical guidelines for visual ethnography in Taiwan. While I agreed to take part in this process because ‘image ethics’ are something I take very seriously, I am also very skeptical about the application of a medical ethics model to anthropology. For this reason I was happy to come across a paper by Bill Simpson entitled “Ethical moments: future directions for ethical review and ethnography” which is a free (if not “open”) download from JRAI.

Simpson is focused on institutional review more than ethical guidelines, but since one exists largely to facilitate the other, it is worth looking at the problems Simpson argues emerge within the review process:

At the outset, there is a serious disjunction between the way in which research is thought about in the context of ethical review and the way in which ethnographic research unfolds according to its own temporality and logic: that is, following the contours of social life as these are revealed by the persons with whom one engages in the field.

I find particularly compelling his argument that the anthropological subject does not easily fit the notion of a “human subject” presumed by medical ethics (whether medical subjects do or not is another question):

However, whilst anthropologists engage with subjects who are indeed human, they would not normally think of themselves as studying ‘human subjects’ in the medical sense, or as part of the legacy of experimentation described above. The vocabulary of subjectivation used by anthropologists is far richer and ranges through informants, interlocutors, consociates, collaborators, consultants. and friends. All of these suggest a relationship with a person for which the reduction to a corporeal ethics is likely to be at odds. Fundamentally, selfhood is seen as a situationally defined project, rather than one to be defined essentially. In this vein, Battaglia has argued for an ‘ethics of the open subject’ and, drawing on Haraway, takes a position which questions the ‘skin-bound individual as the natural boundary of the total person’ (1999: 135). In this approach, there is a profound acknowledgement of the relationality of the human subject. Furthermore, to talk of the ‘field’ is to talk of an entity which is itself relational and not merely spatial. The anthropologist, to a greater or lesser extent, becomes part of this field as a moral agent who is subject to evaluation by those engaged with when in the ‘field’. Subjects, by means of their own processes of counter-subjectivation, locate the researcher in terms of motive, intent, and the level of threat or danger that his or her presence brings, now and in the future (Carrithers 2005; Simpson 2005).

In conclusion he suggests that there are a series of three ethical moments that emerge throughout the research process. This section was a bit confusing for me at first, but then I realized that it was only in the current model that these three moments exist as distinct points in time. Simpson’s critique is actually to challenge the notion that the planning, fieldwork, and writing stages of ethnography have clearly delineated ethical moments. With regard to ethical review at the start of the fieldwork process, Simpson emphasizes that ethical choices are an iterative process and that facing them requires a recognition of the “skill of the ethnographer as a moral being capable of reflexive awareness and an anticipation of the consequences of action and inaction.” Ethical dilemmas cannot be headed off at the outset by fiat.

With regard to the second moment, that of fieldwork, Simpson argues that “the possibilities for communication before, during, and after fieldwork are radically altering foundational tropes such as ‘field’, ‘immersion’, and ‘informant.’” As such, he sees ethics as something that should be the basis of continual dialog throughout the research process and advocates a process whereby ethnographers engage in an ongoing discussion of ethical issues with mentors rather than a one-time review.

The third moment is the writing process:

Confronted with this large and complex cloth, decisions must be made (alone or in consultation with informants) regarding what cuts to make: what goes into the text and what is to be left out; who gets named and who doesn’t; what it is legitimate to expose on ethical grounds and what must be concealed on ethical grounds. This is the moment at which an anthropologist’s judgements about just what is the appropriate relationship between informants, truths, and publics is laid open to challenge. Yet, just as fieldwork itself was once a ‘black box’, the ethics and politics of selection that underpin the writing of ethnography are rarely made explicit.

This last part is of particular interest to me, as I am currently writing a paper about how the process of collaborating on Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! led to certain topics being left out of the film at the request of the community. In doing so, I argue that these ethical decisions can only be understood with the benefit of a historical and ethnographic analysis of the community (which I then proceed to provide in the paper). Thus an understanding of the ethical issues emerged as the result of the ethnographic process, not as something prior to it, although a commitment to a collaborative ethnographic process allowed for these issues to emerge in the first place.

Finally, to Simpsons argument that ethics are not something which can be followed programmatically, but a “skill of the ethnographer as a moral being” I would add that skill an ethnographer is also necessary. Creating a multivocal text (visual or written) is not easy and requires a degree of skill and training. A deep knowledge of the genre and the “tricks of the trade” is necessary to know how to handle ethical dilemmas in an elegant way rather than simply shying away from difficult topics. It is perhaps this, more than anything, which makes me wary of a formulaic review process, as I worry that they leave little room for creative solutions to ethical problems, preferring instead bureaucratic ones.

UPDATE: Edited for clarity.

Waves

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:05:03 GMT

Waves

Break on through

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:47:23 GMT

Break on through

Aix-en-Provence, France

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:21:04 GMT

Aix-en-Provence, France from June 30th to July 14th

Late night TV

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:11:41 GMT

Late night TV

SSCI and Open Access

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:53:54 GMT

I was very impressed to read this blog post by Jeremy Trombley:

As an up and coming academic, I’m willing to put my career on the line and promise to only publish in open access journals. Putting my career on the line is a very real threat, since many departments look for publications in key (generally not open access) journals such as American Anthropologist when hiring. However, I’m confident that the people who will be evaluating me will overlook those issues if they understand why I made this choice, and will evaluate my work on its own merits and not on the journal that publishes it.

I wish I could do the same, but unfortunately I can’t and I wish to share the reason why. The fact is that in much of the world (and in the US as well) there has been a move towards quantification in determining academic promotion and tenure. Taiwan, where I live and work, is has been particularly bad in this regard, as they struggle to raise the number of Taiwanese universities listed in international university rankings.

Taiwan does not have tenure, but one has a series of mandatory reviews as one proceeds from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor. The guidelines for these reviews are mandated in a very top-down way from the Ministry of Education (MoE) and there is little leeway in how these rules are interpreted at the university level. (One of the legacies of the martial law period in Taiwan is that the personnel office reports directly to the MoE, not the university president.) However, one way in which universities do vary with the official rules is in the informal requirement that professors have a minimum number of publications in SSCI listed journals (or SCI for the sciences). Universities thus compete to make the official rules stricter rather than more flexible.

On a side note, these requirements are interesting because SSCI journals are mostly in English, so Taiwan has created a separate Chinese-language TSSCI list, but they are counted less than the SSCI journals (even though they are often harder to get published in). Taiwan is somewhat unique in having the TSSCI list—universities in Hong Kong and Singapore focus more on SSCI. (Taiwanese academic Albert Tzeng has done some research on this.)

In any case, the problem I face is that I already struggle under the burden that my documentary filmmaking garners me zero points under this quantitative regime. Even book chapters count for very little here. And if the top journals in your field are not SSCI, tough luck. Moreover I don’t know of any SSCI listed Open Access journals in anthropology. I know there are some in other fields, but none that I know of in anthropology. My hope is that HAU will eventually earn this distinction, but that will take some time. Till then, I’m afraid I can’t follow Jeremey’s brave example. To keep my job I have to strive to publish a certain minimum of articles in SSCI publications, after which I will have the freedom to publish elsewhere if I please. I’m sharing this so that OA advocates can be more aware of some of the constraints scholars in other countries might face in submitting work to their journals.