中研院民族所

Room 2319, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei

會議全程以英文發表

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Panel 1: Puppets and Dolls

 Robin Ruizendaal

 Puppets, Identity and Politics in Taiwan

 Puppet theatre is viewed as an expression of Taiwanese grass-roots culture and the puppets symbolize far more than the character they represent. Politicians from differents parties are eager to be photographed with a puppet or puppeteer during election time. Television puppet shows have unleashed a craze among young people, which is quite unique in Asia This paper will chart the development of puppet theatre in Taiwan from the stage to the television and its role as a symbol of a distinct Taiwanese identity.

 Katrien Jacobs

 "Animating Ball-Jointed Dolls and the Deity of Transformation"

 The paper discusses how young adults groom and act out flamboyant sexual selves through their love for fictionalized characters and dolls, by observing costuming sessions and online self-display, and by soliciting ethnographic testimonies through interviews, collaborative photography and video documentation. The goal of this research is to capture a process of embodiment and visualization in liminal spaces, spaces that morph between physical and
imagined worlds, and how “shadow characters” are invented to express sexual subjectivity and selfhood. These fans of fantasy worlds dress up and embody multiple variations on queer sexuality that affect physical desires,relationships and a sense of minority grouping within public culture. They nurture a strong devotion for taboo stories and sex lives, but they do not
easily tolerate queer (LGTB) orientations in their daily lives. The paper thus seeks to interpret their practices of “eccentricity” and “abjection” by means of extensive dialogue and documentation, while also paying respect to cultural habits or ways of embodying sexual difference and otherness.

The liminal zone of doll lovers and cosplayers encourages a processual sexuality that allows people to pay temporary and exuberat visits into otherness, while also staying connected to a stable experience of self and social context. My aim then is to contemplate these individual and collective “shadow” sexualities of the body, bodily spaces, and social media networks and find out how they express bodily aesthetics and social change within augmented physical and
digital environments.

Panel 2: Religion and Materiality

 楊淑媛(Yang Shu-Yuan) 

 “It’s Like Idol Worship”: The Agency of Things and the Allure of Modernity among the Bugkalot (Ilongot) of Northern Philippines

 Commenting on the intense desire and fascination the Bugkalot demonstrate about modern things such as televisions and cell phones in an area where electricity current and cellular signals are lacking, the missionaries of the New Tribes Mission did not only condemn it as economic irrationality but aslo regard it as a form of “idol worship”. The Protestant missionaries find the power modern things seems to exercise on the Bugkalot disturbing because it challenges their attempt in removing fetishes and inserting iconoclasm among the Bugkalot through their proslytizing efforts. In their opinions, modern things motivate so-called “backsliding” and lead to corruption of faith by enticing the Bugkalot to indulge in worldly pleasures. This article aims to understand why things came to assert such power over the Bugkalot and how the agencies of things unsettle the Protestant configuration of the relationship between religiosity and materiality.

 Kajri Jain

 Icon, Agency, Efficacy

Now that the dust seems to be settling from the flurry of the “new materialism,” this paper asks whether we’re any the wiser about the icon, a.k.a. the fetish: that original bad object whose putative agency was so abhorrent to post-Enlightenment philosophy, ethics and
aesthetics. For whom was the location of agency (or the distinction between subjects and objects) an issue to begin with; to whom does its distribution matter? Does it make sense to ask what kind of body the icon is, or what it can do in its encounter with other bodies? I
discuss these questions in relation to the genre of monumental icons that seems to have gone viral in India over the past two decades -- that is, in tandem with neoliberal economic reforms.

 Panel 3: Commodity Fetishisms

 莊佳穎 Yin Chuang

Becoming Kawaii –Everyday Practices and Political Performance of Kawaii in Taiwan

Kawaii (可愛い, the Japanese word for ‘cute’) has become not only a major asset in the media and politics, but also in contemporary Taiwan’s everyday social interaction. This paper explores how the concept of Kawaii is embodied within Taiwanese people’s everyday practices in contemporary Taiwan. The discussion extends the scope of current literature on Kawaii culture in Taiwan, which focuses mainly on the aesthetics and politics of Kawaii cultural commodities. It seeks to re-explore Kawaii as an important feature of contemporary Taiwan by looking at how Kawaii is produced, consumed, appropriated and performed in the banality of Taiwanese people’s everyday practices.

I will examine how Kawaii has become an embodied habitus shared by Taiwanese people and particularly young generations. The study of how Kawaii has become a style of emphasizing petiteness and adopting an infantile manner in Taiwanese society will also be addressed. Also, I want to study the politics of performing/being Kawaii during the cultural-making process of Kawaii, which gives the possibility of overthrowing the existing power hierarchy.

 Fabio Gygi

 Animate to Kill? Hoarding and the Art of Getting Rid of Things the Soft Way

This paper critically examines some of they ways the phenomenon of agency and animation has been dealt with in anthropological theory (Gell 1998, Gilmore 2009). Rather than arguing that animated objects are the result of a certain religiously inflected belief, I shall argue that animation is a strategy to deal with the ontologically difficult status of accumulated things and thus a form of boundary work.

In my own fieldwork among hoarders and declutterers in Japan, it struck me that the belief of animation was often used to explain hoarding behavior from the outside by social workers and psychologists, but was hardly ever mentioned by the hoarders themselves. So-called clutter consultants or declutterers on the other hand have devised different rituals of divestment which were aimed at helping hoarders to let go of things, assuming that for them, the things were imbued with some sort of life of their own. My ethnographic data on these rituals however suggests that rather than to cut a connection that existed before the ritual of divestment, the ritual animates things in order to `kill` (=dispose of) them, that is, it allows the things to attain a stable status of `alive/dead` that is different from the ontological limbo they existed in before. By looking at two examples from my fieldwork, I intend to show how in the case of hoarding it is the interstitial status of the hoard that conveys agency to the things it contains.

  Panel 4: The Politics of Personification

 Debra Occhi

 From Propaganda to Parody: Kyara ‘Mascot Characters’ in Japanese Nuclear Narratives

 In Japan, nuclear power has the force of personality. This paper compares four comic characters used to explain nuclear energy issues to the public. Each character uses anthropomorphization as well as narrative combining other classic elements of persuasion, emotive communication, linguistic and aesthetic creativity. Three of these kyara attempt to ease viewer concern regarding atomic dangers; the fourth one confronts the issue and aims to mobilize resistance to nuclear power.

Mr Pluto promoted plutonium imports in the 1990s. His narrative begins by stoking the viewers’ latent fears of nuclear products and then goes on to state that drinking plutonium-laced water would not be harmful. He was framed as dependable (tayori ni naru). The Ikata Visitor Center for Shikoku Electric’s reactor employs the flowerlike Fukkii, named for the fuki plant which grows near the nuclear reactor. Its lack of direct nuclear symbolism is what lends it such power. Fukkii acts as a loveable facilitator of -- and distractor from -- messages about its sponsor, a frame for stories ranging from the dramatic to the factual, and indeed, highly technical. Genpatsu Kun is not an official narrative but rather a Japanese character designer’s brainchild following the Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima meltdown. Within twenty-four hours of the story’s genesis on Twitter, the four-minute anime of "Nuclear Boy" and his stomachache was created by volunteers and posted on YouTube. Subtitled versions quickly followed. Beyond the features of the narrative itself, the responses of anthropologists and other online consumers of this newcomer in Japan’s nuclear discourse also give insight on how such narratives are created, transmitted, and debated.

Character culture has also provided a means for Japanese to organize in the wake of the nuclear disaster. Monju Kun, a parody character based on the Monju nuclear reacter, represents anti-nuclear public awareness and action. The author of three books and a webpage with information, downloads, and goods for sale, Monju Kun is celebrated in song and is currently enjoying over 100,000 Twitter followers. Its image is used on uchiwa fans carried by participants at anti-nuclear protests. Though kyara such as Fukkii and Mr Pluto have been used as agents of friendly authoritarianism, the case of Monju Kun shows us that this aesthetic can also be used to mobilize sentiment against government and industry in protesting to end Japanese reliance on nuclear power.

 Teri Silvio

 Strategies of Personification: Axis Powers Hetalia and its Fujoshi Fandom

         This paper looks at several instances in which communities are conceived of as characters with personalities and lives of their own.  I will look at how communities have been personified in different ways within social science discourse (Boasian “culture as personality” theory, Jane Jacobs’ descriptions of the life and death of urban neighborhoods), in popular culture (the Japanese multi-media animation franchise Axis Powers Hetalia and its international fandom), in government-sponsored tourism publicity, and in political activism (especially the recent struggles of residents of neighborhoods dispossessed by urban renewal projects in Taipei). Each case of personification involves condensing characteristics (cultural, environmental, and organizational) of entire communities into a seemingly coherent individual persona.  Each case also implicitly presents a model for multi-culturalism, or how to organize a community of communities.  This paper compares how these modes of personification open up (and close down) different possibilities for affective relationships between individuals and communities, and among communities. 

 Panel 5: Animating Characters

 Peng-yi Tai

 Labor and Entertainment: The Aesthetics of Disney Animation

 Disney animation may seem ageing and irrelevant in the twentieth-first century, but the principles of Disney animation still dominate Hollywood animation. Arguably, Disney animation aesthetics constituted the cornerstone of the Disney company, animating not only the cartoons but the toys and a paraphernalia of commodities. Today, the aesthetics of Disney animation continues to be the pillar aesthetics of computer animation, particularly for the Pixar studio.

Commonly known as character animation, the legacy of Disney animation has popularized the centrality of the expressivity of character emotions and thought process. The expressivity, however, is achieved by animating in the Disney style of movement and the “acting.” That it, on the one hand, Disney animation is distinctive in the refined style of movement, a well-wrought product of the animation tenets evolved in the studio since the late 1920s. On the other hand, Disney animated characters have been known for being “lifelike,” because they are imbued with such personality of the animators, who pride themselves on being “actors with pencils.”

My paper will examine the development of Disney animation from the perspective of labor process. I will elaborate on how Disney aesthetics evolved dialectically from the studio division of labor, which was extremely intensive. Moreover, the labor approach agrees with the critique of the culture industry regarding the appeals of the Disney entertainment. The paper will thus conclude with the relations between the aesthetics of Disney animation and the industrial world.

 Paul Manning

 Playing Characters and Animating Alts in Ryzom

This paper explores the animation of supernumerary avatars, what are called 'alts', in Massively Multiple Online gaming. While all players typically have one avatar in the game world with which they identify and which they play most often, called a 'main character', they also use a variety of 'alternate characters' or 'alts' for various purposes. When an alt is being played ‘as a main’, that is, directly controlled by the player, the alt appears to be fully vivified, an alternate identity or persona (in ‘persona-play’) or at least an ‘alternate character’ in roleplaying performances. But when alts are used at the same time as main characters by a single player, the alt increasingly is treated as a non-persona, a silent, empty presence. The relationship of such alts to main characters are not explored in terms of identity and performance, but instead such silent attending alts are compared metaphorically to 'servants' or even tools. Such alts neither speak nor are spoken to, and they are identified with kinship or ownership relations to a main character, which they are often linked to by having a rhyming name. But more than anything else, it is the alt's movements that give its 'altness' away. The actions of an alt are often parasitic on the actions of the main character. The alt normally follows the main character, the visual effect mirrors its servant status, the alt follows behind the main character like an obedient servant.

The analytic problems such alts present are not those of performance of alternate identities, for they have no identity, they live in the shadow of the identity of the main, the problems they present are those of their parasitic agency and control, of animation, which foreground the non-identity between the animated object (the avatar) and the animating human player. This paper explores the animation of alts in one online world, Ryzom, where alts are an ubiquitous ghostly absent presence and discourse about alts and animation is equally ubiquitous.

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主辦人：司黛蕊

Organizer Teri Silvio

主辦單位：中央研究院民族學研究所

Sponsor Institute of Ethnology,Academia

協辦單位：行政院國家科學委員會

Co-sponsor National Science Council

連絡人：李佩珊小姐、黃瑜惠小姐

EMAIL：bearli@gate.sinica.edu.t、eyhjiulei@gmail.com

TEL：02-26523324、02-26523413