Scott Simon - Tanners of Taiwan: Life Strategies and National Culture

First published 2005 by Westview Press

Published 2018 by Routledge

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ISBN 13: 978-0-8133-4193-4 (pbk)

One of the values of anthropology is that it deals with the mundane as well as the exotic and spectacular. Indeed, rendering the mundane extraordinary and the spectacular mundane is what makes cultural anthropology compelling, shaking up our received sensibilities and helping us look at the world in different ways. Work is generally considered to be of the mundaneall the more so in the alienated world of late capitalist production. In this book, however, Scott Simon shows how economic production is intimately tied to the formation of national identity.

Tanners of Taiwan focuses on workers and managers in leather tanning factories in southern Taiwan. Simon uses this small industry of family firms with its artisanal heritage as a microcosm for understanding Taiwanese national identity in an age of globalization. Simon takes on several key theoretical issues in the social sciences today, most boldly conceptions of hegemony, resistance, and identity. He reveals the complex circumstances under which individual and national identities are manufactured alongside the leather uppers that may find their way into Texas boots.

Taiwan is a unique place. For a generation of anthropologists it served as a synecdoche for Chinese society, but Simon and other young scholars question this presumption. The degree to which Taiwan is culturally Chinese or is something unique (Taiwanese) may seem like a mute issue to students of globalizations dynamics, but it is a concern very much at work in daily life and national discourse on this island of 36,000 square miles. The Chinese did not arrive until the seventeenth century, on the heels of Dutch colonization, and most were male migrants who married aboriginal women. Their descendants have come to be known as the natives of Taiwan, numerically overwhelming the peoples who first occupied the island 12,000-15,000 years ago. Given its fifty years of colonization (1895-1945), one could say that Taiwan is as much Japanese as Chinese. Nonetheless, national discourse was oriented toward the countrys Chinese-ness during the post-World War II rule of the Chinese Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek (which included forty years of martial law, the longest ever imposed). Under the Nationalists, native Taiwanese culture (itself a hybrid of indigenous, Chinese, Dutch, and Japanese influences) was denigrated, while Chinese high culture, with its 5,000 years of history, was celebrated.

Simons primary focus is on family-controlled tanneries in southern Taiwan. The tanning industry here, first developed under Japanese rule, is shown to be intimately connected to the ebb and flow of the global economy. Taiwanese tanneries flourished in the 1970s, benefiting from an easing of tariff barriers and the subsequent freer trade in skins and tanned hides. We learn that the leather trade is surprisingly global: hides from the United States, Japan, and elsewhere are shipped to Taiwan where they are tanned into leather, and then the leather is shipped to China or the Philippines or elsewhere to be made into baseball gloves, shoes, and other products that often wind up back in the United States. Given this history, one might expect the trade to have benefited from the wave of globalization in the 1990s. Yet, Simon shows how Taiwanese tanneries now have to compete with mainland Chinas cheap labor. In fact, many successful firms have moved at least some production to China to take advantage of cheap labor and lax pollution regulations. The tanners of Taiwan find themselves in a period of economic upheaval requiring major changes in their forms of productive organization, just as the politics of national identity has come to the fore of public discourse.

Simon describes the traditional importance of kinship ties in family firms and how current circumstances have moved families to hire professional managers. Capitalist markets work best when they are anonymous, when the distorting influences of social and family ties are muted. Yet labor relations in Taiwanese tanneries rest on precisely such kinship and social networks. The managers Simon interviews value what they see as a uniquely Taiwanese form of capitalismthe free market with a human face. Here personal connections are key, the human touch (jin-cheng-bi) a fundamental part of management. There are clear aspects here of patron-client relationships, in which client exploitation is softened through asymmetrical personal bonds. At the same time, the emotional bonds of kam-cheng act to decrease social distance between workers and management and ameliorate alienation.

Long a significant employer of women, the tanning industry now employs a growing number of foreigners. Simon shows that there is a sense of class identity that goes along with being a worker, but he argues that this is but one piece in a larger mosaic that includes kinship ties, social identification with ones role in the production process, and national dialogues of collective identity. After martial law was lifted in 1987, organized labor tentatively emerged. But Simon shows that shop-floor forms of indirect resistance (a la James Scotts weapons of the weak) remain important.