first impressions

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Published on Monday, 10 July 2006 09:22
Written by Erik
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So, what is Taiwan like? First impressions are good, but mixed. Everything is a lot more confusing than in my long-held dreams of the Orient. Everything is stubbornly Chinese, and why shouldn’t it be? There are cars and motorcycles everywhere; strange characters on street signs, mangy dogs, manky little eateries, swanky shops selling fashion, shopping malls like you wouldn’t believe, nice old ladies taking even older ladies out for walks.

One of the professor has lent us a car and that makes all the difference to our lives — you don’t get around on foot here. We live close to campus in quite an uncharming apartment, but we bought bicycles for the girls and they are very happy riding around. There is a pool as well and big sports fields. Within easy walking distance there is a playground, a rollerskating rink and even a small but adorable zoo! We were wondering what that weird smell was and it turned out to be tiger poo!

The university is looking after me very well. Since I’m on sabbatical from the LSE in the autumn, I only do a few little things, but I’ll start for real in February next year. I have a great, big, office, and everything is high-tech — as one would expect from the “MIT of Asia.” What’s really striking is how they trust professors to do their work without interference. I can teach what I like, in the way I like, and grade students in whatever fashion I please. I can set up courses on my own server space. I can even blog. Taiwan democratized in the 1980s and there are plenty of people around who risked their lives for free speech.

The problem is that we don’t have a life here yet. We left our life behind in Norflondon. We are literally homeless and I for one feel quite existentially exposed. People are friendly but they are all strangers; the kids’ school is lovely but we don’t know anyone there; we have beds but not our favorite pillows. We are on vacation but with no ordinary life to go back to. We’ll adjust for sure, but adjusting is harder than I remember it to be. Perhaps I’m getting conservative in my old age — or perhaps just lazy.

When he was roughly my age, my maternal grandfather, who was a vicar in the Swedish church, decided to go up to Lapland to teach the locals about Jesus Christ. This was a very strange decision considering that most vicars slowly move their way down to Stockholm as their careers progress. You can have different kinds of careers, I guess. We were always romantics, my grandpa and me.

love and incomprehension

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Published on Thursday, 21 September 2006 11:24
Written by Erik
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betel nut girl

These are five things I love about my new life:

  • the creative confusion of the streets and the cities — how people relate to each other — everyone talks, even to strangers, in very nice and cheerful ways.
  • the Peking duck the nice man sells on our street. We have it every Friday with a bottle of wine.
  • the Taiwanese mountains — green, rugged, full of hiking trails and tucked-away temples.
  • the passion, seriousness and erudition of some of my new colleagues.
  • the crazy Chinese language. I get to make the rudest sounds and write the strangest squiggles.

These are five things I will never understand:

  • why people block up the windows in their apartments and turn on the brightest and most industrial looking florescent lights.
  • why no students drink beer.
  • why bureaucrats love paperwork so much and why they stamp every paper with hundreds of stamps.
  • why there are no sidewalks to save you from the ferocious motorcycle drivers.
  • why girls who sell betelnuts wear next to no clothes.

Georg Simmel in Taichung

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Published on Tuesday, 28 November 2006 12:01
Written by Erik
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I went to the annual meeting of the Taiwanese Sociological Association this past weekend. That’s the only professional association of which I’m a member these days. (Adieu science politique – ye cruel mistress). At the conference there were lot’s of papers on subjects ranging from the problems of aging in Shanghai to high-tech industries in India and the future of Chinese-style capitalism.

The last session was on Georg Simmel. A lecture hall packed with students and 5, 6 professors. For some two hours they went through the man, his life and thought, in excrutiating detail. It was very lively; questions, critique and jokes were flying through the air; students were laughing, the professors were strutting their stuff and vigorously disagreeing with each other.

No, Simmel is not dead. He is alive and well and living in Taichung, Taiwan. He has lots of friends here, more friends than he had in his first incarnation. They are young, easily excitable, and they talk about him until their heads start spinning.

It’s weird though. This deification of old Europeans. All intellectual debates in Taiwan seem to concern an old European and what he possibily could contribute to an understanding of topic X or Y. Why is Taiwanese academia so hung up on Europeans? Where for example is the Chinese tradition? It’s just like Taiwanese factories in the end, churching out products invented and designed elsewhere. They are very, very good at it but also pretty unoriginal.

mountain tasting

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Published on Thursday, 30 November 2006 16:00
Written by Erik
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We’re looking for somewhere new to live. Right now we’re renting an apartment in the middle of town. It’s fun, hectic and overwhelming in a Chinese inner-city kind of way but for the longer run we’ll need more space where the kids can play. We went for a drive around Hsinchu yesterday and there are all kinds of things available. Much of it pretty manky it must be said, and there are lots of developments put up by fly-by-night contractors with a taste for faux Greek columns.

To our horror we really took to a development with large, American-style, houses. Suddenly we understood how our parents felt back in the 1960s when they migrated to the suburbs. We who always hated the suburbs.

Then we took a road leading up into the mountains. After only a few minutes a large vista opened up. Mountain range after mountain range lined up in that unlikely pattern which Chinese ink paintings make famous. We looked around and saw oranges on the trees and tea plantations. Now this is the place to live. Imagine waking up every morning and tasting mountains for breakfast.

a good spanking

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Published on Wednesday, 17 January 2007 20:24
Written by Erik
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My kids just did their final exams. They like exams in Taiwan. And if Taiwanese kids do badly they get punished. Saga tells me “nearly everyone” in her class gets spanked if their results are under 95 percent. Anything to get into those Ivy League schools! The teachers used to spank the kids too, but at least in our school that’s no longer practiced.

My TA firmly believes that my students would work harder if I punished them. That’s just a little bit weird, no? I’m really uncomfortable with corporal punishment. I also don’t believe in mixing pedagogy with sexual excitement — even if some students ask for it.

Considering how much they love hurting each other in school, Taiwanese sex life — well, what I’ve noticed of it — seems surprisingly wholesome. Not much prostitution and little by means of “red light” activities of any kind. There are some sex shops to be sure but they mainly seem to sell lingerie. Few signs of any spanking implements.

My social science theory is as follows: spanking is only translated into an adult sexual fetish in strongly hierarchical societies. This surely explains the English fascination with S & M. Judging by the little cards attached to London phoneboxes, the English spend more time on spanking than on traditional penetrative sex. Clearly they find hurting each other’s bottoms more fun. It also fits far better with the general nature of their social relations.

Universities are of course strongly hierarchical too and spanking is the fetish of choice of many professors. The most famous case at the LSE was the great conservative icon, Michael Oakeshott. The man loved horses and apparently he loved the sound of the whip. According to a living LSE legend, stacks of spanking mags were carried away from his office after he retired. You don’t have to be a conservative to be a sadist, but it probably helps.

loose change

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Published on Sunday, 28 January 2007 20:27
Written by Erik
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We watched the notorious Loose Change video last night. It’s very interesting, if not necessarily for the reasons the film-makers suggest. I love the critical, storm-the-king’s-palace, attitude of these young kids. Question authority! I also love the power that’s been given to 20 somethings with laptops and internet connections. What talk-radio was to the conservatives in the 1980s, blogs and the internet are to the neo-radicals today. Power to the people!

But why should I go on and on about it when I actually can show it to you:
WPvideo 1.10
Download!

So, did Bush do it? Of course not. Not even Dick Cheney or Rumsfeld. They clearly aren’t well-organized enough. This kind of an operation would have required “military precision,” but we all know what American military precision is worth.

What I do know is that if more people like these kids had been speaking out three years ago, the Iraq war could have been prevented. Most Americans are such flag-waving dupes, but this film reminds you that there is another American tradition of irreverence and critical thought. Great stuff.

voyeurs of our own caresses

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Published on Monday, 29 January 2007 19:49
Written by Erik
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In my class on “The Politics of Resistance,” I gave my students the intro chapter of The Sadeian Woman by the extremely brilliant Angela Carter. This is her observations on the wrong way of making love:

Any woman may manage, in luxurious self-deceit, to feel herself for a little while one with great, creating nature, fertile, open, pulsing, anonymous and so forth. In doing so, she loses herself completely and loses her partner also.

The moment they succumb to this anonymity, they cease to be themselves, with their separate lives and desires; they cease to be the lovers who have met to assuage desire in a reciprocal pact of tenderness, and they engage at once in a spurious character of maleness and femaleness.

The anonymity of the lovers, whom the act transforms from me and you into they, precludes the expression of ourselves. So the act is taken away from us even as we perform it. We become voyeurs upon our own caresses.

the emperor's giraffe

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Published on Wednesday, 07 February 2007 00:00
Written by Erik
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The latest issue of the Journal of World History has my article on giraffes. You can get it here, here or here.

In the 15th century Chinese ships were travelling to Africa and as part of this trade a giraffe appeared at the court of the emperor in Beijing. A few decades later another giraffe appeared in Florence, Italy, as Amerigo Vespucci and his fellow sea captains were preparing to across the Atlantic. There is a puzzle here. In the 15th century, when the Chinese suddenly stopped their overseas discoveries, the Europeans began theirs. My idea is that the two giraffes could help tell us why.

There are already a few references to the article — here and here. Everyone loves reading about giraffes! It was fun writing about them too although I was terrified my LSE colleagues would find out and start suspecting I wasn’t taking my work seriously. Somehow comparative giraffology just isn’t good enough for a political scientist. Now I can finally come out of the closet with my giraffes (and if you ever spent any time in a closet with two giraffes you know how great that feels!)

The secret reason why I wrote this article is that I wanted to make a reference to one of the most amazing book I’ve ever come across in my various readings:

L.C. Rookmaaker, The Rhinoceros in Captivity: A List of 2439 Rhinoceroses Kept from Roman Times to 1994 (The Hague: SPB, 1998)

Now that’s what I call scholarship!

rice porridge, durian charged

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Published on Wednesday, 21 February 2007 05:36
Written by Erik
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Swedes eat rice porridge, risgrynsgröt, for Christmas. In fact we even feed it to our Santa Clauses. A Santa who doesn’t get his gröt is sure to return and make trouble for you during the year ahead. We serve it with cinnamon and there is supposed to be a peeled almond mixed in with the glutinous substance. The person who gets the almond will be married within the year. But there was clearly something wrong with the almond aspect of the tradition. I got many almonds over the years before I got hitched.

This year we did a South-East Asian version of the meal. We boiled sticky rice with coconut milk and added durian. Durian is a tropical fruit famous for its weird prickly exterior and nauseating smell. I’ve relied on it in the past as a talisman, but now we actually ate some. It’s heavenly. Yes, indeed, heavenly. Me and Diane had second and third helpings. As it turns out it goes perfectly with the smallest glass of whiskey. In addition, Santa had brought a Jimmy Hendrix CD which we put on, and I swear the gröt had psychotropic properties.

Durian is reported in Southeast Asia to work as an aphrodisiac. Hence the popular saying “when the durians come down, the sarongs come off.” Durian, I’ve come to realize, is the real reason why many people in this part of the world have such satisfied smiles on their faces. Does it work? Well, let’s put it this way, gröt with durian is more reliable than gröt with almonds.

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