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Scott Simon, Tanners of Taiwan: Life Strategies and National Culture.

Article Excerpt
SCOTT SIMON, Tanners of Taiwan: Life Strategies and National Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Westview Press, 2005, xviii + 172 p., Index.

Tanners of Taiwan is an ethnography and social history of people working in the leather-tanning industry in southern Taiwan. As an anthropologist, Simon was interested in identifying and exploring the social construction of identity, particularly that of ethno-national identity. This is a focus of increasing importance internationally as a result of the conflict between Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, and the U.S.A. over the political status and identity of Taiwan.

Simon (145) provides a critique of the tendency of anthropologists to reduce identity formation to "culture," ignoring the importance of power dynamics and political economy in creating the categories of identity in the culture. Furthermore, Simon demonstrates that there is resistance to and conflict over these categories. Simon (7) asserts that "[t]he goal of the anthropologist, therefore, is to render visible the struggles and contests of power that lie beyond power and are so often masked by it." By developing a...

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