Return to Taiwan
While the 16 months of dissertation field research that I conducted in Taiwan in 2014 and 2015 was open-ended, meandering, and prone to unexpected delays, the follow-up trip that I took this summer took on a very different pace. This was to be my last visit to Taiwan before completing my dissertation, and there were a number of loose ends that I wanted to tie up. I had a limited amount of time to gather the remaining materials for my dissertation, and I had to make sure to leave enough time to have follow-up visits with my informants.
As soon as I arrived in Taiwan, I headed to the archives. The primary focus of my trip was to collect non-governmental dangwai news articles and publications to supplement the government reports that I had already obtained during my first research trip. I also collected materials from the Japanese colonial era to give my research a broader historical and cultural context.
Research materials on Taiwan are spread out in different locations at different libraries, and each library has a distinct history. The National Central Library near Liberty Square (formerly the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall) originated in 1933 in Nanjing, China and moved to Taiwan in 1949. The library boasts of being the only national library in Taiwan. It contains government documents for the Republic of China, as well as the publications of local organizations registered under the government. I came to this library to locate the publications of key noise researchers from the 1970s-1990s and to trace the intellectual lineage of acoustics and audiological researchers in postwar Taiwan.
The National Taiwan Library, based in a suburb of Taipei called Zhonghe, can be traced back to 1913 during the Japanese colonial period when it was originally called Imperial Taiwan Library. The library has undergone a number of name-changes as a result of three political regime changes in Taiwan during the twentieth century. It houses the Taiwan Studies Research Center, which includes colonial-era publications and colonial government records. It was here that I found indisputable evidence that a transnational circulation of information on noise and acoustics took place between the United States, Japan, and Taiwan in the 1930s, a much earlier time period than I had originally thought.
Finally, I visited the Chilin Library in Yilan, Taiwan, which also houses the Taiwan Democratic Movement Museum. The library contains dangwai materials including journals, magazines, and books on environmental movements in Taiwan. The materials at this library helped me to understand how noise fits into a broader history of environmental activism in Taiwan.
Finally, I conducted follow-up interviews with my informants and gathered details on the development and distribution of Japanese-manufactured decibel meters from the 1970s to the present. The government project of noise control was made possible through the availability of foreign-made technological instruments. In fact, the manufacturer was the link through which audiometry began a new life outside of hospital test rooms and into the area of environmental protection.
There was just one minor setback. Two typhoons passed through Taiwan back-to-back while I was there, and I was quickly reminded of just how easily plans could suddenly change. One interview that I had scheduled was cancelled because the high speed rail stopped running. My informant and I decided to move our discussion onto email where we will probably remain in contact throughout the writing of my dissertation. Perhaps next time I shall not travel during typhoon season!
Written by Jennifer Hsieh, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University and currently a Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She was awarded an FSI research grant in Fall 2016.
