He proved a very strong connection with the real world. He seems to have spent a lot of time in it.
You can spend a lot of time in it but at the same time be disconnected and see what you want to see …
He proved a very strong connection with the real world. He seems to have spent a lot of time in it.[/quote]
I agree…a little with both. Also, he isn’t a scientist, he is an anthropologist. I dunno, I thought he put into academia-laced words what people here experience at the meeting point between Taiwan and “everyone else.” I wasn’t really surprised at anything in the paper.
But maybe I’m just being cynical/pessimistic/grouchy…
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]Amazing. A freakin’ scholarly article on Carnegies. Not only that, but the guy got not one, but two Fulbright grants, plus other financial assistance, to hit the bars and write about it. I’m in the wrong field.
Good God. I knew there is an entire industry devoted to writing bollocks about China, but it never occurred to me there would be money in writing this sort of facile codswallop about Taiwan. The mind boggles to think someone was paid - paid to write this puerile nonsense.
Amazing, isn’t it?
[quote=“Everybody”][Insert name of nationality] sexual objectification of [different nationality] men portrays them as [different], ranging from analogies of Nazi masculinity ([Beavis] 2002: 32) to stereotypes of African American ([Butthead] 1994: 127; [Lemmy] 2001; [Grant, Student] 2004a) and Caucasian American ([A Job? In Africa?] 1995: 186) brute strength. In addition, it is believed that [other nationality] men lack morals, and are generally (and generically) decadent. The behavioral ethos in [insert name of famous bar most likely to make people read your schoolboy twaddle] seemingly confirms these images so that perceived racial differences are naturalized rather than seen as the cultural constructs that they are.[26]
In mass media and daily lives, the [other country] male is also represented as a foreign barbarian—an unmannered savage who could never hope to learn [our] language or proper [our] etiquette. Though one sees a marked [foreign] influence on [insert name of country] media, it also serves to reify racial difference between [us] and [them] by portraying [foreign] men as sexually rapacious ([two other unemployable eternal students] 2002: 146), destroyers of traditional morality, or depicting them as being closer to beasts than the civilized [our people] ([Morris Dancer] 2004a).[/quote]
(Can I have £10,000 please and a Ph.D.?)
Can you imagine what this poor schmuck would have made of Spin or Tops back in the day?
HAHAHA!
Still gobsmacked to think though that someone has the lack of self-respect to write fatuous garbage like this just slagging off an entire section of society and a bar which is so well liked by so many people and then call it “research”. The Greeks had a word for this. “Hubris”. Now I finally understand why everyone hates students. The penny has finally dropped. What a cunt, eh? People going out to work, earning a living, trying to get by, running a business, taking a night out to enjoy themselves, having a few beers, and then comes along this sententious arsehole just running everyone down. Not even fucking original either. Not a single original thought or sentiment. Just pure self-absorption. From a naive little kid you could see this sort of thing appearing in some homework essay entitled “Why is Little Johnny Different, Mummy?”, but a grown-up? No, really. Staggering. Where do you have to go in the world to get away from pricks like this?
I’ve not seen Tibetan thugs in a long time.
Skimming through it I was reminded of my days of panic at university. Oh no, I;ve been given two years scholarship to write a piece on clubbing in Taiwan and its due tomorrow! Have to pull an allnighter!
HG
Geez I didnt think you guys would pick up on this “dissertation” this quickly. For memories sake, what about a paper on the interesting capers that went on at Buffalo Town, or behind Buffalo Town, or on the roof of Buffalo Town, or [fill in blank] Buffalo Town?
What do u you expect? How long exactly did he spend here?
Does anyone have any informed comment yet on the weaknesses of the paper?
Not yet, but the shittiness of his website display capabilities are making it difficult to read. So far I haven’t found anything to disagree with, but I’m reading it backwards too.
So far, I’ve not found anything bar anecdotal evidence a la “Miss Lai ran out of the bar in horror at the dirty barbarians,” and other similar claptrap. If he could write in a bit less pedantic manner he could get a job at Apple Daily, I expect.
What about all the shite about how people go to Carnage because they can’t afford other clubs? Is this bloke for real? What a crock of arsebiscuits. Why should I read the whole thing? He’s got me rolling my eyes and ridiculing his so-called “research” in the first couple of pages.
I do think Lord Lucan is right though that it seems as if he got most of his inspiration from the works of others (even if it was well constructed).
Isn’t this one of the problems with higher education these days? Everything needs a source and that stymes creativity. What is this guys original premise or idea that is then verified later through futher research?
Its almost written as if everything possible was pre-researched before he travelled, when IMHO a scientist (and Athropology is a science) should explore first, create a hypothesis, and then analyse quoting other sources afterwards.
Well, to second a point made earlier, he’s no scientist. He’s a social thingummy-job, and you’ll have to excuse me for that term, I just can’t use the word scientist next to social without having to wash my mouth out. What he does is NOT science. To use the word scientist in his direction is to give him a giant serving of truly undeserved credit.
OK, enough of the turf war. BP is right that many scientists lack connection with the ‘real’ world, but they’re often the best scientists, not the worst. This guy is not with it either, but that is hardly a glowing recommendation for an anthropologist… perhaps those who should be most on the social ball.
Reading between the lines of his attendance at Carnegie’s and other places, and the timings of his award of Chinese language tuition wavers tells me he was most probably a student here in the 90s who … surprise, surprise… most likely made a bit of money on the side teaching English by the hour. While nursing a hangover and the pall of repeated rejection at Carnegie’s…
Anthropology is a real science.
Anthropology is a social science. That is the key difference. And the kind he studies, dealing with unquantifiables like culture and tradition, is especially so.
Not that there aren’t branches of anthropology that are more science-oriented, and anthropology and biology are a great combination for studying both environmental and human conditions, especially within the realm of conservation and environmental science.
As for my source…Wikipedia Knows All! 
Absolutely it is. And there is nothing wrong with studying Social Anthropology either. But this is so transparently someone trying to make himself sound clever by putting down others that it is contemptible.
Ludicrous subject matter aside, this sort of patronising bollocks is what gives Sinology a bad name. Let’s look at it:
Most foreigners don’t speak Chinese. I do. I am superior.
Taiwanese girls shag foreigners. Sometimes just for the hell of it. Sometimes the foreigners are of questionable provenance. They do not appear to shag me, though. Therefore I extrapolate from this microcosm of Taiwanese behaviour an argument about an entire section of Taiwanese society in a series of sweeping generalities.
There exists a thing known as racial stereotyping. The media plays upon this. Therefore, this is generally reflected in Taiwanese society. I will graft onto this my own prejudices about Taiwanese people and ignore the possibility that many Taiwanese people believe the print and TV media is a load of shite.
I have recently discovered that most foreigners I meet have not been here or have not been coming here for as long as I have. Because these tend to be Westerners, and I prefer to hang out in Western bars where I believe the women are more likely to go home with me (and I have not been out with a bunch of local lads whom I have befriended over the years down South or even Hsinchu where I would be getting so much more attention) I will come to a fairly predictable set of conclusions about the behaviour of foreigners. (How on earth do those non-Chinese speaking blow-ins get to shag all the cool girls? Dammit! Will someone tell me what these girls want? I’ve got a Ph.D., dammit!)
I will throw in a little bit about Taiwanese people versus Chinese people just to make all this sound less like the billions of pages that have been written previously starting approximately when the British landed in Malaya and India and found the local girls to be rather lovely. If I do a good job I can snag that scholarship money that is going begging as no-one writes about Taiwan any more.
I will remember to focus on the foreigner element and not try to write about various Taiwanese identities because my Taiwanese isn’t good enough to chat with the boyos down South and the couple of years at Shi Da weren’t enough for me to read the acres of print written in Chinese about the subject.
As I’ve not lived in any other part of Asia, I’ll make no attempt to compare Taiwanese girls shagging foreign blokes with the situation in other parts of Asia. Nor will I attempt to tackle the real issue here which is Gender Relations in Taiwan and the New Female Identity and is applicable to Taiwanese-Taiwanese relationships, too. No. Fuck that. These birds are shagging foreign blokes for the sheer fun of it and going out and having a larf and it totally contrasts with my preconceived notions about Taiwan and all these big fat foreign loons in Carnegie’s like Lord Bloody Lucan are pissing on my little Taiwan parade. ( I don’t think he really speaks Chinese you know, and he pretends to have been here longer than me. That’s impossible. He’d have to have been, like 19 when he first arrived! I refuse to believe that. I mean a 19-year-old White Chinese speaker with no shortage of money in 1992?* He’d have been getting more ass than a Carnegie’s toilet seat. I refuse to believe that. If I’d have been there they would have shagged me instead.)
Fuck this. I’m off back to university. I’m not getting the respect I deserve. I’ve got a bloody Ph.D. you know!
(*Ironically, given his tirade about the over-funded ignoramus under discussion, Lucan had a GBP9,000 student grant for the year and he taught English and he didn’t need a work permit. And he had no time to write a bloody book about it all either.)
he know’s dick…to repeat; he calls the brass monkey a dance club, he’s been there 4 times, he doesnt know its a sports bar with a once a week ladies night, wtf?. he’s simply grafting a theory over the top of his taiwan experiences. which from the look of it comprised hanging out in TU and then when it closed moving on to carnegies. no mention of roxy 99, or spin, or any other of the many clubs that have come and gone. and of course he’s too uncool to go to luxy which has just as many foreigners as carnegies…
Yes. If he were affiliated with the university where I work, he would be censured by the research ethics panel and perhaps fired. Using names of participants just ain’t on. He likely did not seek or obtain permission from Carnegies to conduct, cough, research on its premises. Whether he would need to or not is debateable since “restaurant, its staff and its customers” does not necessarily equal “participants” and it is a public place, but I can say with 100% certainty that the university where I work would not approve a research ethics application in which the investigator planned to use the real name of the business where data was collected in the write up. It leaves the investigator and the university wide open to accusations of libel. If some pathetic loser wanted to do this “research” and applied for ethics clearance from the university, the committee would check to make sure that the real name of the business wasn’t going to be used in any published paper. In decent qualitative research, the important thing is the phenomenon observed, not the exact location of where it was observed. If this guy’s university has even a piss-weak ethics policy and committee, then an e-mail to that committee could put him in some hot water.
The first thing that popped into my head when I saw this was the word “libel”. The second thing was “gutter journalism”. The third thing was “this is a take-on, right?”
Apparently not.
I have been here for only six years, might lack a Fulbright scholarship, but I do have enough fucking brains to go to more than just three clubs over the course of 8 years before writing a dissertation about the club culture here.
Next time you see him break out a notebook, give him a swift kick in the nuts like he deserves.
I bet if he had actually gotten some he wouldn’t be writing this paper as a bitterly rejected whinger.
Why does the name Lake Forest, the university this wanker works for, sound like it should be on the front of a tee-shirt at a nightmarket between the Noter Dam one and a Mickigon Stote one.
I’m not sure that I understand the reason for the overwhelming aggression and hate being shown here towards this individual. Could someone enlighten me?