Thursday, August 21, 2008

American anthropologists find island engrossing (Taiwan Journal)

Few professors can claim to have written a book so popular with non-academic readers that illegal "pirate" editions appeared, and which - in a legal form - remains in print more than three-and-a-half decades later.

David K. Jordan is one. He has been at the University of California San Diego's Department of Anthropology since its founding in 1969. The book - his first - is called Gods, Ghosts & Ancestors.

In his preface, Jordan described the book as an effort "to present an overview of folk religion as it is lived by farming people." Based on fieldwork he did between 1966 and 1968 in a village in southwestern Taiwan, "Gods, Ghosts & Ancestors" has chapters devoted to ancestor worship, exorcism and divination.

The complete article is here.

1 comment:

David said...

Another Taiwanese anthropological study which is popular as literature is The House of Lim by Margery Wolf.