Description

Night markets, adored by locals and tourists alike, are a vibrant part of social life in Taiwan and affordable places to experience “authentic” cuisine. Yet night markets are more than just food stands, entrepreneurs, and high-calorie snacks. They are stages for cultural poetics, where diverse national, cultural, ethnic, and gender identities are shaped, represented, and contested. Night markets embody the cultural poetics of the masses, just as film and literature represent the cultural poetics of the elite. What do night markets mean in Taiwan? This talk provides an anthropological approach to the study of Taiwan’s most loved culinary institutions.

Scott Simon, with a Ph.D. in Anthropology from McGill University, is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Ottawa; as well as Chair in Taiwan Studies. He specializes in the anthropological study of development in Taiwan. Simon is author of three books about Taiwan, including Sweet and Sour: Life Worlds of Taipei Women Entrepreneurs, which includes research on night markets. He has also done research on the informal food sector globally for the Food and Agriculture Organization. In recent years, he has been doing field research with the Seediq and Truku communities of Nantou and Hualien, Taiwan. The results of that field research will be published as a book by the Presses de l’Université Laval in the summer of 2012.