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Scott Simon, Tanners of Taiwan: Life Strategies and National Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: Westview Press, 2005, 172 pages.
Scott Simon quotes one of his factory-owning informants in this ethnography of the Taiwanese leather tanning industry, as follows: "The Chinese have been making leather for thousands of years, but it has just been to cover their bodies. Taiwan has a modern tanning industry only because of foreign technology. .. Leather tanning has nothing to do with Chinese culture" (p. 60). It is statements like these that, for Simon, form the central problematic of his study: how is it that labour and business practices which are promoted by the government as distinctively Chinese (and linked to new forms of global Chinese capital) are instead identified by their own practitioners as precisely the opposite, as non- or even anti-cultural? Simon conducted almost two years (with several subsequent field trips) of anthropological fieldwork in both small- and largescale leather tanneries in southern Taiwan to answer this question. His ethnography uses the experiences of leather tannery owners and employees to explore questions of national identity and ideology in Taiwan, especially in light of recent political and social changes that have allowed previously marginalized populations to influence the course of the nation.
This book is much more than simply an ethnography of work. Most of the ethnography is not about the workplace itself but about how business owners and workers situate themselves within the imagined space of the nation: "In the workplace and at home, [Taiwanese tanners] craft identities at the same time that they craft leather" (p. 5). Simon includes a four page appendix that describes the technical steps of the leather tanning process, as well as some ethnographic detail...