Sadyaq Balae! L'autochtonie formosane dans tous ses etats (Sadyaq Balae! Formosan indigeneity in all its states) [Book Review]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scott Simon, Sadyaq Balae! L'autochtonie formosane dans tous ses etats (Sadyaq Balae! Formosan indigeneity in all its states), Quebec, Presses de l'Universite Laval, Collection Mondes Autochtones, 2012, 252 pp. + XV.As book's back cover blurb notes, few ethnographic works in Western languages deal with Formosan indigeneity. This book is only one in French devoted exclusively to issue. Scott Simon draws on rich, finely analysed ethnography of Sadyaq Austronesian societies, especially in last five of book's eight chapters. He adds to and carries on from previous contributions - articles and book chapters on subject by Fiorella Allio, Veronique Arnaud, Josiane Cauquelin, and Chantal Zheng, to cite just main authors in French on identity dynamics among Taiwan's Austronesian peoples (who represent 2% of archipelago's 23 million inhabitants).In 2004, Josiane Cauquelin published monograph in English entitled From Headhunting to Modern World on another of Taiwan's Austronesian societies, Puyuma, and transformations it underwent under influence of successive policies of Japanese government and Republic of China regime. (1) In this book, Josiane Cauquelin stresses rituality as well as kinship and organisation among Puyuma, but offers no more than about ten pages on their constitution as an ethnic group and on their relations with state apparatus controlled by Han majority with whom they live today in same villages.It is just reverse in Sadyaq Balae: whereas in general classic monograph deals with kinship relations and rituality, this book covers them more succinctly in latter part of Chapter 2 (pp. 47-62), to be referred to briefly as and when argumentation requires it, thus making for an easier flow. A brief first chapter goes over and economic conditions of indigenous peoples and their place in Taiwan's lively identity debate as well as in contextualisation of research itself. Although directed at author's students (p. 1), and thus taking didactic approach, it is not textbook. It does demand effort on reader's part, containing throughout many vernacular terms, proper names, and place names.The book's general structure is justified by author's choice of clearly situating his subject, indigeneity, in field of political anthropology. More specifically, it follows path hewn by mainly French anthropologists such as Marc Abeles, Georges Balandier, Maurice Godelier, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, and Pierre Clastres. In line with last named, Scott Simon qualifies Sadyaq as an egalitarian (division of tasks between sexes is seen as complementary rather than unequal), without political institutions, and as society against (2) notion he defines as social logic according to which several societies refuse any accumulation of power (p. XI) and reject the emergence of unifying state, stratification, and subordination (p. 4). The book's main problematic is understanding relations between Sadyaq [...] and state during successive administrations of Japanese (1895-1945) and Republic of China (post-1945), and why Sadyaq accepted Taiwanese state's legitimacy on their territory, only to remain marginalised inside country (p. 3).The author's approach is itself political in sense that he uses nonhegemonic anthropology, i.e., rejecting all forms of domination. The choice of re-transcription of vernacular terms is in line with practice of symmetrical anthropology between observer and his interlocutors, same as in all that concerns terminologies, given author's systematic desire to justify his options and define concepts. He stresses that indigeneity forms part of relationship between community and state or between an individual and noting helpfully that it is just a legal classification (p. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".