GOLDEN SNAIL OPERA: the More-Than-Human Performance of Friendly Farming on Taiwan’S Lanyang Plain
GOLDEN SNAIL OPERA: The More-Than-Human Performance of Friendly Farming on Taiwan’s Lanyang Plain YEN-LING TSAI National Chiao Tung University http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1847-8240 ISABELLE CARBONELL University of California, Santa Cruz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2863-2814 JOELLE CHEVRIER Land Dyke Feminist Family Farm http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6176-992X ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING University of California, Santa Cruz Aarhus University http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0411-959X How can visual and textual materials gain equal weight in an article? This was the challenge we set ourselves in contributing to Cultural Anthropology’s Sound + Vision initiative. Searching the archives for good examples, we felt distressed. Most everywhere, either visual or textual materials dominate: the other is just an add-on. Many articles use visual materials as exemplification. Many films have explanatory texts. But how might we create a text-and-film document in which both lead—though perhaps sometimes in different directions? In working through this question, we thought about music-and-text syn- chronization, as in an opera, where sound and story augment each other, creating a combined effect. Neither dominates; neither makes sense without the other. In this spirit, we have written a sort of opera: a script intended to be read along with a film. Yilan, our setting, is the home of Taiwanese opera, which is quite CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 31, Issue 4, pp. 520–544, ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. ᭧ by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.14506/ca31.4.04 GOLDEN SNAIL OPERA different from European opera in ways that support our conceit.
[Show full text]