Manly Vice and Virtù

Introduction This dissertation is an ethnographic study of male sociality, the most pervasive but paradoxically unexplored aspect of public life in urban Taiwan today. Specifically, I examine the politics and poetics of disreputable social activities in which cohorts of male friends engage regularly and extensively, including hunting, drinking, and gambling. My analytical point of departure derives from anthropologist Michael Herzfeld’s concept of “cultural intimacy,” which recognizes how everyday practices whose social efficacy hinges on contravening official norms and deforming mainstream values actually constitute the state as well as a range of national and other identities (Herzfeld 1985; Herzfeld 1997; Herzfeld 2004; Herzfeld 2005). The dissertation addresses three overarching questions: What are the micropolitics of cultural intimacy through which men negotiate status and identity and provide mutual assurance of common sociality? How are mainstream values and norms perpetuated and reworked through these activities, and how do subversive forms become incorporated into everyday social repertoires? And in what ways do these local practices resist, reformulate, and reinforce global forces, state power, and nationalist ideologies? The data for my analysis was collected from three years of intensive participant-observation fieldwork among several cohorts of men, from semi-structured interviews, and from popular and official discourses gathered from newspapers and periodicals, fiction and non-fiction literature, as well as Web sites. My primary informants numbered around forty-five, and were between the ages of thirty and fifty, married, and had children. Island-wide, this age group constituted around 40% of the total population of 22 million in 2001. Ethnically, my primary informants consisted of 1 2 an arbitrary mix of Taiwanese, Mainlanders, and a few Hakka.1 Occupationally, they held a diversity of urban working and middle-class jobs, from cab driver to cram- school teacher, computer salesman to stockbroker, construction boss to carpenter, bridal-shop photographer to art-house movie cameraman, customs bureau rank-and- file to factory manager, interior designer to engineer, local politician to police officer, among others. These men lived in Taipei City and County, from where many of them originally hailed but to where even more had moved from different places throughout the island. This demographic profile suggests that the customary conditions for shared identities grounded in ascriptive or quasi-ascriptive ties have been largely eroded (typically recognized as classmates [tongxue], same native place [tongxiang], and/or colleagues [tongshi]; see Yang 1994:194)—a fact that I maintain goes far to explain the compulsory nature of male social activities in urban Taiwan today. Ethnographically, my study is centered around three social activities: deep-sea spearfishing, carousing at hostess clubs, and high-stakes gambling at mahjong, each of which my informants understood to be subversive of societal norms. Methodologically, I structure my examination of each activity around an innovative adaptation of classic ritual analysis, namely totemism, sacrifice, and ludus. In so doing, I explore the production of male sociality in relation to the culture of fate and luck, military training and masculinity, sexuality and public culture, nature and the environment, as well as state ideology and global capitalism. Based on my findings, I argue that disreputable male social activities are key sites for the production of values and communities that reconfigure the contours of public culture, capitalism, and democratization in Taiwan, and that both contest and legitimate state power. In developing this argument, the nation-state emerges as a sub-topic, so that my 1 Hakka refer to a sub-ethnic group of Han Chinese. Most Hakka in Taiwan are “Taiwanese” and currently constitute about 14% of the total population (roughly the same percentage as Mainlanders). I elaborate on the ethnic dimensions of Taiwanese society below. 3 ethnography of the concrete lived experiences of male sociality is simultaneously a study of the connections between politics, power, and play. The Dangerous Relationship and the Rise of Taipei In her contribution to a recent American Historical Review Forum on “Gender and Manhood in Chinese History,” historian Susan Mann writes that “China’s late imperial society was even more sex-segregated than contemporary societies in the West” and that “any historian of China whose subject lies outside the domestic sphere…will find himself or herself studying almost exclusively men and their relationships with each other.” Yet, Mann proceeds to ponder, “no one has thought to ask what sorts of homosocial bonds these various sex-segregated social networks gave rise to or how they might be understood” (Mann 2000:1602). Mann also affirms what scholars of contemporary China have discovered, namely that “public culture in contemporary China remains dominated by structures formed of male bonds,” despite a quarter century (1949-1976) of Socialist experiments intended to erase the gender inequalities of the traditional Confucian family and society (2000:1612). As this dissertation demonstrates, the centrality of male associational life also remains true of public culture in contemporary Taiwan, whose own tumultuous postwar past was marked by more than a quarter century (1945-1987) of thoroughgoing political mobilization in which “traditional Chinese culture” was formalized and sacralized. Mann suggests that one key reason why historical studies of men have been so few has to do with the history of gender studies in the China field. In the 1970s, “anthropologists in Taiwan, together with scholars interested in women and socialist revolution in China proper, shook loose decades of scholarship encrypted in the ‘patrilocal, patrilineal, and patriarchal’ language of China’s family system” (2000:1601). Perhaps the most influential scholar to emerge from this initiative has been Margery Wolf, whose pioneering work placed women at the center of the 4 patriarchal family structure (Wolf 1972). As Mann explains, the ensuing stream of valuable work on women entailed simultaneously a turn away from studying men, which was an “inevitable result of a backlash against the China field’s obsession with problems of patriarchy and male dominance” (Mann 2000:1601). The upshot, then, was that “gender studies” became equated with “women’s studies,” resulting in scholarship that left men as the unmarked gender and tended, paradoxically, to hypostasize the male dominated family and state structures that it set out to deconstruct. But the impact of women’s studies only partly explains why male associational life has remained a blind spot in anthropological studies of Taiwan. Another contributing factor has to do with both the nature and milieu of the male bond. Four of the “five cardinal relationships” (wu lun) of Confucianism were overtly concerned with “the maintenance of China as a guojia—literally a state-family—a state modeled on the principles of family organization” (Kutcher 2000:1615). The relationships that bind father and son, ruler and minister, husband and wife, as well as older and younger brother appeal to hierarchy and necessity as the source of parallel devotions to family and state. In contemporary society, as I detail in Chapter 3, “work” emerges as an intermediary realm of hierarchy and necessity integral to the maintenance of the guojia, now defined as the nation. But the fifth relationship, “friendship” (you), has always remained morally and spatially outside this state-(work-)family system of hierarchy and necessity, which is why China historian Norman Kutcher calls it the “dangerous” relationship. Indeed, friendship is voluntary and, theoretically, could be non-hierarchical. For these reasons, combined with the fact that, especially in the cities and towns, men of all classes have always lived most of their lives beyond the orbit of the state-family system (see DeGlopper 1995; Fried 1951; Kutcher 2000), male friendship was and is potentially the most powerful relationship. The power and danger of male friendship, as Kutcher notes, goes far to explain why it is strategically 5 downplayed as the fifth and last relationship, as well as why Confucianism is obsessed with the maintenance of hierarchy and necessity—with “order”--through the first four cardinal relationships. And this overwhelming preoccupation of the classics with the state-family system has also contributed to the anthropological neglect of the friendship relationship. Formally set apart from the family-state system, male friendship belongs to the public realm, particularly as manifest in urban centers (towns and cities), where all- male institutions have long been a feature of the urban landscape (see Chapter 3). The Confucian-driven scholarly interest in family life must be viewed in the context of the history of the Western anthropology of China in order to obtain a more complete understanding of why the public life of urban men has been largely neglected, especially in the anthropology of Taiwan. The pioneers of the Western anthropology of China were fated to conduct fieldwork at a time when China was in tremendous tumult. After World War II, which ended China’s protracted bloody war with Japan, the nation became engulfed in a civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. The Communists, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, defeated the Nationalists in 1949, and all

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