司黛蕊 Teri Silvio

研究藝術與社會的關係 聚焦動畫的影響力

Throughout my career, my research has focused on the role of art and the imagination in social transformation. I am particularly interested in popular culture genres that create virtual characters and worlds, and have done ethnographic research on theater, puppetry, cinema and television animation, collectible figurines, and comics. I have done fieldwork with the artists who create characters and worlds in these genres and with the fans who interpret and recreate them, looking at how both characters and artists work as models of and for social identities, and at how new media platforms transform the relationships among fictional characters, their creators, and their audiences.

My book, Puppets, Gods, and Brands： Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019) draws on over fifteen years of fieldwork in Taiwan to develop a new anthropological concept of animation. In it, I argue that the increasing popularity of animated cinema, television, and video games is not simply a side-effect of the development of digital technology and the spread of global markets in cultural products, but evidence of a paradigm shift. Animation in the narrow sense is becoming popular because animation in the broader sense of investing objects with lives and personalities of their own is becoming good to think with.

In contrast to performance, the construction of social selves through the introjection and embodiment of roles, animation is defined as the construction of social others through the projection of human qualities into the material world. The book then elaborates how an anthropology of animation could work through an ethnography of different animation practices in contemporary Taiwan. Through this ethnography, the book demonstrates how looking at the contemporary world through the lens of animation may make us rethink the global and the local, identity and otherness, the human and non-human.