Short-Term Trends in Bastardy in Taiwan

Abstract

Library of Congress, deserve thanks; their policies of allowing researchers free access to their stacks had a direct effect on the discovery of some of the findings reported in this paper.By international standards, bastardy was a relatively common occurrence in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period (1895- 1945).This may come as somewhat of a surprise to many of those familiar with an- thropological accounts of Chinese populations ; in most of these studies, illegitimacy is presented as a rare phenomenon. 1 In recent years, historical demographers have published a considerable amount on European patterns of illegitimacy during the last century (Shorter, Knodel, and van de Walle, 1971), and on certain smaller areas for longer periods of time (e.g., Las- lett, 1977:102-159).Yet for China, aside from Arthur Wolds s pioneering work with Taiwanese household registers from the Haishan district, we have almost no reli- able data on illegitimacy (see Wolf, 1975; Wolf and Huang, 1980:251-260).pects ; while information on such percep- tions and norms is valuable, there is no necessary relation between such perceptions and the actual prevalence of bas- tardy.Hopefully, future anthropologists of China will distinguish more clearly which parts of their work are based on thorough investigation and which are largely the re- sult of informed speculation or conjecture.Of course, if one is to hold the anthropologist to such rarified standards of pro- fessional honesty, one should be willing to take a tentative step in this direction one- self.Thus it should be stressed that the data which will be presented below can only answer certain questions about the prevalence and distribution of illegitimacy, not about its social meaning for the Tai- wanese. 2 An analysis of the colonial vital statistics and census records shows that:

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