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Teri Silvio's book is an important and original tour-de-force of theorized ethnographic engagement. She convincingly argues that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift, which she calls the Age of Animation--a time of giving objects lives of their own, a widening of the sense of an agency heretofore jealously guarded as the purview of humans alone. Her book achieves anthropology's Holy Grail: It makes surprising connections about the world around the reader, rendering legible, in new ways, aspects of it that she did not even know she did not understand. And this is accomplished via ethnography of a seemingly peripheral place--Taiwan--that proves to be deeply significant in our globalized world.--Angela Zito, New York University

"In this lively work, Teri Silvio uses Taiwanese material to theorize about everything from religion and puppetry to marketing and national identity. With the ang-a (an artificial humanoid figure that can be a deity or a doll) as her guiding metaphor, Silvio convincingly argues that the old ""Age of Performance"" has been giving way to an ""Age of Animation."" Rather than adopting or challenging prescribed roles in performative acts of identity formation, in the new Age of Animation people invest objects with vitality (as with puppets and figurines) and bring characters to life (as in cosplay). Puppets, Gods, and Brands is a relentlessly creative study with far-reaching implications for anthropology, religious studies, and East Asian cultural studies. Silvio challenges longstanding presuppositions about Japan’s dominance of the East Asian popular media space, overturns some widespread assumptions about how animation works as a technological process and as an imaginative act, and pokes holes in recent theories about animism and neoliberalism along the way. A fabulously provocative book. Teri Silvio’s book is an important and original tour-de-force of theorized ethnographic engagement. She convincingly argues that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift, which she calls the Age of Animation—a time of giving objects lives of their own, a widening of the sense of an agency heretofore jealously guarded as the purview of humans alone. Her book achieves anthropology’s Holy Grail: It makes surprising connections about the world around the reader, rendering legible, in new ways, aspects of it that she did not even know she did not understand. And this is accomplished via ethnography of a seemingly peripheral place—Taiwan—that proves to be deeply significant in our globalized world."

Author Information

Teri Silvio is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei. Allison Alexy is assistant professor in the Department of Women’s Studies and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan.

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