Taiwan Studies Workshops

Since 2017, the seminar dedicated to Taiwan and its Places of Memory has been examining Taiwan’s process of affirming its identity as well as its cultural and memorial roots. For Pierre Nora, “realms of memory are not what we remember, but rather the point where memory operates”. Thus, by focusing on how Taiwanese actors are operating on their own memory, we looked into the debates around historical, cultural and identity legitimacy in the constitution of a “common”. As Maurice Halbwachs argued, posing the question of the “social frameworks of memory” ultimately means questioning what binds us together as a group. What stories do we pass on? What narratives do we construct? What emotions do we mobilise? Which protagonists do we remember? Whom do we address? With what words, in what languages, through which reference points?

This year, we approached the issues of memory in Taiwan through the prism of bond, to which we added the terms space and distance. However, these terms ought not to be apprehended  as mere spatial and geographical categories. Whether material, social or symbolic, space is a locus where meaning and significance are produced. The dynamics of memory that traverse it and operates on it construct the near and the far, the ‘us’ and the ‘others’. A fourth term emerges from this triptych of ‘bond, space, distance’: the boundary that delimits the space, constructs the distance, and is traversed by the bond.

Our lines of questioning mobilised have been wide-ranging and the terms polysemous. This is a deliberate choice, in order propose a common reflection based on what is concrete: our fieldwork (whether geographical or textual, in Taiwan or elsewhere). Thus we discussed the Waishengren people’s link to their homeland, the boundary between sacred and profane spaces in the Ba Jia Jiang ritual, or broadened our horizons by thinking Koreans’ bonds with and distance from Kazakhstan.

For this half-day conference, the students enrolled in the seminar will take the floor and explore these issues. What spaces are investigated? What borders are observed? What bonds are forged t and how are they maintained? What distances do these bonds traverse? What narratives and memories are mobilised? How can the construction of a ‘common’ be observed?

The objective is to set up a benevolent setting where the  reflection  on these issues, in the light of our own fieldwork and in the presence of our colleagues and established researchers, may be stimulated. However, the question of the bond should not be confined to Taiwan. This workshop is also intended to de-compartmentalise our work and make it accessible to those interested in Formosa, and will therefore be open to the wider public.

An Introduction to Le Temps des Mots, un dialogue Sino-Taïwanais by Sociologist Évelyne Ribert (CNRS – IIAC/LACI)

“In France and other places across the world, Chinese and Taiwanese students happen to meet. They are keen to make better acquaintance but at the same time they feel some embarrassment due to the profound sense of otherness. They gain awareness of their divergent representations of each other: the Chinese evoke the belonging they share with the Taiwanese, whereas the latter point up to the “rift”; separating them. They are here observed by their professor, a specialist of Taiwan, who set up a workshop where the roles played by official, institutional and family memories in their identification dynamics have been probed. The discussions unfurled within the framework of an original research project — conducted in 2009 and 2010, involving ten participants — which was based on the screening of films looking into the Chinese and Taiwanese pasts (…). More specifically, this book explores family memories spanning two, three or even four generations and, in the process, it exposes the collective social frameworks of memory. Pieced together from 2009 until 2021, these are the memories of the generation born in the 1980s, at a time when democracy was established in Taiwan and the Chinese government urged its people to seek prosperity.”

The Hunglodei Nanshan Fude Temple (Hongludi Nanshan fude Gong 烘爐地南山福德宮) is one of the most famous places of worship today in Taiwan for the quest for wealth (qiu cai 求財). Located in Nanshijiao Mountain (Nanshijiao shan 南勢角山) in Chungho District (Zhonghe qu 中和區) in New Taipei.

The Hongludi Nanshan Fude is dedicated to Tudi Gong 土地公, the god of the soil. Tudi Gong is considered to be the deity in charge of protecting a human group settled near its anchorage place. Given his power related to the land occupied and exploited by humans, previous studies on the cult of Tudi Gong have focused on the relationship between the cult and the notion of space. Tudi Gong was defined as a “deity of Place” (Henri Maspero, 1971: 127) operating in a small-scale administrative context – the neighbourhood of a city, villages in rural areas (Henri Doré, 1995: 864). In Taiwan, the Taiwanese ethnologist Lin Mei-Jung 林美容 (1987) had considered Tudi Gong as the cult for understanding the social structure of a village. On the other hand, Alessandro Dell’Orto (2002: 25), in a comparative study of the different cases of Tudi Gong worship in Taiwan and the relationship with the cult space, had found that the multitude of altars in his name and the local legends contributed to constructing the meaning of the god’s action space according to its actors.

Indeed, although place is a fundamental connotation of this cult, Tudi Gong is also considered as a god of wealth. This connotation is linked to the cult’s relationship to the land, conceived as the source of its power and the symbolic carrier of fertility and abundance. According to my interlocutors, Tudi Gong is the “most ancient god of wealth” (zui lao de caishen 最老的財神), because “if there is the land, there is also wealth” (youtuyoucai 有土有財). However, how do we define this concept of wealth in relation to the Tudi Gong cult? Hongludi Nanshan Fude is mainly known for the quest for material prosperity based on personal enrichment. However, is the quest for prosperity in this place of worship today only about enrichment through an accumulation of economic capital or is it a multi-faceted wish that touches the sphere of the applicant’s daily life, namely the attainment of family and work happiness and status in the social environment to which he belongs?

The ongoing formation of a truly Taiwanese nation-state is accompanied by an increasing autonomy of Taiwan studies. We can only welcome this development, which has made it possible to understand the political and social dynamics of the island in all their plurality by emancipating itself from a Sinocentric reading. Nevertheless, contemporary Taiwanese society is partly based on a political framework that was formed on the mainland before 1949, and it is therefore essential to examine this framework in order to understand the democratisation that has been taking place since the 1980s.

The aim of this workshop is to offer students working on Taiwan an overview of the different ways in which the republican state was conceived and constructed in China before 1949. In contrast to a teleological interpretation of the transition from the Manchu Empire to the Chinese nation-state, the aim is to identify the successive responses to the paradoxical challenge of rebuilding a strong state while giving voice, at least in principle, to the sovereign people.

Félix Jun Ma will attempt to reassess the first republican experience of the 1910s through the case of the Progressive Party (jinbudang), situated at the hinge between the aborted attempt at a parliamentary monarchy and the subsequent efforts to institutionalise a strong state through law. However, the state was not the only possible horizon for thinking about the transformation of society, as Aurore Michelat will explain in relation to the Chinese anarchist movements between 1907 and 1927. Through the neglected contribution of the warlords to this transformation, Xavier Paulès will question the relevance of the still prevalent narrative according to which the modernisation of the republican state took place despite the centrifugal and external forces threatening it. Finally, David Serfass will show how the advent of party-states at the end of the 1920s led to a rethinking of the relationship between the strong state and democracy, thus founding the framework in which Chinese society is still evolving today and against which its Taiwanese neighbour is now trying to build its own model.