The Matsu archipelago between China and Taiwan, for long an isolated outpost off southeast China, was suddenly transformed into a military frontline in 1949 by the Cold War and the Communist-Nationalist conflict. The army occupied the islands, commencing more than 40 long years of military rule. With the lifting of martial law in 1992, the people were confronted with the question of how to move forward. This in-depth ethnography and social history of the islands focuses on how individual citizens redefined themselves and reimagined their society. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, Wei-Ping Lin shows how islanders used both traditional and new media to cope with the conflicts and trauma of harsh military rule. She discusses the formation of new social imaginaries through the appearance of 'imagining subjects', interrogating their subjectification processes and varied uses of mediating technologies as they seek to answer existential questions. This title is Open Access.

A plethora of theories from contemporary museum studies have suggested that museums have been used as political tools of the state or the elite ruling class who control the majority – a perspective which inexorably links the museum to the instrument of power. However, this overt reductionism or instrumentalism denies reality museums reflect in relation to contemporary society. What are missing from this particular view are the interactive relationships intertwined between institution’s internal organization and external social networks. In our understanding in this postmodern age, when singularism is yielding to pluralism and democracy prevailing, powers in our society operate not only from top to bottom, but also the other way around. In light of this, I have chosen two ‘state corners’ (those having nothing to do with development operated by the state) as my subjects of comparative studies. One is National Museum of Prehistory (NMP) in Taitung, Taiwan. The other is Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum (OPMAM) in Okinawa, Japan. Drawing upon the notion of ‘contact zones’ developed by James Clifford (1999), this research regards the museum as an arena in which reciprocity, exploitations and contestations are found between people’s interactions. These two organizations have all that museums should have, and both function as significant cultural spaces in their own societies. In the ‘displayscape’ to embody the interweaving tradition and modernity as well as global and local, and with its tourist, cultural, academic, political and economic activities, the museum has become a meeting point for various groups to express divergent views, identities, attitudes and to exchange and compete for benefits. This multi-contextualization needs further study and comprehensive explanations. In chapter 2 and 5, I give an ethnographic description and analysis of the natural, social and cultural environments in Taiwan’s Taitung and Japan’s Okinawa, finding that 1980 for the former and 1972 for the later are their respective turning points of development. Before moving forward to the points, the two places had been non-developed societies ignored by the states and disqualified to join in the governments’ projects for development. They have since been included in the projects initiated by the authorities under an ambiance of official ‘apologies’. Employing economic, social and cultural channels, the administrations have attempted to offer the development opportunities to these non-developed societies located in the corners of the countries, in order to shorten the rural-urban differences. Both state corners are not capable for developing industry, but are rich in natural and cultural resources. In response to the trend of reflexive development, the states and local elites have thought in terms of and decided on developing tourism and leisure industries. With their particular historical resources, both Taitung and Okinawa lay sound foundations for museums to prosper. The museums have thus turned out to be a constructive national policy to respond to and reciprocate the local. Further examination of NMP and OPMAM and their relationships with other local museums have shown that the museums are historically and sociologically shaped under the competition and cooperation among local resources, aspirations, interest groups, ethnicity, tourist markets, and national goals, which reflects distinctive cultural administration and landscape. Based on local identity, OPMAM reflects a ‘local museum’ with different layers of divisions. Representing Taitung’s multiethnic society, NMP equals to an ‘ethnic museum’ as cultural landscape. Influenced by centralization and administration by ethnicity in Taiwan, the management of NMP suggests a vertical link between central authorities and their local subordinates, while there is a widening gap between horizontal coordination at local level. I maintain this phenomenon ‘ethnicity in the realm of rift valleys’.

This thesis is concerned about how Bankim Catholics perceive their past through Catholic feasts and rituals, and how they reformulate their identity through the culturally patterned ways of experiencing and understanding their history in the foot of mountain area on the Pingtung Plain. Approaching these questions by the perspectives of religious experiences and ancestral memories, I explore how Bankim Catholics evoke relevant elements of past memories through bodily sensations and emotions in the ritual performances, how they experience a simultaneity with the past through cyclical reenactment of the yearly-round Catholic feasts and rituals, and how they construct their identity through reformulating the “ancestral” traditions. During the long processes of forced migration and religious persecution, Bankim inhabitants disconnect with their ancestral past. In their embodied and enacted forms of past memories, Bankim Catholics repetitively experience feelings of “suffering,” “being displaced,” and “uncertainty,” and continually articulate the past and the present through the principle of “repetition of the relevancy.” Moreover, Catholicism turns Bankim into a particular place for incorporating displaced refugees and persecuted believers from different origins, and replaces different ancestral traditions by Catholic culture. Therefore, Bankim Catholics emphasize Catholicism as their ancestral tradition, which over-all replaces ambiguous past of pagan ancestors. Through forgetting and selection, they re-define their ancestral traditions and construct their contemporary self-identity. The other purpose of this thesis is to challenge the Pingpu study in Taiwan. Based on the assumption of ethnicity, researchers of the Pingpu study construct images of reified and objectified “Pingpu” cultures; furthermore, these academic discourses form essentialized identity among “Pingpu” people. However, I argue that the idea of historicity is more suitable for us to understand how people as historical actors are able to create their own understanding of history and past actively, and how they construct their historical agency to think about the present reflexively.

Kinmen, better known as Quemoy to the West, was at the forefront in the standoff between communism and the free world since 1950s. A strong sense of boundary prevailed in the discourse of Kinmen''s recent history. This discourse is still evident after 1992 when the martial law ended and cross-strait communication resumed. eople of Kinmen are portrayed as loyal and brave in the fighting against the communists. However, this stereotypical view does not do justice to the daily living of the people, even during time of great tension. How they lived their lives in the "war zone" do not always correspond to the official, and the commercial version. his article examines the village of "Shuang-Kou" in Lieyu, an off-shore island of Kinmen. Shuang-Kou was designated as a "combat village" since1949, also described as a ‘spy village’ by the rumors. By using materials collected from the memories of the villagers about the military landscape along the coast and their daily life, this paper discusses why and what happened to Kinmen as a sort of "frontier society," and how the border landscape was constructed in order to maintain the tension of the boundary. My finding shows, rather than clear-cut rigidity, the border identities in the "combat village" is actually porous.