How to Place the Ancestors? The Heterogeneous Ways toward Housing Modernization, Taiwan
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Chen, Ching-Chieh
Abstract
This article focuses on the emobodiement of the Chinese Han people’s ideology, namely the center of their traditional housing configuration, the worshiping hall, or the so-called Gong-ma ting. The author examines the evolvment of the post-war housing in Taiwan to revisit the tension between the traditionality and modernity of the Taiwanese housing. The investigation is conducted through the compilation of journliasm, archives, in-depth interviews and the mapping of the interior housing pattern. The author draws on Steven Sangren’s notion of “alienation,” which regards the traditional Han people’s ideology as the disguise of their relationship of productivity that however is able to bind the society together, to establish a more overarching analytical framework shedding light on the Han people’s ideology and housing configuration. Two main findings emerge here. Firstly, there exists a sort of “safety valve” for the Han people’s household symbolic orders. The safety valve is practices triggered by the conflicts between the traditional and modern housing configuration. Its function is to mend the fissure of the housing symbolic orders, and its fix of the misplaced configuration has unexpextedly relied on the modern architectural structural system. The purpose of the safety valve is to integrate a production mode of housing configuration that integrates both the family ethical relations and their corresponding spatio-temproal concepts. The expansion of family members, the division of family due to the members’ demise or dissent, and the traditional generational procedure based on the couples’ room as well as the rituals of the separateon of kitchen and incense all consititute such process. Secondly, the Han male’s traditional obligation to marry a wife and raise an heir becomes the rationale by which the traditional ideology might gradually divert from the configuration of modern housing. The head of the family who has followed the custom of setting up a couples’ room for the heir now finds it unsuitable for the new family relations their children want, which is mainly core-family and is embedded in the housing of modern style. The Han male thus have to negotiate with the ancestors, during which the modern housing configuration gains its legitimacy and reflects the female’s motivating role for the changing family-socio relation. The female’s raised position is associated with this new style of living as they tend to envisage the ideal housing from a modernized point of view of raising the children. This inherent change from traditionality to modernity is intimately bound with the life style which is swiftly altering at the outside, and this study, which has focused on the housing forms and interior patterns, may embody this family-socio relations. Gong-ma ting is represented as the practical form to deal with the complexities within. By looking in to the gap between the householde social status and the imageined position as shown by the Gong-ma ting, the author has portrayed a modernizing process labeled as the subjectiveity of Taiwan. Keywords: Housing history, Traditionality, Modernity, Ideology, The Han society
Subjects
Housing history
Traditionality
Modernity
Ideology
The Han society
SDGs
Type
thesis
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