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- Title
Dreaming Ethnicity in the Politics of Recognition.
- Authors
Ya-Chung Chuang
- Abstract
This article investigates a new minority politics in which ethnicity is metaphored into a multiplicity of expression and democracy is seen as a space for creatively unorthodox imaginations and appeals. The creation of ethnicity as imagined alterity moves democracy into the phase of what Charles Taylor calls the "politics of recognition." This article documents two ethnic recognition struggles in Taiwan. One is about an aboriginal Pangcah tribe whose tribalism had uncovered a longburied memory and whose exposure would have been explosively disconcerting. The other one is about what I would call a Hakka radicalism whose recent formation showed the heterogeneity of a Han Chinese identity. I find in both cases an ethnic "dream" in which the recognition of long-lost cultural values was a creation in the face of a past in the shadows. Recognition was a process of daily reinvented acknowledgements of a shadowed tradition under the effects of unrecognizable cultural confrontations. There are always unthought, unspoken, and unexperienced forces out there that need to be dealt with in this politics of recognition. The dreams which this article explores seek to encounter and locate these unrecognizable forces of identity politics.
- Subjects
ETHNICITY; DEMOCRACY; POLITICAL culture; POLITICAL participation of indigenous peoples; HAKKA (Chinese people); RADICALISM
- Publication
Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, 2010, Vol 8, Issue 2, p3
- ISSN
1727-1878
- Publication type
Article