Monuments of Culture: Minzoku Taiwan and the Search for Local History in Colonial Taiwan(1938– 1950)

Abstract

This study reconsiders the way in which “folklore,” or “local culture,” was documented and narrated, and thus “discovered” by the increasingly transnational intellectual society of 1940s Taiwan. By invoking the term discover, I propose to trace the historical roots of the construction of legitimacy for such subjects as “folklore,” “local culture and custom,” and the emerging discipline folklore studies/native ethnology in a modernizing society facing colonial rule and the globalizing processes of nation building in mid-twentieth-century East Asia. Ultimately, this study proposes that the act of documenting and discovering “folk life” was not necessarily the product but part of the globalizing process of inventing or reinventing traditions among communities establishing historical narratives in a postcolonial world.