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Tsai Ing-wen’s cultural policy has attempted to end a “culture war” between the KMT’s re-China-ization and the DPP’s Taiwanization. Tsai’s Taiwan’s Cultural and Artistic Renaissance contrasts with the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement promoted by Chiang Kai-shek. Her 21st Century Taiwan’s Overall Cultural Construction resonates with the Overall Community Construction proposed by President Lee Teng-hui, and the New Homeland Community Construction advocated by President Chen Shui-bian. The three “Construction” policies were three forms of Taiwanization which gradually replaced Chiang Kai-shek’s and Chiang Ching-kuo’s re-China-ization after 1987. Tsai’s reconvening of the Nationwide Cultural Congress, earlier held by Lee and Chen, produced a new Cultural Policy White Paper, signaling a new direction for Taiwanese cultural development. Tsai has encouraged multi-culturalism and diversification, rejecting the binary re-China-ization vs. Taiwanization conflict, and emphasizing democratic governance, civic participation and internationalist cultural diplomacy. The success of her efforts is not yet assured.

This paper addresses how religion is playing an increasingly important role in empowering anti-nuclear protests at Gongliao in Taiwan. It begins by describing how the anti-nuclear movement in Taiwan was originally dependant on the opposition political party, and then examines how growing disaffection with party politics at Gongliao has resulted in a local temple dedicated to the goddess Mazu coming to the forefront of the struggle. This paper frames the dispute as a struggle between three different ways of generating power (and implicitly, of losing power): first, the generation of nuclear power by bureaucrats and scientists working through the industrial sector; second, the generation of political power by opposition politicians and elite campaigners; and third, the generation of religious power by people rooted in local communities, creating an alliance between religious power and secular protest.

This article interrogates so-called 'bad death' rituals and their cultural implications in the Chinese patrilineal society of Taiwan. It begins by outlining the significant features of 'good death' rituals through which the discontinuity of biological death is transformed into the social continuity of being an ancestor. Importantly, only those among the dead with male heirs are entitled to become ancestors. The article then looks at 'bad death' practices relating to males who die in childhood or who die before they marry, with a focus on the rituals through which they are re-incorporated into their family lines and are granted ancestral status. However, according to ancestral orthopraxy, females who die unmarried have no place in a family line or on an ancestral altar, and thus are excluded from the social practices of remembering that ancestor worship enshrines. This paper in particular analyses the cultural significance of social practices relating to maiden death in two contexts: examining how people deal with dead maidens, firstly, in pre-modern and rural Taiwan in relation to Daoist practices and, secondly, in modern and urban Taiwan in relation to Buddhist practices. It concludes by arguing that the analysis of maiden death requires a contextualisation of those practices within wider processes of societal modernisation.

This paper addresses a significant gender issue in the Chinese religious culture of Taiwan. The exclusion of deceased maidens from family and ancestral lineages leaves relations between the living and the dead disordered. People believe that homeless maidens become restless, polluting ghosts after death who will bring misfortune to their family and others in society. The case study examined here is a correction to the exclusion/pollution/homelessness of maiden-spirits through ‘adoption’ in the maiden-temple of Sam-giap. I will analyse how spirit-adoption in the Sam-giap maiden-temple constitutes an attempt to correct that disorder and pollution. I will also argue that one result of the Sam-giap corrective practice is the generation of a new space for maiden-spirits in which a new category that disrupts the opposition of ghosts and ancestors emerges.

New Atheism is characterized by a binary logic that pits religion against science, belief against doubt, a pre-modern past against a modern present. It generates a temporal sensibility and attitude toward being modern that is a 'survival' of late-nineteenth-century anthropology, where religious belief and the past were bound together in opposition to science and the present. We analyze this binary logic and then, in response, present two ethnographic accounts—one from the Philippines, the other from Taiwan—to support our contention that religion is not just a matter of personal convictions. Rather, it is a public practice in which belief and doubt are constituted socially and dialogically.

This paper has two sections. The first constitutes a reflection on anthropological analyses of religion in Taiwan. We try to demonstrate that a shift has occurred in the conduct of these analyses that reflect engagements with the notion of "orientalism" and debates about the concept of "culture". We argue that the formation of the category "religion" in anthropology served a specific function: to signify the pre-modern. We outline the breakdown of this idea of religion in light of orientalism and the critique of culture as a bounded unit of analysis. We then argue that the strength of contemporary approaches to religion in Taiwan lie in their acknowledgement that studying religion provides new ways to examine processes of place-making and representational practices. The second part of the paper is an interview with Stephan Feuchtwang who has been writing on religion in China and Taiwan for over thirty years.

This chapter examines the issue of injustice in a Confucian society in Northeast Asia. It uses examples from the White Terror in Taiwan, focusing on three levels at which the demand for justice has been articulated, both during and after the period of the terror: firstly, at the level of the state through political calculation and bureaucratic procedures; secondly, at the level of local culture and through the idioms of religion; and finally, at the level of global civil society. These three levels do not constitute a unified demand for justice nor, indeed, do they offer a coherent response to the problem of injustice. Instead, they reveal fractures and discontinuities through which ideas of justice and injustice are refracted. I consider the Luku1 incident of 1952–53 and the Kaohsiung incident of 1979, which respectively mark the beginning and the end of the Terror. I conducted my field research on Luku, including interviews with surviving victims and their family members, between 2004 and 2005.