ABSTRACT
This study was prompted by a desire to understand Taiwan’s postwar development in a way that would take into account the dynamism of local society, a dynamism I had experienced firsthand during my field-work. I was dissatisfied with accounts of Taiwan’s transformation that either overlooked local society or considered rural development to be merely a reaction to the initiatives of the government and foreign corporations. These studies overlooked the fact that local society had a long history of engagement with a regional commercial economy that shaped local institutions. Studies that did look at this local society could not break out of the conventional structural–functionalist paradigm; they continued to stress the importance of the group, when it was apparent that other forms of social organization were operating in conjunction with the newly emerging productive relationships. Diverse and overlapping social relations complicated by new global–local articulations rendered inadequate the conventional building-block approach to social analysis. The corporality of social groups seemed to give way to their bones, muscles, sinews, and blood vessels, which became connected in more diffuse forms, if only temporarily.
