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Abstract
As a more globalized world has exerted new pressure on the conduct of the state, more fluid concepts of citizenship have appealed to people as corrective to state–individual relations. However, there is a vast and understudied life-world in which people decide what they are entitled to and on what grounds, and because of this deficiency we do not know what people talk about when they bring up citizenship. For this task, I draw upon my fieldwork findings at a Taiwan eco-village, Tau-Mi, to demonstrate that when we engage with cultural contexts ethnographically, we discover that citizenship, rights, and grassroots mobilization are being reimagined through complex local conditions that are historically rooted. By doing so, I not only reconsider the boundaries of the political, essential for state–individual relations, but present a case study of how we may approach a ‘native’ theory of citizenship.
Funding
This work was supported by National Science Council [grant number NSC 95-2412-H-260-008-MY2].
Notes
1. The names of people mentioned in this article are pseudonyms, given the delicate politics in the community.
2. Even given its mission to grant autonomy to a community to decide its own matters, ICC in fact operates in a top–down fashion. State agencies in charge of ICC use their funding power either to direct what they think is best for communities or to screen proposals from grassroots organizations. A consequence of the highly competitive granting process is that there develops a safe and predictable form of proposal that gets funding, an outcome apparently not in agreement with the spirit of ICC. Patronage in Taiwan’s local politics is, of course, to be blamed. Various authors have, in fact, pointed out that ICC is really a state-initiated nationalist project, though in community-activist form (Lu Citation2002; Yen Citation2001).