Ethnicity, Clans/Lineages, and Gender: from Theories to Experiential Practices(1/2)

Clan/lineage organizations have long been an essential type of social community as well as a culturalsymbol among the Hakka and Min-Nan people. The fast-evolving contemporary society has challengedtraditional consanguinity-, kinship-, or region-based social organizations with tough issues such as pluralisticidentity politics, rendering them to develop different characteristics and ways to interact. Over time, suchorganizations have adopted and mixed traditional and modern perspectives. Internally, traditionalclan/lineage organizations play a symbolic role in supporting community cohesion and preserving existingoperational norms and the patriarchal hierarchy. Externally, these organizations are involved in maintainingthe power of the local cultural network and finding external resources for the organization. Reform has alsobeen taking place; consanguineous, regional, or even ethnic boundaries of these surname-based organizationshave collapsed, and transregional, nationwide, Pan-Asian, or even global actions promoting networking anddiffusion have been initiated. An extension of the previous study on the territorial societies of the Taoyuan,Hsinchu, Miaoli, and Kinmen regions of Taiwan, this two-year research project (an experiential investigation)will conduct a literature review, participant observation, and in-depth interviews to further explore issuesrelated to Hakka and Min-Nan clan/lineage organizations. The first interest of this study will be theadaptation of these traditional consanguineous, regional, or ethnic social organizations to the modern worldin terms of their identity and belonging, ethnic relations, family succession, clan politics, and interterritorialconnections. The second interest of this study regards the use of inclusion and exclusion for pluralistic yetambiguous interpretation of symbolic signs for regenerating and reinforcing norms concerning socialreproduction. All these social phenomena will be analyzed, verified, conceptualized, and linked to studies onclans and gender for a comprehensive examination of existing theories and experiential practices.