| dc.description.abstract | To accomplish the urban planning around Hsinchu Station of Taiwan High Speed Rail, the traditional Hakka Lins’ settlement was designed to be a park area. The Lins’ settlement, also known as Hsinwawu, contained more than thirty traditional courtyard houses, and they were encountering the situation where they had to be torn down for the park construction. With a petition submitted by the local government and the support of the public sector’s cultural policies, the people in the settlement were able to keep their houses. In 2005, Hsinwawu was delimited as the first Hakka culture conservation area in Taiwan with the help of the Urban Planning Act. Using Tony Bennett’s concept of governmentality as the foundation, this study firstly examines the process of the culture conservation. The issues that affect the culture conservation include: 1) the seeming conflict between the central and local governments, 2) the gap between traditional culture and innovative culture, 3) different expectations among old residents, new residents, and literary and historical workers, and 4) the restriction of policies. While having to consider the issues mentioned above, the executive team of the public sector developed the core of governance step-by-step utilizing system, procedure, analysis, and estimation, applied agency to executing cultural policies, and constructed Hakka cultural policies that the Preparatory Office of Taiwan Hakka Cultural Center was responsible for carrying out. We aim to learn how the team performed in those aspects.
Bennett believes that the culture governance and exhibitions of museums represent a form of government’s allocation of power. Through long-term participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study secondly observes the power allocation and conflicts behind each exhibition in Hsinwawu museum, the preservation of the ancestral temple ‘Chung Hsiao Tang’ and Ji Huei Tang, the building of the nine-foot tall glass house, and the planting of camphor trees at the entrance. What have been found through the observation and interviews demonstrate the selection of exhibitions indeed functions as a tool and an expression that provides power. However, it is also found that Hsinwawu residents do not blindly obey the ruling from the authority. As the local government took over the management of the preparatory office, and the power operation and policies were disordered, the residents in the community have developed an autonomous way to operate the conservation area and built up their own self-identity.
Policies or negotiation of exhibition is usually the only issue discussed when talking about Hakka cultural facilities. Through a small but cautious analysis of the conservation process, this study intends to respond to Bennett’s idea of the possibility of integrating culture with government governance, and at the same time figure out how to embed the cultural value of the obvious or subtle Hakka culture into the analysis of the conservation process.
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