| dc.description.abstract | The thesis examines how intermarriage influences women’s ethnic memory and their perception of ethnic identity and how their memory and perception reflects the social process in which the boundary Hokkien and Hakka shifts with different situations. Hakka people have continuously interacted with Hokkien people since they immigrated to Taiwan. An indication of the growing cultural and social interchange between the two groups is the increasing frequency with which intermarriages between the two groups have taken place. Though much research has been done in recent years on the interaction between Hokkien and Hakka, intermarried women have seldom been accorded a place in the study of that interaction. Because they have encountered the “other” culture, the culture of their husbands’ group, at the most mundane level, cultural and social differences make more profound an impact on them than on others. They confront and experience those differences in the details of everyday cultural practices, such as ancestry worship, family cuisine, the use of a different dialect, and the education of children. Since they straddle two cultures and since they play a pivotal role in cultural reproduction, they contribute not only to the transmission and preservation of ethnic memory and heritage but to the fluidity of identity-formation and to the changing complexity in the negotiation of the cultural boundary between Hokkien and Hakka.
Drawing on theories of collective memory and ethnic identity-formation, the thesis analyzes the stories told by intermarried women about the differences between their pre-marital and post-marital lives. The twenty-four women interviewed belong to two age categories: ages 28-40 and ages 55-67. Of the twenty-four, twelve are Hakka women married to Hokkien men while the other twelve are Hokkien women married to Hakka men. Each group of women comprises six members of each age category. By analyzing their narratives, the thesis argues that ethnic identity is to be located not only at the macro-level, in the social relation between different ethnic groups and the gender relation in the family, but at the micro-level, in the plurality of the domestic and the everyday. Furthermore, intermarried women provide a unique perspective from which to look at the interaction between Hokkien and Hakka cultures. Having been brought up in a culture different from that of their husbands and compelled to accommodate themselves to the latter, they participate in the everyday practice of the “other” ethnic community with mixed feelings accompanied by a sense of mixed identities. Positioned in the cultural interface between two ethnic groups, they tend to see the relation between those groups as multifarious, the boundary between those groups as fluid, and ethnic identity-formation as a social process shifting with changing life-situations. By embedding their ethnic memory and the social process of identity-formation in their involvement in, and their negotiation with, the everyday practice of the other culture, they offer new directions for Hakka studies. | en_US |