In search of pillars | Tingchao Chang

As my project is a relatively academic one, it’s always desirable to make a bulk of literature review in advance. Here, I would like to share some key concepts related to my research topic and the ideas I recently figured out from the academic research. The concepts I provide here extend from the global level to the local level, and also from the practical issues to the theoretical issues.

l   Cultural Landscape and Military landscape

The concept of military landscape is quite new in the field of cultural heritage. The first journal article specifically coping with military landscape (Woodward 2014) appeared no later than 2014. The only site regarding modern military landscape on the tentative list is “The Walk of Peace from the Alps to the Adriatic – Heritage of the First World War,” submitted by Slovenia in 2016. The heritage value of military landscape as a category of negative landscape is self-evident, but the conservation, management and development strategies of military landscape are still in progress.

The concept of cultural landscape is rather mature. First introduced in 1992 by the World Heritage Convention, cultural landscape has already long been spread to every corner of the world. There are three subcategories which the World Heritage Committee adopts, one of which Matsu most matches to is “organically evolved landscapes.” This kind of landscape results from the need of initial purposes, such as plantation, and the interrelated evolution both human activities and natural environment. In the sense of battlefield heritage in Matsu, the landscape is undoubtedly evolved from both the hilly landform and the military purpose. It reflects the local’s daily lives and memories which are substantially influenced by the history of the cold war period and the mobilization of militarized society.

However, do the military memories really dominate the island? In the operational guidelines for world heritage (2017), the “organically evolved landscapes” can be again divided into two kinds: the relict (fossil) landscape and the continuing landscape. Such categorization can be used to prove the insufficiency of the concept of military landscape on the island because Matsu is still alive after the end of the war (at least de jure). The agricultural activities, religion beliefs and the traditional settlement are also inherited until today, while the frangibility of them is equally serious to the battlefield heritage. In later paragraphs, I’ll explain more in the aspect of local community in the recent decades.

The fortification on the island (Dongyin) is unboutedly the outcome of both human activities and natural environment.

l   The recent local community in Matsu

The particularity of Matsu has attracted some scholars’ interests from different disciplines. Among them, the research most related to my topic is Huang’s (2011) MA thesis from the Department of Architecture. He put much effort in the clarification and identification of battlefield heritage as a military landscape in Matsu islands, which is definitely helpful to me. In his work, the original idea and framework of the planning of nomination together with the relation between local community and heritage are distinctly shown. 

Lin (2013), a professor in cultural anthropology from my alma mater, NTU, had made a series of research related to the local community in Matsu, one of which is concerning the community mobilization through the heritage. She observeed that the strategy of preservation traditional settlement in the first stage of development doesn’t work well because of various reasons. In contrast, the mobilization of temple construction is actually the way all the stakeholders are interested to involve in. This, along with my travel experience, shows that the religion aspect is still dominant in the local community which should not be overlooked from the integrity of the landscape, including intangible and tangible, as a whole.

The construction of new temple (the big one in the picture) is the ethnographic work Lin did in Nangan, Matsu.

l   The relation of community mobilization and nation building in Taiwan

In Taiwan, the heritage issue is highly related to the community mobilization. In other words, the heritage conservation is often just a strategy to achieve the goal of community mobilization. Matsu, in spite of its particular political situation, also follows the entanglement of community mobilization and nation building. The entanglement is even more complicated because of the diverse history to Formosa (the island of Taiwan). To sort out the context of community mobilization, Lu’s (2001) and Huang & Hsu’s (2011) works provide profound insights to the special experience of Taiwan in the different moments of the timeline. By the way, both Lu and Hsu also now works in NTU, the former in the Department of Anthropology and the latter in the Department of Geography.

In Lu’s work, she proved that the community mobilization as a tool of inventing/recapturing locality (local culture) supported by the central government is embedded in a larger context of the nation, or the “imagined community”, building. We imagine that every place has its own culture, as Taiwan has its own “exclusive” culture different to China. The research into future development of community mobilization was completed by Huang & Hsu’s work. Years later, the community policy of the government had an “economic turn” that the infrastructure, service, administration and tourism are more encouraged than before. The local community organizations became an agent between the government and the citizens. More experts and scholars are introduced to assist and instruct the development of the local community. In my personal viewpoint, this tendency is still prevailing in Taiwan.

The experience activity of traditional fishery held by the local community organization with the aim of promoting tourism.

After this kind of organizing previous research, I think I nearly figure out the pillars of my research in Matsu. Also, I feel very fortunate that there are so many works I can refer to. In the worldwide level, it’s the framework of cultural landscape in the aspects of definition, identification, preservation and management. In the nationwide level, it’s the context of community mobilization in the larger political and socio-economic context. As for the local level, it’s the part I have to focus more on: what the appropriate concept of heritage best fits the local’s memory in the island?

Huang, Li-Ling & Hsu, Jinn-yuh. 2011. “From Cultural Building, Economic Revitalization to Local Partnership? The Changing Nature of Community Mobilization in Taiwan.” International Planning Studies 16, no. 2: 131-150. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563475.2011.561058.

Huang, Hui-Chien. 2011. “Preservation Values for the War Heritage – A Case Study of the Military Cultural Landscape in Matsu.” [In Chinese] MA Thesis, National Cheng Kung University.

Lin, Wei-Ping. 2013. “Why Build a Temple? The Materialization of New Community Ideals in the Demilitarized Islands between China and Taiwan.” [In Chinese] Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies 92: 1-33.

Lu, Hsin-Yi. 2001. “The Politics of Locality Making a Nation of Communities in Taiwan.” PhD diss., University of Washington.

Woodward, Rachel. 2014. “Military landscapes Agendas and approaches for future research.” Progress in Human Geography 38, no. 1: 40-61. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513493219.

World Heritage Center, UNESCO. 2017. “Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention.”