Institutionalizing sentimental control: community policing and neighbourhood justice in Taiwan

Abstract

The substantive organization of modern society in Taiwan remains anchored to its historical foundations. One site where this is readily apparent are the various institutions of control established under Japanese colonialism which were preserved through subsequent regimes by virtue of their instrumental utility for the work of modern administration. In this paper I will outline a socio-cultural perspective for understanding how such institutional continuities are involved in the formation of conventional or “cultural” sensibilities about the nature of justice. I propose that a certain domain of discourse about the nature of justice in Taiwan – one which links the sentiments of kinship and the non-kin intimacies of ganqing (感情) to an ideal of the peaceful well-ordered local community – may be understood as constitutively related to the architecture of regulation grounded in the institutional form of the neighborhood police substation (paichusuo, 派出所). The work of neighborhood policing involves a constant investment of ideological labor in the formation and maintenance of these linkages. I describe this ideological labor using ethnographic data from my studies of policing practices between 2000 and 2007, relating this description to an account of the motivations of institutional design evident in historical materials drawn from the entire modern period (1895-present). The purpose of this project is to develop a methodology for studying the dialectical process through which the political legitimacy of local institutions is preserved across regime transitions while, at the same time, the cultural values structuring this work impose their own limitations on the possibilities of institutional reform.