Negotiating Tradition in the New Global Order: What Taiwanese Youth Teach Us About Care and Accountability

• In Event: Dreaming the Possible: Exploring Global Worlds and Micro-Ecologies Using the Pedagogies of Drama

Abstract

PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVE:
To whom do young people feel accountable? Our travel to Tainan, Taiwan and our encounters with the young people there revealed that the idea of responsibility and accountability to others was a driver of youth social relations in and out of school. In this site, we gleaned important understanding regarding notions of belonging, citizenship and community for young people. This paper will explore, in particular, how young people are carefully keeping in balance respect for tradition and filial piety set against personal dreams, autonomy and breaks with convention.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
This paper draws, in part, on the work of Chen & Ghaill (2015) that explores how young Taiwanese make sense of their gendered identities through local traditions and cultural practices, such as kin values and filial responsibilities. Here, the authors argue against the idea that modernity is marked by a decline in tradition. Instead, they offer that traditions do not disappear but rather become a “complex resource” (p. 449) in making sense of gendered identities.

METHODS/DATA SOURCES:
This paper will draw from data collected during the research team’s visit to Tainan, Taiwan in November 2016, where the young people were engaged in an ensemble/collective devising process. This paper will specifically mobilize the script of their devised piece titled, “My Old Man’s Love for Me” – one of three devised pieces being developed during the visit and our first-hand accounts of observing their rehearsal process. The analysis will be complemented by data from interviews with students, educators, administrators, as well as rehearsal and performance video, and other artefacts, including digital images/videos and conversations from our asyncronous communications platform.

RESULTS:
Our engagement with the young people in Tainan revealed a complex renegotiation of tradition, especially kin practices within families. Here, “retraditionalization” was a key exploration for youth. Chen and Ghaill (2015) define retraditionalization as involving “a reinterpretation of tradition and meaningful practice, where reflexive agency is the mechanism for the continuation of strong tradition” (p. 461). An example of this emerging from the drama data involved the kin practices between father and daughter where the traditional gendered language of kinship between father and daughter is reinterpreted to accommodate the tension between the values and practices of the father’s generation and the changing filial practices of the current time performed by the daughter.

SIGNIFICANCE:
This paper contributes to the understudied area of the role of tradition in contemporary time. Tradition is typically perceived as losing its legitimacy as a result of reflexive agency in modernity, especially among young people. Rather than assume this dualistic oppositional stance on tradition and contemporary reflexive agency, our findings suggest that this negotiation is rendered more complex in Taiwanese society and merits a more contextual analysis that accounts for economic and other socio-cultural and political factors at the local level. Their creative work, and identity concerns, pointed us clearly in this direction.

Author

• Kelsey Jacobson, University of Toronto