Locating law and governance on unstable ground: An ethnography of events after a disaster in Taiwan

It is said that anthropologists always get to the field too late (usually after the unfolding of important events), but also leave the field too early (before the advent of important events). My work, on the contrary, got a jump on the key event – one that brought about the sudden realization of an underlying normalcy (Das’s usage; 1993, 2007). I had been conducting fieldwork in a rural town, Dongshih, for my dissertation from May 1999. Then at 1:47am, on 21 September 1999, an earthquake of the magnitude of 7.3 on the Richter scale hit central Taiwan. The epicenter of the earthquake was located in Jiji, along the Central Mountain Range line, near the center of Taiwan. Dongshih, an agrarian town in the hilly regions of northeastern Taichung County, was one of the areas hit hardest. The death toll there was the highest of any township. Three hundred and fifty-eight people died; thousands of houses were flattened in this town alone. Dongshih was a town with spectacular natural scenery and a rich historical heritage. It was a town I had just settled into and was now forced to view in a totally different way.

At the time, I had no idea what would become of my research, or even whether I would be able to continue. The town I had been studying was destroyed. My role as an ethnographer was also dubious at this point. I became an aid volunteer, but I was also a person in need of help. For almost a month, I depended on the rescue centers for water and food. I then became an informant in relief work, offering advice to experts, social workers, and a variety of community activists who had rushed into Dongshih and were eager to collect the information needed to provide aid to the town. In their eyes, my role was that of a go-between, which was problematic as well. I was an out-of-towner living there without affiliation, but on the other hand I was experiencing the same difficulty and trauma as the townspeople. I lived among them, using a makeshift shower cabinet and a mobile toilet, struggling to take care of my basic needs during those first months. I remained with them in the disaster area for no apparent reason.

During the course of ethnographic fieldwork, it often becomes necessary to modify one’s original plan of research, but nothing in my training prepared me for life and work in such a situation. Many ethnographies dealing with disaster (e.g. Erickson, 1976; Rossi, 1993) have mostly taken place well into the aftermath of the event. There is a ‘disaster research’ literature (e.g. Oliver-Smith, 1986, 1996; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, 1999) – mainly concerned with scientific and psychological concerns – that deals with individual, group, and organizational responses to disaster. There is also an ‘accidental anthropology’ that focuses on how chance changes the format and objectives of fieldwork (e.g. Hendry, 1999; Pieke, 1995). But I was conducting ethnography in an unstable place, more like that documented by Greenhouse et al. (2002), though their primary focus was ethnographic representation in the context of political violence (also see Hoffman and Lukemann, 2005; Jackson, 2005, for a discussion of war-zone ethnography). Faced with the challenges to research posed by political horrors and other uncertainties, they suggested ways to avoid biased explanations, particularly those colored by the state.

My situation also reflected the experience of Dongshih as a whole: just as I was forced to rethink my fieldwork based on this chance event, so too did chance play a major role in the social metamorphosis of Dongshih. If this unforeseen event dramatically changed the direction of my research, it also profoundly transformed the social functioning of Dongshih, perhaps forever. Life would never be the same for the town and its survivors. The content of my fieldwork changed, so too the scope of my research. The original purpose of my study was to explore the law as a sociopolitical and ideological apparatus in the context of Taiwanese nation-state formation. I assumed that law provided an overarching set of standards and procedures for governance that was capable of addressing each particular local situation through the nationwide network of legal agencies. I went to rural Dongshih to look at how national law became constituted in customary social spaces and how the experience of daily life was related to legal discourses. One could say that initially I was more interested in exploring the ‘objective’ and instrumental function of law in society, as it mitigated potential conflict using rational procedures instead of violent means.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, there was a noticeable change in the attitude of the locals toward the law. It seemed that every adult Dongshih resident was talking about law; everyone was eager to inquire to what extent relief measures would be able to ease their plight. People exchanged what they knew about reconstruction subsidies. In contrast, at the outset of my fieldwork when I asked informants what their idea of law was and how law was related to their daily lives, they would always shrug and say things like ‘I do not know anything about law; law is the business of the government’, or ‘law is not for the common people, it is for the rich’. The sudden change of events had, of course, nothing to do with any serious structural transformation, legislative or judicial. Neither did it mean that the people felt closer to the law now. I believe instead that change had to do with the legal measures the government implemented in its attempt to contain losses caused by the disaster.

The government responded to the disaster and the demands that resulted from it by proposing a series of emergency guidelines for relief and reconstruction. In the absence of an overarching law designed to cope with disaster prevention and rescue, the actions the government took in the wake of the earthquake were mainly administrative in character. These responses were coordinated ‘in the name of the law’. But in practical terms, the state found itself in the difficult position of talking about regularity and normalcy in varied and unpredictable local circumstances. There has historically been a huge gap between law and policy in Taiwan (e.g. Ma, 1999; Moser, 1981); this did not emerge simply because of the earthquake. But the gap had less to do with the usual dichotomy between ‘law in theory’ and ‘law in practice’ than with the fact that the real social world is a place where many kinds of normality exist. When terms of universal legal application – accountability and liability – prevailed, this did little to help survivors in rural areas who found themselves tangled in the encounter between an imposed normative system and customary practices. The Taiwanese state found itself in the difficult position of articulating the ideas of regularity and normalcy after a devastating earthquake that was invested with moral imperatives because in its aftermath vast numbers of individuals experienced extreme suffering. In meeting the massive demands of reconstruction on an ad hoc basis, the limits of the government’s responsibility to its citizens were put to the test. The law as universal rule and the government as objective enforcer of that rule both proved less than effective.

As an event, the 9/21 earthquake stood out for highlighting the indeterminacy of the social world where complicated relations between state, political community, legal modernity, and governing techniques overlap. In this article, I suggest an approach that shifts from a historical analysis of certain formal codes to an analysis of the complexity of lived experience in Dongshih to highlight how the line between the legal and the illegal is constantly negotiated by people in everyday life, especially in times of exigency. I will focus on the plight of one extended family with jointly owned land and examine the strategies they used to sort out legal puzzles that arose for them in the aftermath of the earthquake. Their story provides a useful case for re-evaluating our understanding of underlying processes such as state governance and legal instrumentality in the regulation of social conduct.

The past in the present

The Zhang family lived in a three-section compound (a central building with two parallel wings attached to either side). This u-shaped structure surrounded a courtyard – a typical Hakka ¹ living arrangement in farming areas outside Dongshih downtown (see Figure 1). The multi-family household was the traditional norm in the Taiwanese conception of family, although examples of this norm tended to be on the decline. The Zhang family compound was a joint household of three married brothers (the fourth and youngest brother moved out years ago), with each occupying a wing with his own family. In other words, it was composed of separate rooms owned and occupied by each brother. Although the three wings were joined under one roof and registered as one house, each wing was really an independent unit with its own front door and stove, a fact that signified the brothers had separate households who did not cook and eat together. OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Dongshih and its environs.

The gongting (ancestor hall) occupied the central building’s parlor where ancestor tablets were situated. It was the focal point for family members, a place of worship where they burned incense at the altar to honor their ancestors. The eldest brother, Zhang Jinye, lived in the house to the right of the gongting, the second brother, Zhang Jin-Wan, to the left. All the children of both brothers worked in the city and did not live with them. Both brothers lived with their wives. Adjacent to the right wing stood two newer concrete houses. They had been built by the third brother, Zhang Jincai, for the family of his son who still farmed and lived at home. The main building was a 60-year-old house that had undergone several renovations, and consisted of a structure of mud walls and tile roofs. A winding and narrow private road 50 meters long joined the house with the public road that connected Dongshih town to their village, Zhongke li (li is the lowest administrative unit in Taiwan). An orchard surrounded the compound and private road and consisted mostly of pear trees. Each brother had his own plot of garden to plow. They did not work together. On the extreme north side of the orchard was a brook. From the public road looking down, one saw an idyllic scene: a mud and brick hut, and old-fashioned farmhouses dispersed among green hills, with yellow and white pear trees scattered throughout the property.

The earthquake destroyed the central building and right wing of the main house, leaving the left wing standing amid broken roofs and crumbled walls. Neither of the two concrete houses were damaged. Instead of going to the shelters in town, the Zhangs erected tents for themselves in their courtyard in the first few weeks. Food, water and other necessities were distributed by the village headman. They bathed in the river and cooked on makeshift coal stoves. The township officials, along with clerks from the Farmers’ Association, ² conducted several surveys to document the destruction and keep up to date on conditions. The family was granted a rent subsidy for the collapsed house. According to the government’s emergency relief measures, in the wake of the earthquake, a subsidy was to be given to the owner(s) of the destroyed house only. But all three wings of the Zhang house were registered under one name, so they counted as one house, according to official records, even though the three brothers considered themselves three families. In November 1999, less than two months after the earthquake, the Zhangs had already begun to talk about partitioning their land in order to satisfy the stipulations of the housing subsidy policy that required land ownership to be clear and detailed. In January 2000, because settlement of the partition issue seemed nowhere in sight, Zhang Jincai started to rebuild where he and his wife had once lived. The new structure had iron walls and a zinc roof (tiepiwu, literally, an iron-sheet house); it was a type of house commonly erected in Taiwan with simple materials (but without permit and license), as a temporary structure that might or might not become permanent. ³

The partitioning of land created endless problems. First of all, the brothers disagreed over which parcel of land each would acquire in the division. They also could not agree whether to rebuild the gongting (ancestor hall) or not, although the eldest brother, Zhang Jinye, was in charge of the task of rebuilding it. The actual assignment of their land was complicated. ⁴ Their land was situated in a farming area, according to government zoning. But their parcel had two parts. First, there was the land designated for farming in its broadest sense, which included rice, fruit, and vegetable crop production. The second part was zoned for housing; that is, the farmers could put up structures within the bounds of this land for their own lodging. This was to discourage the sale or lease of farmers’ houses to anyone not registered as a farmer in government records. In the countryside the permits and licenses required for constructing buildings in urban areas were not required for either building new or updating farmhouses. The land where fruit trees had been planted was designated for direct agricultural production, and hence was not supposed to be used otherwise without a permit from the authorities. According to the ‘Land to the Tiller’ policy, which assigns the ‘protection of food supply sources’ to the cultivator, the land actively used for farming had already been partitioned and was owned individually by each of the three Zhang brothers. ⁵ The grave problem the Zhangs faced instead concerned the land that was designated for housing: the farmhouse where they had lived under a single roof was partially destroyed by the earthquake.

The land where the Zhang family house once stood had been registered under the name of the father, who passed away many years ago. Although the four sons inherited the property (the fourth and youngest brother sold his share to the eldest when he moved away), they never bothered to register these changes because the paperwork and tax documents were too much trouble. Officials rarely inspect buildings outside urban areas, which are typically governed by custom, thus local records did not show the Zhang property’s actual status. This gap between actual and legal reality had stood for years and only became an issue of dispute because of circumstances caused by the earthquake. According to current inheritance laws in Taiwan, each son and daughter have equal rights to their parents’ property, unless the law or a will declares otherwise. ⁶ In the case of communally held property, children get equal shares in parental property, which would be divided accordingly. Degree of kin relationship within a genealogy is the basis for stipulating who gets what. With larger numbers of descendants, each person gets less, a problem that is multiplied with each new generation. The title still belonged to the Zhang brothers collectively, but they could do nothing without the consensus of the senior generation. As the brothers had not registered the land ownership change once they inherited it from their father, they had not paid any inheritance taxes or land value increment taxes, which amounted to a lot of money. If they divided the land now and went to the land office to register it, they would have to pay these taxes, which prompted other questions. Who will pay the money? Is it worth paying? They could not reach a solution.

Zhang Jincai, a burly, nervous man in his early 60s, told me that the lands where the family house and the orchard now stood had originally been rented by his great grandfather from the aborigines. ⁷ After the aborigines retreated deeper into the mountains, the family expanded their holdings in various ways. He was born and raised there; he had strong emotional ties to the compound and the land. But the land had to be divided in order to facilitate rebuilding. ⁸ With the main building collapsed, he saw no reason not to do so. He also did not want to leave the dilemma of landownership to the next generation. He complained bitterly about the eldest brother, Zhang Jinye, who he felt stood in his way:

He rarely leaves the compound, so he does not know what happens in the outside world. He is stubborn and unreasonable. His two sons work as teachers in outlying areas, hence are easier to negotiate with. When we considered the partition of land, we called them in to join the discussion. After three or four meetings, we had arrived at a settlement. But the following morning, he reneged and overturned all our agreements. The sticking point was what portion of the land each one should get. He was not willing to strike a deal because I believe he wants to build houses of his on our portion of the land, taking advantage of us, if possible. I am too poor to move into the city. I do not want to endure the insecurity and inconvenience of rural areas. The government officials do not care about the rural areas.

To Zhang Jincai, his eldest brother was responsible for the problem that neither of them had a legitimate house, and they had to make due with temporary structures. The hostility between the brothers reached a point where they rarely spoke to each other. And still they continued to reside under the same roof, so to speak. Zhang Jin-Wan, the second brother, and his wife managed to live in his original wing, which needed only minor repairs. He was not interested in the partition and did not push the issue. His children, who worked in the city, did not care either. Thus, most of the heated animosity occurred between Zhang Jinye and Zhang Jincai.

Zhang Jinye gave me a rather different account of their dispute. They could not reach an agreement because the surface of the land had been shifted by the earthquake to a point where the boundary of the compound had become unclear. He hired a building consultant to survey the change and discovered that the house now stood on land that used to be farmland. As a result, the value and designated use of that land had been changed. The standards by which they could divide the land equally could be contested: should they be based on the location that each had occupied before the earthquake or after the change in boundaries? Zhang Jinye, a small-framed man in his late 60s, anxiously wished to prove the validity of his explanation. He brought me several times to the contested spot, noting that his younger brother had already built on the location where his own living room once stood. The line that had separated his home and his brothers’ was obscured, and Zhang Jincai took advantage of that to build his tiepiwu. Zhang Jinye was furious and believed that any negotiation would be impossible, based on the current situation. Although his brother always said, ‘Everything can be put on the table among brothers’, Zhang Jinye simply dismissed that. In Zhang Jinye’s eyes, the tiepiwu was big and opulent by temporary housing standards. Zhang Jincai was wealthy, and with three generations of his family living together, his need to expand the house was urgent, and he desperately wanted more land. In contrast, Zhang Jinye’s two sons worked in town as teachers. But he and his old wife clung to the orchard and his share of the land. The land was his last resort. If his portion or the value of his land proved too unfavorable after the partition, he said, ‘We will have nothing to rely on.’

Brothers and sons care only for themselves, building houses only for themselves. There is nothing I can do if following generations suffer from more complex situations that result from the inability of my generation to resolve these problems. The rebuilding of the gongting is not likely, either; for now, each brother has already gexiang ⁹ [cut the incense, i.e. divided shares]. Nobody will work hard for gongshi [common welfare].

Zhang Jinye then planned to quickly put up his own informal-structure house so he would be able to take care of his orchard and also shield himself from what he saw as his brother’s ongoing ‘invasion’. He said that he just could not let go of the land on which he has invested so much energy and time. The property had been acquired from their landlord after the implementation of land reform programs by the KMT (Kuomintang, an abbreviation for the long-time ruling party) – a version of the history of their land that differed from what Zhang Jincai had related. I see the difference in their accounts not as a matter of memory or as another example of squabbling between the brothers. Rather, I see it as an indication that official land registery has not functioned well in rural areas, precisely because farmers do not really care about the legal status of their land so long as they possess the land in fact. And Zhang Jinye continued to farm, even though pears were not very profitable now. While younger generations have increasingly disengaged themselves from agriculture and their roots, the older generations of farmers have maintained their traditional ways. They believe that wasting farm land means wasting jobs and lives. Zhang Jinye was quite proud of what he had done to develop his orchard and showed me around earnestly. We walked through rows of pear trees that stretched like green tunnels clouding the open sky as we crossed through. He hacked the field from out of a barren place of ‘lichen, giant rocks, and rain’. With the help of hired workers, Zhang Jinye eventually turned a swath of land on the hill into his fief. It really did not matter, he said, that he developed land belonging to his landlord, because land was so precious. ‘This is my orchard, from this side of the road to the banks of the river, the other side is my brothers’.’ He was quite accurate about the boundary of his land. This was not easy considering the fact that the only borders separating the plots were soil ridges. The fruit trees were planted some years ago because the cost of maintaining an irrigation system for rice cultivation on so high a hill was not worth it. Like many farmers in other parts of Taiwan, Zhang Jinye made the most of his land by following the government’s farm policy and cultivating the crop that was most profitable at the time.

With the good possibility that negotiations would be indefinitely deferred, Zhang Jinye planned to build his own temporary house, which he did in May 2000. Located right in the middle of his orchard, the house was a large iron-sheet structure, whose red zinc roof showed nicely amid the green and yellow pear trees. Despite the fact that he no longer lived on the parcel of land where the old family home had stood, he enclosed his old space there with wooden planking to stave off any further ‘incursions’. The old communal courtyard had become a parking lot, and each brother now lived in his own individual temporary house, though the land was still registered as a single address. Neither brother received any subsidy for rebuilding because they could not present the necessary ‘legitimate’ documents to the government.

Problematizing history and the law

The Zhangs were an extended family that lived together under the same roof for many years, although they did not pool their resources financially. It was distressing to watch the family struggle to come to grips with events that eventually set the brothers against each other. While other victim families did not have resources and could only desperately look for hope and help in rebuilding their homes, the Zhang brothers, who had adequate resources, ironically reacted to the terrible burden of rebuilding with anger, hostility, and finger pointing. This behavior was perhaps predictable, given the life cycle of growth and division that have long typified Han Chinese families. What was odd was how the first days of incomprehension and grief about the collapse of the house abruptly gave way to nasty family infighting and emotional gridlock. Whereas rebuilding a house is simply a legal matter from the state’s point of view, the Zhang brothers understood it as a key event in their family history, one that over time led to differences and falling out. Reconstruction appears to have been the juncture where mourning, legal regulations, and family sentiment overlapped, refracted, and erupted into conflict.

First of all, according to customary principles, property is divided equally among male descendants (but now among all descendants, including females, under current law). The question that must be asked is this: is it customary behavior for the Zhang brothers to demand land partition, or is it an action precipitated instead by ‘rights consciousness’ under the law? Traditionally, the gongting (ancestor hall) and its land was not an entity that a (male) family member owned as a possession. That a son had a share of it did not mean that he could unilaterally divide that share as he wished. He had a share simply because he was a member of the family. Ideally, it was more a description of the state of social relations related to rank and position, with respect to others more senior or junior (Chiu, 1984; Report on Investigations of Customs in Taiwan, 1992). This notion has changed radically in modern times. Zhang Jincai once said, ‘Land is for use’. This expression definitely echoes what Bernard Gallin (1966) observed in a southern Taiwan village and Michael Moser (1981) saw in northern Taiwan, where local farmers no longer had a strong emotional attachment to the land following land reform, which had made individual titles possible. Later, greater economic opportunities outside farming areas tended to further weaken the fabric of the traditional structure. All of this contributed to the increasing commoditization of land. Now, the Zhang brothers perceived their share of communal land as a right, vested in laws imposed by the state. There was nothing to stop them from pursuing such rights since the gongting, the ultimate symbol of their allegiance to common ancestors and the unity of the extended family, had collapsed as a result of the earthquake. The fact that the Zhangs wanted now to divide their housing land derived from their understanding of modern law, a notion that clearly differed from the customary ideas of partitioning property among brothers. Social scientists have tended to understand custom primarily by reference to what it isn’t and cannot be – law or another universal, normative conceptual system. In practice, however, custom’s conceptual boundaries and specificities of use overlap with many other things, including law. Custom is never static and undifferentiated; it can be seen as a social field where modern practices and local reactions to them are developed and contested.

Having said that the Zhang brothers understood the law does not mean that they were ‘rational’ agents in terms of choosing from among various legal resources and procedures to maximize individual benefit. The common legal strategy to frame a case to one’s advantage was evidently not on their minds. The seeming stubbornness of Zhang Jinye in his drive to thwart negotiations resulted less from his eagerness to build a house of his own on another brother’s portion of the land, as Zhang Jincai believed, than from his heated dealings with Zhang Jincai. As far as Zhang Jinye was concerned, Zhang Jincai had already built his new house on a contested plot of land. Besides, the two concrete houses Zhang Jincai had built near the old family home for his son’s family were strong evidence that he and his family had already encroached upon communally owned land. Because his sons worked in the city and he relied on the land for his own livelihood, Zhang Jinye remained insecure about the fairness of the division, and he suspected that his wealthy brother and his family had always wanted to control the land. It is reasonable that Zhang Jinye would rather live in a temporary house than partition the land, given the hostility between the brothers. It was these emotions and interactions of the households that mattered, not formal rights.

I wish to emphasize here that people’s experience of social connections blends with the pragmatism of personal goals in social action. Of course, social positioning, historical roots, and many other factors influence one’s decision-making, both legal and social. I shall proceed further to analyze two kinds of social connections in Taiwan, namely, state-individual, and individual-individual, that shaped the Zhang brothers’ decisions about land partition.

First of all, the long history of a paternalist state in Taiwan should be considered. The Zhang brothers all complained that the government did not intervene to resolve the entrenched problems around communally owned land and did nothing to help them as they tried to rebuild. From a legal perspective, partitioning is a process that is considered to be a transaction among private parties. The owner can do whatever he or she wants to do with the land unless special laws explicitly prohibit it, including renting, selling, or pledging it. It is up to the concerned parties to sort out the details among themselves. With the state taking no role in these affairs, the distinction between public and private domain becomes a major, if not the most critical, feature of modern law. ¹⁰ The state maintains a firm line between the public and private based on clear and evidentiary justifications. In other words, while the state can provide loans to help victims rebuild, it has no power to interfere in the arbitration process that assists parties to agree upon when and how to divide.

But this distinction becomes blurred in people’s conceptions and expectations of the law. Given the paternalist role that the Taiwanese state has played in its relations with society, the Zhang brothers’ demand that the state intervene in their partition problem reflects their expectation that the state should fulfill the entire task of reconstruction by both providing a loan and by assisting them with partition. Many authors, working in different areas, report that law is the result of social struggles of various kinds (e.g. Clark, 1994; Gordon, 1989; Kellogg, 1995; Lazarus-Black, 1994; O’Rourke, 1995; Paoli, 1992). This is not the case in Taiwan; the Taiwanese state established law mainly as an agent of social engineering. ¹¹ A comment by Zhang Jincai illustrates this relation vividly. When I asked him why he signed up with a community reconstruction plan if he had no desire to observe its policies, he simply replied that farmers have participated in government plans for 30 years. That participation promoted not only the paternalist relationship of the state to the individual, but also fulfilled the goal of integrating the individual into the state’s broader social and economic schemes. Since the livelihood of individuals indicates a nation’s modern status and level of development, the enjoyment of individual rights is also seen as a product of the state. In these circumstances, one may assume that the advance of individual status in the legal arena, ironically, is related to the demise of the citizen’s political participation. As an understanding of rights has become the foundation for new entitlements in Taiwan in recent decades, the claims and agendas for legal reform, basic rights, and civil liberties are actually campaigns initiated by the state, through direct intervention. But on the other hand, the state must carry out these agendas and will always be evaluated on how well it responds to these demands. It can be said that the direct relationship people now have with the state has fundamentally (re)defined their notion of rights. To paraphrase what Shivji observed about the legal system in Africa, ‘Whereas the developed bourgeois legal system is characterized by ‘‘right/duty’’ pair of correlatives, the authoritarian system is marked by ‘‘privilege/no-right’’ or ‘‘power/liability’’’ (1989: 276). The important thing is that where rights are viewed as privileges of specific groups of people or even individuals, it is unlikely that constitutive (at the same time generative and transformative) political and legal rights advocacy that potentially challenges structural inequality and injustice will develop. After thousands of years of imperial law across Chinese history (Chiu, 1984), in the minds of the people law is merely a tool of the ruler – from emperors of the past to the state’s elite now. Law, in most people’s understanding, is the exclusive arena of the state. Therefore, for the Zhang brothers, subsidy policy is more a benefit and privilege than a space for mediating relations of many kinds. It was no accident that Zhang Jincai complained when he learned that other villagers had received compensation that he did not get. When the state’s relief policy did not save the Zhangs from the debacle that in fact resulted from their infighting, it is no wonder they felt they had been deprived of ‘rights’.

Second, whereas state–individual relations construct a distinct social space within which other social relations play out in Taiwan, individual–individual relations are not experienced as a reliable means of social communication by which private individuals exchange ideas and interests on their own terms. The ideal of inter-subjective communication that characterizes the modern public sphere is supposed to take place between competitive individuals, just as opposition between free individuals takes place in the marketplace. More to the point is that under this premise the human being is abstracted from social existence into an individual juristic being. Legal rules take over the activities that formerly were conducted through kin and community relations. Both individuality and rights are thus presented as categories that are notably ahistorical and asocial (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997; Mauss, 1985). It is this particular structure of abstraction and individuation that marks the modern form of social communication (Calhoun, 1992).

It was not, however, through universal rules in the realm of law or social exchange that people in Taiwan have understood themselves as citizens. The Zhang brothers’ point of view presents a very different picture. I would argue that because the private sphere and subjectivity in law have been defined by the state in Taiwan, the individual has little chance to develop a modern liberal mode of interaction with another individual. Whether and how the rational atomistic individual would develop in Taiwan remains an open question; all people are first and foremost members of societies, villages, and kin groups around which universal rules are understood. The notion of the individual under contractual or judicial agreement is foreign to the Zhang brothers’ perception of things. They had their own notions of personhood, property, and entitlement, all of which were relevant to their own social milieu. They expected brothers to behave not as modern, right-bearing subjects, but in accordance with their social roles and duties, acting within the relations that confirm their social status. Their problems were more concerned with justice or fairness framed by given interpersonal relationships than within contemporary concepts of property ownership, which are fundamentally framed by the ‘man to land’ relationship.

A weakening both of the kinship system and local sanctions upon which regional dispute settlement was previously based made it difficult for the Zhangs to resolve their dispute outside the legal system. But on the other hand, if they filed a suit in court asking a judge to resolve it, the most predictable outcome after a long court procedure would be the judge ordering them to reconcile through arbitration. Without obvious fraud on the part of any of the parties, the judge would be unable to determine an equitable distribution of the land shares. The unreasonable social behavior the Zhang brothers charged one another with would not provide the proof of culpability required for a legal ruling. In the final analysis, it is still up to the brothers to define the terms for themselves, returning the problem to where it began – so much for special intervention by the state. Their need to turn to the state and its legal tools, however, is most telling about the failure of existing customary communication systems.

From ethnography to event

Legitimate title to property and land was the sole qualification for receiving benefits and compensation in the aftermath of the earthquake. Legitimate title here means that the title is held in exclusive ownership under the name of a single person, or that of a corporation or similar body, except where joint property was explicitly formulated. A series of land laws dating from the 1950s was devised to transform agricultural land tenure to guarantee and facilitate peasant ownership. These policies promoted commodity relations and the production value of land, and thus changed villagers’ ideas about land to a large degree. Conventional ownership practices persisted nonetheless. In Dongshih, traditional property systems were not yet (and still have not been) converted to the modern Taiwan property system. In Dongshih, family members still jointly held land, with individuals usually possessing only very minor shares. In extreme cases, joint holders of land might number in the thousands, and because of their sheer number they simply could not gather to discuss partition and register shares of the land under individual names. In addition, there are many instances of unclear land ownership. For example, the actual owner is sometimes different from the name in the land register, either because the register is outdated or because the owner failed to enter changes or prove in writing that his/her property was inherited through traditional practices. Juridico-bureaucratic incompetence is also to blame in many cases, but the problem remains that the register, despite its inaccuracies of fact, is the only record of ownership recognized by the state. The effects of this situation after the earthquake were far-reaching. When land ownership became an issue in gaining government aid, the record legalized whatever had been written and ended up creating documentation that differed from actual ownership, based upon the customary understanding in the village. This ultimately deprived ‘actual’ owners of their rights. This ‘misrule of law’ (Holston, 1991) between the juridico-bureaucracy, the intention of the law, and the lack of resolution between the legal system and local practices often stood in the way of reconstruction.

The complex web in which collective patrilineal and individual property relations are intertwined was revealed and further complicated by the earthquake. Longstanding ambiguities in rural land ownership often do not have any legal standing. In fact, ownership issues are so complicated that the state is rarely able to untangle their generations-old complexities. Things would just have continued in this manner had the earthquake not occurred. The prolonged friction over land ownership in Dongshih inevitably surfaced in the aftermath of the disaster because old houses on the lands in question were demolished and new laws took effect once the process of building new houses had begun. Under current reconstruction measures, victims living on land of indeterminate ownership would not be granted permission or subsidized to rebuild their homes until title to the land was clarified. For victims to rebuild their homes, they had to resolve their land problems. Either the numerous descendants, in cases of jointly owned land, reached agreement about dividing or they joined together as trustees to collectively apply for loans, or the ‘actual’ owner, in cases of registration fallacy, created a document that presented the basis for his or her claim. As long as aid policies stuck to modern property regulations, which discounted the ambiguity of land ownership in practice, they acted as a fulcrum of controversy among people in Dongshih and other disaster-struck areas. Land problems continued to bedevil the legal proceedings that concerned reconstruction.

Thus the law encountered a historically tangled social situation, and this was common across the disaster areas. There was no easy resolution. When the Taiwanese nation-state intentionally introduced a unified legal system, its agents believed that system would facilitate the processes of modernization and nation-building. The long-ruling KMT government, following the Romano-Germanic tradition that emphasizes a nationally integrative legal framework, does not allow ‘customary’ practice, but rather considers the traditional system as particularistic, obscure, and backward, if not downright primitive. ¹² On the one hand, the reconstruction measures themselves were claimed to derive authority from the law, since they were based in the rule of law. On the other hand, the inefficiencies of legal processes laid bare the contradiction between two notions of property. That contradiction, rooted in a historical process that combined customary, national, and liberal concepts in Taiwan, was not something that could be resolved easily, especially in a time of crisis. The intended goals of the reconstruction measures ignored this contradiction; moreover, in their bureaucratic enforcement, the reconstruction policies pushed the problem aside and tried to make the contradiction go away by declaring it illegal. While the state continued to claim to adhere to principles of law, its regulations had little traction in local reality. The subsidy measures aimed at settling reconstruction problems only ended up getting lost in a maze of local structures and traditional practices.

The ‘reflexivist’ contention that has attracted anthropologists since the ‘writing culture’ movement in the late 1980s calls for the ethnographer to adopt a first-person experiential fieldwork narrative in connection with natives’ lived experience. The relationship of a fieldworker to the people he/she studies, to the political authorities and other powerful figures among the host people, and to himself/herself as observer, participant, and interpreter has been investigated in depth. Yet, this reflection is constructed in the main after the fact. It appears that ethnographers have been most concerned with and interested in how to involve the interaction of various subjectivities. Those various subject positions remain retrospectively constituted, their relationship being given priority over process. However, accidental, or event-centered, anthropology cautions us that reflective construction can also be reached by assuming that natives’ lived experience follows a script informed by their society’s ideals. It is assumed that people’s action becomes intelligible, however aberrant it may first appear, once that script is deciphered. In the Taiwan context, Harrel (1991) looked at the issue of healing to question the post hoc meaning-construction approach. He showed that people make sense of an illness by using their own symbolic repertoire, but they do so in a way peculiar to their situation. A meaning-centered approach may avoid ambiguity and contradiction, but it fails to account for how people improvise to make meaning in particular instances, a situation that ethnographers need to pay attention to.

The event itself, the earthquake, the historical and natural forces leading up to it, and finally, the social reactions and legal proceedings that followed it, all inflated its cultural and political weight. There is no doubt that the legal system played an important role in standardizing the moral and institutional responses to suffering. Suffering, individual and collective, may be relieved via an institutional forum, but it more often outstrips the capacity of institutional responses. The vast numbers of individuals experiencing suffering created a moral obligation, particularly for the government, to provide relief by implementing emergency measures. No doubt the Zhangs felt disgruntled that the government did not do enough. At the very least, the earthquake created a liminal situation, not just between nature and society but also between the everyday world and the rupture of its usual norms. This circumstance led to a sharper awareness of what normalcy entails, an awareness that would otherwise have gone unremarked in routine daily life (see Agnew, 1990; Burke, 1992; Gluckman, 1958; Gruner and Walsh, 1969; Humphrey, 2008; Jayawardena, 1987; Samimian-Darash, 2009). The earthquake event can be conveniently viewed as a concrete unit post hoc, with a definite beginning and an expected end, but this framework represents an institutional perspective. The more we dig into how people’s lives were affected both by the catastrophe and the reconstruction measures, the more we can know the diverse situations that constitute an event, and the more meanings emerge that could not have been anticipated.

Much the same can be said of the case I have examined here. The reconstruction measures put in place to ease the suffering and loss from the earthquake proceeded from a starting point of normalcy and aimed to bring back normalcy in the midst of a chaotic and traumatic situation. But in fact those measures created another kind of suffering for the Zhangs, since they instigated infighting, mistrust, and emotional distress that impeded the rebuilding of the family house and a resolution of tensions around land ownership. Such suffering is too easily attributable to the individual failures, yet when we inquired into the domain of the experiential, the life history of the individuals, we can understand that their failure is attributable to the combination of institutional and private misconnections. The Zhang episode shows what legal regularity excludes. While legal scholars may claim that the gap between the intention of law and its enforcement is inevitable and normal, this case shows that the law often proceeds at the expense of the individual, never mind the local customary values that are incongruent with the modern legal system. ¹³

A diagnostic event

In sum, from the state’s point of view, it has the legal mandate and power to implement subsidy policies that would assist earthquake victims in rebuilding their homes. This it did in the wake of the earthquake. Unfortunately, many people were simply unable to get these benefits and instead ended up putting up the temporary housing these policies were aimed to prevent. The results indicate that the boundary between ‘legality’ and ‘illegality’ in Taiwan is not clear. While a tiepiwu is viewed as illegal by the state, it counted as ‘legitimate’ housing among the Zhang brothers, who were not concerned with questions of illegality. Rather, their story centered on what customary practice prescribed as appropriate and inappropriate. The case of the Zhang brothers shows that the real problem was the state holding a view of law as the ultimate authority and initiating regulations instrumentally in order to spur social change. To be precise, their situation prompted my realization that legal reasoning is often divorced from the social field of which the law is also part. Moreover, this disconnect highlights the heterogeneity and legal plurality that coexist with state power. In short, the meaning of ‘legal’ deserves a more holistic evaluation, one that would include the terms of customary practice.

In the Zhang brothers’ attempts, to no avail, to resolve their conflicts by recourse to legal regulation and enforcement, it is not surprising to discover that the law was not perceived as a coherent body of rules that could lead to a definite resolution, but rather as something that could be used for bargaining and negotiating. While the law was certainly part of their process, the stronger factors, such as family history and individual feelings, were what influenced each brother to use, or not use, the law. This is significant because it throws light on why villagers would turn to infighting, rather than behaving in other ways, such as filing suits, particularly during a time of crisis.

An ethnography of the 9/21 earthquake in Dongshih must not only record what the natural disaster brought about in terms of the human situation. Catastrophe disrupts the usual routines of society, effectively necessitating an ethnographic analysis of events over the history of the structural change. Usually, it takes generations before meaningful transformations in the social structure become manifest for study. A crisis by natural and human forces may more quickly alter what people understand about the meaning of change by exposing the very fabric of their social structure. The 9/21 earthquake, in its aftermath, may exemplify a ‘diagnostic event’, in Sally Falk Moore’s terminology, which ‘reveals ongoing contests and conflicts and competitions and the efforts to prevent, suppress, or repress these’ (1987: 730). One thing extraordinary events can teach anthropologists is that the moment of discovery is important not only for uncovering the fault lines in everyday life but also for understanding the systems and processes that typically escape us during normalcy.