Title
Parameters of Legitimation and the Environmental Future of a Taipei Neighborhood
Files
Description
Published as Chapter 21 of Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories in Environment Injustice,Sylvia Hood Washington, Heather Goodall & Paul Rosier, eds. p>Based on ethnographic fieldwork with community activists, this article demonstrates how urban residents use local history to justify demands on the city government, making a past they never experienced relevant to their personal biographies in ways more potent than appeals to law or representative democracy. It argues that scholarship on collective memory benefits from explicitly examining how, and why, group members make history relevant to their individual selves, a process I call the personalization of history. This examination inevitably encompasses not only the rhetorical tropes and ritual practices of the those who personalize history but also the values and expectations of the society they address. In this case, the community activist group seeking to affect its locality chooses the tropes of personalization because emotionally laden biographical experience, more than structural relations, historical realities, or legal strictures, legitimates political action in its society.
Publication Date
1-1-2006
Publisher
Lexington Books
City
Lanham
ISBN
978-0-7391-0912-0
First Page
311
Last Page
330
Keywords
Taiwan, collective memory, community activism, legitimation
Disciplines
Environmental Law | Law
Recommended Citation
Anya Bernstein, Parameters of Legitimation and the Environmental Future of a Taipei Neighborhood in Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories in Environment Injustice 311 (Sylvia Hood Washington, Heather Goodall & Paul Rosier, eds., Lexington Books 2006)
Comments
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