英文摘要 |
The foreign brides in Taiwan are an undeniable social fact."One must be blind to overlook them. In the same measure, thinking of them as non-Taiwanese elements is a naive and unrealistic projection. In fact, they contribute to the formation of Taiwanese society in the full sense. Although the presence of foreign brides is evident, they are often treated and experience themselves as strangers. Georg Simmel defined the stranger as "the one that comes today and stays for tomorrow (wer, der heute kom mtund morgen bleibt)" (1908: 509). The strangeness of the foreign brides does not, of course, come from their immanent attributions, but from the relationship, from the everyday contacts with the people in Taiwan. In this article, I will examine the inclusion/exclusion-process of foreign brides from Luhmann's systems theory, but in a critical way. Based on Luhmann, Rudolf Stichweh (2002) points that the inclusion/exclusionprocess in the functional differentiated society does not obey a status-based schemata any longer. We witness instead a process of individualization andmultiplication of inclusion/exclusion. Consequently, this leads to the invalidity of the classical concept of the "stranger", which according to Stichweh, signifies a compact social object. But in the case of foreign brides in Taiwan, we will see contrary findings. Foreign brides in Taiwan are to a certain extent still marked as a compact social object because their chance of inclusion in most areas is correlated with their status as foreign brides,
including political participation, educational chance and economic accomplishment. |