英文摘要 |
This study examines the phenomena of“taking a wife as a commodity”among the substraturn in Taiwan from the Qing dynasty to the early era of Japanese colonial rule. In an era when the mode of production maintained stability, marriage stood at the center of the traditional social structure. However, men who were unable to support their family due to poverty. illness, indolence. or extravagance turned to wife-selling and mortgaging as a survival strategy Sometimes the husband married off his wife to someone else, or else tolerated or abetted his wife's illicit intercourse. The author utilizes cases from the Qing legal documents, contracts, journalism, customs investigation reports, Japanese court verdicts, and other sources to investigate sex work within maptal contexts. Understanding this topic allows researchers to reconstruct marital pedigrees in the Taiwanese substratum, and detect how they employed their agency to transform the values of the upper stratum. |