This dissertation investigates the relationship between waste recycling and social change. Instead of complying with a prevailing notion of recycling as an environmental solution, or as material... Show moreThis dissertation investigates the relationship between waste recycling and social change. Instead of complying with a prevailing notion of recycling as an environmental solution, or as material conversion and trade, this research maintains that recycling is about people, their relation to objects and environments, their networks of interaction and modes of thoughts. The empirical focus of this dissertation is Tzu-chi recycling: a volunteer-operated, community-based, Buddhism-associated national movement in Taiwan since the 1990s. This research analyzes Tzu-chi recycling at three levels: individual, communal and institutional. It studies Tzu-chi recycling against the backdrop of Taiwan’s drastic social change: the economic and demographic restructuring, a movement of political localization, and the dynamic powers of religious phenomenon. By doing so, the dissertation shows post-authoritarian Taiwan through the lens of waste recycling, and understands waste recycling through Taiwan. Overall, it contends that in different forms of action and ways of seeing, Tzu-chi-associated members redefine recycling as a past-oriented strategy and a redemptive tool to deal with different consequences of modernity. From the vantage point of waste, this research sheds light on the entanglement between a society’s development and its waste as an examination of its continuum and rupture between present and past. Through the chapters of this dissertation, it becomes clear that, above all, rubbish is at the core of meaningful and coordinated social activity; it makes us who we are. Show less
Besides the official care for cultural heritage on Java, which in the 1920s and 1930s was under the responsibility of the Dutch Archeological Service, different attitudes towards heritage are... Show moreBesides the official care for cultural heritage on Java, which in the 1920s and 1930s was under the responsibility of the Dutch Archeological Service, different attitudes towards heritage are identified of which three are discussed more elaborately using three typical case studies. It will become clear how for the local population on Java statues and sites were still places of worship where offerings were made and rituals performed. This use of heritage often clashed with repairs undertaken by the Archeological Service, for instance, for constructional reasons, but which in practice sealed off the heritage for local people for whom it was a site of veneration still. On the other hand, local people sometimes also deliebrately destroyed heritage such as statues who would have had a negative agency. This chapter aims to contribute to how such responses and attitudes should be explained and what questions need to be addressed further to understand the meaning of cultural heritage for the people living nearby heritage sites to whom they are more than reminders of an ancient past. Show less
