No abstract

In recent discussions about event as the foundation of historical research, it is William H Sewell Jr who has developed the most comprehensive version. However, Sewell’s theory of the event is not adequately articulated and is even one-sidedly dominated by his theory of structure. He did not take the problem of self-reference (and therefore circular causality) seriously enough, with the consequence that his emphasis on eventful temporality and contingency could not be carried through to the end. This article attempts to overcome such shortcomings by introducing Niklas Luhmann’s insights, which take a fully temporalized concept of event as departure, in order to build an adequate theory of event that complements the idea of eventful temporality.

No abstract

No abstract

In Taiwan, sociology is ‘the Western knowledge’ by its origin, and inevitably will be indigenized, especially in the process of teaching or researching. The development of sociology in postwar Taiwan takes a crooked path. It is in the crooked path to postwar that the indigenization in Taiwan’s sociology takes different faces, employing different terminology and constellating around different academic figures to embody the indigenization as we have known today. Although the path from sinicization to Taiwanization may nicely capture the basic line of Taiwan’s sociology after the Second World War, it does fail to reveal the details that can suggest to a more dynamic, more controversial side of indigenization. In this short article, we review the emergence, transformation, and invisibilization of indigenization in postwar Taiwan in the following three aspects: its periodization, the socio-political background in which the debate is embedded, and the key issues involved. While the indigenization debate has been subsiding in last decade, we will argue that the ideal which the debate evinces is still significant and influential. In conclusion, we propose an alternative view to rethink the indigenization of Taiwan’s sociology. In terms of reciprocal comparison and connected histories, Taiwan’s case exemplifies an alternative trajectory of modernity, which is potential to correct the hitherto double historical misrecognition of modernity upheld by classical sociological theories, and to build a new synthesis or a new theory of modernities.