Taking the emergence of the first vegetarian organization in Victorian England as a case, this article argues that “what vegetarianism is” is an ongoing social process that is determined by how social actors link its boundaries. Although in hindsight, people tend to take what an idea is for granted and treat it as a constant, what an idea was, is, and will be in fact depends heavily on what ideas can penetrate the boundaries of the specific idea and vice versa. Adopting Abbott’s alternative approach that boundaries come before entities, the case study of the emergence of modern vegetarianism serves to further illustrate the complexity between boundaries and entities and the emergent aspect of the process of “boundaries-into-entities.” A connection is also made to align Abbott’s suggested approach with Star and Griesemer’s ecological approach.

Consistent with memory studies' emphasis on the tight relationship between memory and identity, this article regards nation-building as an ongoing social process of nation-remembering. Taking the official Chinese nationalism in Taiwan from 1949 through 1987 as the case, this study aims to demonstrate the significant role that commemorative narratives play in nation-remembering. Facing extraordinary difficulties, the master commemorative narrative of official Chinese nationalism led its intended national members to remember their Chinese-hood (thereby maintaining its legitimacy) by telling a shared past, present, and future. That is, collective memory facilitates the imagination of people's commonalities in a community. Moreover, the abstractness of commemorative narratives allows room for employing mnemonic techniques to narrate a preferred shared past, present, and thus future for people to memorize their national identification. In addition to detailing the employed mnemonic techniques observed in the official Chinese nationalism, how the narrated shared past, present, and future are introduced as a package in the commemorative narrative to construct an organic whole and how the commemorative narrative undergoes ongoing modifications are discussed as well.

Agreeing with the constructivist approach to nationalism, this article argues that the prevailing ambiguous attitude towards nationality among people in Taiwan is a reflection of different waves of nation‐building − each led people to imagine a distinct nation − and the mixture of these waves during past decades. Whereas all nations are artificially imagined, ‘the style in which they are imagined’ should be examined. This article aims to distinguish three waves of nation‐building in Taiwan after 1949 and address the issue of superimposition of contradictory elements in producing nation‐ness to highlight that nation‐building is a path‐dependent process. Three suppositions can be derived from the investigation of Taiwan's case. First, people are not empty vessels and the new national imagination has to compete and coexist with vestiges and crystallizations of former imaginations. Second, the content of a single nation‐building programme may be reinvented according to the external and/or internal environment. Third, depending on the social atmosphere, official nationalism may adopt a different method to instil the national imagination.

This paper investigates the invention of a Chinese National

This article unveils how love, as a signified, can be constituted by the artificially constructed symbolic signs (“signifiers”) represented in our everyday life. Only when we regard love as a symbolic system and try to decipher its meanings can we understand how love is transmitted through sociomental patterns. This article attempts to provide examples from language, symbolic materials, the imprinted body, the code of temporality, and the spatial aspect to interpret the general elements that commonly form the forest of love symbols. Moreover, this article introduces cognitive sociology as a significant analytic approach to examining love. On the one hand, taking the “semantic square” proposed by Zerubavel, I articulate that when we want to understand the meanings of symbols, we usually have to embed them into their symbolic context. On the other hand, based on the distinction between marked and unmarked social categories proposed by Brekhus, I explain that more often than not, we can shed light on the marked love types even when we focus on love issues. Last, this article reminds us that the symbols of love are not fixed and constant but change according to the transformations of context.