英文摘要
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For the needs of colonial administration in Taiwan, the Japanese Government launched the Investigations of Laws and Customs between 1901 and 1919. However, the project was based on Japanese ethnocentrism that regarded Japan as a "civilized" pioneer and devalued Taiwanese marriage culture and customs. Japanese colonists believed that the bride price in Taiwan's marriage in effect represented human trafficking and that marriage was built on economic needs. Meanwhile, public opinion was also based on cultural evolutionism that propagated the ideas of "civilized marriage" and "new-style wedding." This article focuses on the discourse of "civilized marriage" in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule and explores how the colonists and the colonized respectively established their evolutionary theories of marriage in terms of the bride price issue. This article first discusses how the Japanese Colonial Government identified Taiwanese marriage culture and customs through the Investigations of Laws and Customs and how Taiwanese people gradually changed their wedding ceremonies from the principle of "following and applying old customs" in civil laws to the new idea of "civilized marriage." The article then examines how bride price became the target of marriage reform in the Government's kyōfū (moral reform) policy in the 1920s and suggests that the difference between discourse and practice of banning bride price actually existed in Taiwanese society. In response to Japan's domestic austerity measures and centralized control of social undertakings in the late 1920s, the Colonial Government attempted to extend the focus of civilized marriage discourse from "banning bride price" to "abolishing empty formalities." Although the colonists' main purpose was austerity, Taiwanese intellectuals with self-liberated awareness had different considerations in rejecting the old family system as well resisting the colonists to achieve personal freedom. However, the discourse of civilized marriage, bride price prohibition, and women's social status was always dominated by males. Taiwanese women were not just bargained objects but also lost their voices throughout the discussion.
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