This interdisciplinary study brings together perspectives from literature, anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, history, philosophy, and art to explore the culture of a fully industrialized society with a traditional Chinese background.

Stevan Harrell has been visiting Taiwan for study and research since the late 1960s and has conducted anthropological research there on four occasions. Since 1974 he has taught at the University of Washington, where he is now professor of anthropology and director of the honors program. He is author of Ploughshare Village: Culture and Context in Taiwan as well as numerous articles dealing with Taiwanese religion, folk medicine, family organization, economic values, and social change. He has also conducted field research in Sichuan and is coeditor (with Deborah Davis) of Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era.

Huang Chun-chieh is professor of history (a Mencius scholar) at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan. He taught Chinese intellectual history at the University of Washington in Seattle (1986-1987). He is author of four books (in Chinese) on Confucianism and four books (also in Chinese) on postwar Taiwan and is coeditor (with Erik Zürcher) of Norms and the State in China (1993).

Foreword -- Introduction: Change and Contention in Taiwan's Cultural Scene -- Culture in "Crisis": Views of the Past and Outlooks for the Future -- Cultural Policy on Postwar Taiwan -- Civil Society and Taiwan's Quest for Identity -- Taiwan and the Confucian Aspiration: Toward the Twenty-first Century -- Culture at the Individual Level: Education and Attitudes -- Investment in Education and Human Resource Development in Postwar Taiwan -- Transformation of Farmers' Social Consciousness in Postwar Taiwan -- culture with a Small c: Everyday Life -- Changes in Postwar Taiwan and Their Impact on the Popular Practice of Religion -- Playing in the Valley: A Metonym of Modernization in Taiwan -- Tourism, Formulation of Cultural Tradition, and Ethnicity: A Study of the Daiyan Identity of the Wulai Atayal -- Culture with a Big C: Literature and the Arts -- Sociocultural Change in Taiwan as Reflected in Short Fiction: 1979-1989 -- Modern Poetry in Taiwan: Continuities and Innovations -- Painters of the Postwar Generation in Taiwan -- Feminist Consciousness in the Contemporary Fiction of Taiwan