Abstract
Through an exploration of the history and development of Taiwanese local museums, this article aims to analyse the relationship between cultural construction and collective identity born of the encounter between local society and nationalist ideology. The analysis follows two distinct but complementary paths. On the one hand, it engages with the political anthropology of the Nation-State, resituating the three distinct waves of museum-building in their local context and seeking to identify the different forms of state intervention in local affairs. It highlights the ways in which politics imbricates itself in cultural representation under different political regimes. And on the other, it looks at the inextricable conflict between diverse forms of Taiwanese nationalism. The author draws on and develops ideas of the cultural imaginary and state formation to explore what he terms “the disappearance of society”, a phenomenon he locates in the construction of local museums, caught up in an identity complex which is part and parcel of wider democratic processes.