Abstract
Sociological researches on 1980s' social turmoil have usually focused on political factors to explain why there emerged social protests in the period. It's argued that due to lessening of political control, various 'social forces' were made possible to emerge. In this paper, in contrast, we argue that political liberation constitute only a 'passive' explanation for the development of social forces. To have a more appropriate explanation, we need to explore the factors concerning why people have come to actively involve in the production of various social protests. In this sense, we try to answer the question about the culture origins of social forces. To achieve this, we go back to the 1970s, and analyze how people's attitude had changed to react to environmental pollution, which in turn is regarded to contribute to the development of various social protests in the early 1980s. By means of content analysis to newspaper, we find that in the 1970-86 period, people had undergone three stages regarding how their bodies react to the environmental pollution: the suffered body, the victimized body and the sacrilegious body. It is argued that with the change in the body concept, and particularly, with the emergence of the concept of sacrilegious body, people were therefore made 'unbearable' to the environmental pollution, a fact which 'positively' explain why people rebelled in the early 1980s. Theoretical implication is also discussed.