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Over the past 30 years, the most significant transformation in fishing villages across Taiwan has been the shift towards a leisure and tourism-oriented industry. Since the mid-1990s, to address challenges such as population outflow, aging demographics, labor shortages, industrial decline, economic stagnation, and community decay, the leisure and tourism model has become a widespread solution for Taiwan's fishing villages. This transformation has involved various aspects, including fisheries, fishing ports, fishing villages, fishermen, and even the broader coastal areas. The current landscape of Taiwan’s fishing villages and the general public’s perception of them have been deeply influenced by nearly 30 years of tourism development, with a concrete manifestation of this tourism being the rapid growth of "new festivals" in these villages. This lecture integrates theoretical perspectives from sociology of tourism, nationalism studies, and "experience economy" to examine major social changes driven by tourism. Topics that will be discussed include the origins and development of new festivals and tourism in fishing villages, the content and nature of these new festivals, the public’s festival tourism experiences, as well as how tourism has altered the relationship between fishing villages and the outside world. The lecture also explores the impact of fishing village tourism on the relationships between local communities and the state and its role in nation-building.

Speaker：A-Chin Hsiau (Research Fellow and Professor, Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica)
A-chin HSIAU is a research fellow and professor at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica. He works on the areas of nationalism, generational identity, historical narrative, collective memory, territorial disputes, and cultural and rural tourism. He is the author of Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism (2000), Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan: Youth, Narrative, Nationalism (2021), Return to Reality: Political and Cultural Change in 1970s Taiwan and the Postwar Generation (in Chinese, 2nd edition, 2010), Reconstructing Taiwan: Contemporary Cultural Politics of Nationalism (in Chinese, 2012), and Contemporary Cultural Politics of Taiwanese Nationalism (in Korean, 2024). He is the co-editor of Cultural, Ethnic, and Political Nationalism in Contemporary Taiwan: Bentuhua (2005), Ethnicity, Nation, and the Modern State: Rethinking Theory and Experience in Taiwan and China (in Chinese, 2016), Les Liens de la Memoire: Itineraires Taïwanais (2024), and The Bonds of Memory: Taiwanese Itineraries (in Chinese, forthcoming). He is about to finish a book in Chinese entitled Experiencing the Local: the Ocean, Fishing Village Tourism, and Taiwan's National Imaginary.