This research is focused on the revitalization and the utilization of folklore in Yilan County, Taiwan, which centers upon the experience and the folklore process of “culture-oriented development”. By using the approaches of public folklore and local anthropology research, the research background was set before post-martial law period, when the county magistrate, Ting-nan Chen started the political resistance and cultural turn with local value and localism. Afterward, the next magistrate, Shyi-Kun Yu continued to reconstruct local culture and cultural governance based on folklore to try to shape the possible paradigm in regional society since December 1989.
Since 1980, the trends and the traits of the development in Yilan County have started to evolve its unique culture in Taiwan. At the time, Shyi-Kun Yu utilized the political resource and folkloristic capital to establish “150th anniversary of the land development of Yilan County” as the birthday of the land of Yilan. The process also created the field of cultural policy to expand the strategic context of the tradition of “culture-oriented development”. This research opens up the discussion that during the process, Yu used folklore as the new traits and construction of the experience reconstruction model of provincialism and localization.
The structure of this research begins in chapter two with the background information of the rise of localization and the formation of the experience of “culture-oriented development” in Yilan, and Ting-nan Chen’s strategic basis of localization which was his new political traits and the thinking of governance.
Chapter three to six are the core chapters of this research, which describe the cultural policy in Yilan, to discuss, how the revitalization of traditional festivals can rebuild the local collective memory in Yilan, how the local identification was shaped by the spatial memory and the reinterpretation, how the traditional theatrical opera could be continued and become the local identification codes, and how the movement of local community could rebuild the local history and start community development of localization.
To conclude the research results, the experience of “culture-oriented development” in Yilan was constituted by the new culture created by the folklore capital through the folklore process, which formed the logic of development and the social traits of the political resistance. The local construction was the process of the cultural penetration from the outside of the system to the inside, which was the folklore process that the political elites from the opposition parties who held the leadership of local culture followed the specific values and strategies to choose, intervene, and create folklore capital. The gradually evolving values and strategies fairly formed the local knowledge, local meaning system and local bonding in Yilan.