Martin, Jeffrey T. Sentiment, Reason, and Law: Policing in the Republic of China on Taiwan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019, 175 pages

Police violence emerged into global headlines in May 2020 after African-American George Floyd died under the knees of a white police officer in Minneapolis. Protestors against police brutality and racism took to the streets, even as far away as Taipei. I grew up in an African-American neighbourhood, so my formative years taught me to fear the police and associate them with violence. When I went to Taiwan as an anthropologist, I was struck by the lack of police patrols, and I was surprised by the relaxed way civilians socialized with officers in police stations over tea. Mystified, I thought such civility merited ethnographic inquiry, and Jeffrey T. Martin took on that job, over eight years of meticulous research in Taipei. Martin opens with Egon Bittner’s definition of police as “a mechanism for the distribution of situationally justified force” (1). Martin, while acknowledging that police violence happens, argues that Taiwan’s police do not ground their authority in claims to sovereign, law-giving violence. Indeed, they openly and systematically yield to other, sometimes more violent, players. The police task becomes one of mediating between the unruly solidarity of the population and the centralized state, through idioms of sentiment, reason, and law (6). Martin succeeds in depicting the life-worlds of police in Taiwan, without succumbing to the Orientalist fallacies that haunt many ethnographies of Taiwan. Indeed, his theoretical insights resonate well beyond Taiwan. Martin invested over a decade in this book, and it shows. Each word is carefully chosen, beginning with the title. There are solid reasons for saying “Republic of China on Taiwan” rather than “Republic of China (Taiwan)” or simply “in Taiwan.” Martin crafts his argument through an introduction and six chapters. Chapter One describes his passage into the world of police work, from a banquet at the police station’s front door, to an erotically tinged foray into a hostess bar, and back to daily rituals of sharing tea. This forms the basis for an innovative reading of politics through a Chinese idiom of sovereignty as zhuquan, literally “host power” (31). Chapter Two traces the history of Taiwanese policing to the period of Japanese administration (1895–1945), when Japan adapted European policing practices to local situations across its Empire. After the Republic of China came to Taiwan in 1945, the new overlords inherited the system, which evolved through martial law and democratization. Chapter Three looks at police patrols as politics of care when officers mediate conflicts in the community. Chapter Four examines the bureaucratic work of case processing. Chapter Five, based on a description of police going through formalities of temporarily clearing an illegal street market, shows the challenges of balancing sentiment, reason and law in a democratic society where citizens increasingly see law as a legitimate expression of popular will that should be equally enforced. Chapter Six, arguing that democracy weakens the police, compares Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement (when students occupied the Legislature for three weeks in 2014) to Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement (which was brutally crushed by police). Only briefly does Martin indulge in metaphysics, to speculate that Taiwan’s model of diffused popular sovereignty is consistent with its polytheistic folk religion (145). Yet, consistency is not causation, and Martin notes judiciously that the study of religion lies beyond the scope of his book. Indeed, Martin avoids the ideological bias of many Taiwan ethnographies, which often construct Taiwan as an avatar to a more traditional China. Four decades ago, Gates and Ahern warned of the pitfalls of such a culturalist approach, to argue that continuity needs to be explained as much as change, and that the key for Taiwan ethnographers is understanding …