Vietnamese Immigrant Women’s Scientific Worldview in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Pin-yin Liao, 廖斌吟
• Other Authors: Chia-Ling Chiang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/81894716595012682617

碩士 === 國立臺南大學 === 材料科學系碩士班 === 95 === In a multicultural society, cross-cultural encounters are inevitable. To improve more understanding of and respect to various cultures in Taiwan, the purpose of this study is to investigate Vietnamese immigrant women’s scientific worldview. The participants are seven Vietnamese immigrant women studying Chinese in Tainan, Taiwan. Data were mainly collected by semi-structural interviews. Each of the participants had been interviewed for 3-5 times and spent about 1-1.5 hours for each time. Based on Kearney’s logico-structural worldview theory, Vietnamese immigrant women’s scientific worldview is able to be represented as seven universals: self, nonself, classification, relationship, causality, space and time. Moreover, five of the universals--self, nonself, classification, relationship and causality--are built up as a model in this study. In this model, the axis is constructed by sef-nonself which is represented as a continuous number line. Some domains, such as human, god, ghost, animal and plant, are distributed on the line, and the spirit and body are the classification criteria. Human beings and animals, for example, are regarded as the integration with bodies and spirits. Gods, ghosts and devils have the spirit but without the body. Plants, in contrast, have the body but without the spirit. For Vietnamese immigrant women, the harmonious and friendly relationship between self and nonself is very important; therefore, they offer sacrifices to gods, ancestors and ghosts. Furthermore, they cherish the used things, so that the mutual relationship between self and nonself could be maintained. Besides, Vietnamese immigrant women have multi-collateral causal presuppositions which are used to explain phenomena depending on the contexts. Vietnamese immigrant women’s perceptions of time are multiple. Their cognition of time is both linear and oscillating, and the ways they judge the time period are not only by the clock and calendar, but also by their family life. Based on the living geo-environment and commonly used terms about space, Vietnamese immigrant women tend to represent space sequentially and use relevant reference frames.