Rejecting roots
When Aboriginal people do succeed in making a move up to a higher social stratum, they have the opportunity and ability to deconstruct -- or detoxify -- the poison in the colonizers' myths. Regrettably, however, these successful Aborigines tend to identify with the values and moral judgments of the colonizer and their myths, drawing closer to them and criticizing the people from which they originated.
In fact, the formation of the Aboriginal drinking culture myth is closely tied to Aboriginal intelligentsia: In order to rationalize their own alcoholic, disorderly behavior, they get all Aboriginal people to recite this stuff after them.
The "drinking myth" has even become a prop for Aborigines to cling to as they go through a crisis in cultural identity.
This corresponds to what social psychologists say: a needy culture enters a generational vicious circle, and corresponding "self-fulfilling prophecies" emerge in the collective subconscious of its members. When reporters in the media conduct their so-called in-depth reports, they rarely fail to notice scenes of Aboriginal people affirming drinking culture as being the same thing as Aboriginal culture. The lazy and faddish nature of reporters prevents them from seeing the power structure of this discourse and taking the next step of seeking out the causes of this phenomenon.
What is bizarre about this is that with the "best intentions" of not destroying Aboriginal drinking culture, the Monopoly Bureau has found a way out of the predicament of having to compete in a globalized market.
And so, Red Label Rice Wine is still being produced, and government and media continue to perform an absurdist comedy of Aboriginal exploitation.
Isak Afo (以撒克．阿復) is convener of the Aboriginal Labor Alliance (-鮐磳螫??u聯盟) and is an Amis tribesman from the Mataian (馬?蚞b) Aboriginal community in Hualien County. This article is reprinted courtesy of the Austronesian News (南島時3?I>) and was translated by Martin Williams.
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