Sun, Sep 09, 2012 page8

• Aboriginal cultural roots run deep

  • By Kwan Hwa-san 關華山
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  A thorough appreciation of the features and value of one’s cultural assets is a core factor in the task of preserving it.

  Taiwan’s tangible and intangible cultural assets can be divided into a number of constitutent parts: Han Chinese culture; the Austronesian culture of Taiwan’s Aborigines; the colonial cultural legacy arising from colonization by the Dutch, Spanish and Japanese; and the cultural influences brought by modernization. To these can be added the cultural strata discovered by archeologists both underground and underwater.

  Although government officials and the general public have made considerable progress in recent years in their appreciation of the features and value of these aspects of Taiwanese culture, in some respects it is still not enough. Even though concerned people have been trying for decades to get a cultural assets law enacted, their efforts have not met with success.

  Problems can arise when archeological remains get in the way of land development. Legislators often think these remains are just “trash” left behind by our forebears, and when human remains and stone coffins are dug up, people think it will bring bad luck.

  However, the most important aspect is that people in general still do not understand enough about the culture of Taiwan’s Aboriginal tribes.

  It is true that in recent years the public has gradually become more familiar with the names of various Aboriginal tribes, such as the Atayal, Paiwan, Bunun and so on. However, although a lot of people have seen the film Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, they probably still do not fully understand the Atayal’s gaga (or gaya) belief system, their belief in ancestral spirits or their traditional moral values, so it is hard for outsiders to enter into the Atayal’s worldview and deeply empathize with them. The fundamental reason is that the traditions of Taiwan’s Austronesian tribes are relatively “primitive,” making it hard for modern people to understand them unless they have some knowledge of anthropology.

  What does “primitive” mean in this context? The progress of human civilization started out from bands of hunters and gatherers formed according to blood relations. This was the form that human communities took in the Paleolithic period, or Old Stone Age. Only with the rise of farming in the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, did people start to settle down and gradually form tribal societies. From then on, societies evolved to the stage of having chiefs and lords and eventually states began to emerge. Taiwan’s Aborigines, for their part, have always lived in small populations that never established even small states.

  Taiwan’s Austronesian people are not homogenous — they have always been divided into a large number of tribes with small populations.

  From the point of view of the modern notion of culture and creativity, the Aborigines are definitely to be admired for having created such a diverse system of cultures on an island as small as Taiwan, despite being small in number and having lived contentedly in their limited territories without any thought of unification through conquest.

  The Aborigines’ animistic beliefs and their belief in ancestral spirits gave rise to the custom of headhunting, since they regarded heads taken from their enemies as an important object of worship that could increase their tribe’s spiritual powers. This belief system linked the life and death of individuals with the survival of a greater self — the tribe — and cannot at all be compared with the cold-blooded, cruel and vicious mutual slaughter that has occurred historically between feudal kingdoms and empires, or the bloody wars that are still waged between modern states.

  For modern people who have read so much about the history of slaughter between rival countries and dynasties and watched so many modern films and plays, it is hard to enter into the world of “primitive” Aboriginal tribes. Therein lies the biggest difference between the two films Seediq Bale and Apocalypto.

  Apocalypto is about the rulers of a country bullying a little tribe, in which the three members of the family who are at the center of the story flee deep into the mountains and in the end the native kingdom comes face to face with even more powerful conquerors — the Spanish.

  Seediq Bale, on the other hand, is about a small tribe who, having been forced to submit, decide to hunt the heads of people from the colonizing empire as they prepare to face the tragic collective fate that they have arranged for themselves. For the general public, the theme of Apocalypto is relatively easy to understand, whereas it is harder for people to resonate with the theme of Seediq Bale.

  Taiwan’s Aboriginal tribes have small populations, and yet each of them has established its own self-contained cultural system. Under such conditions, their diverse cultural assets are of course “rare animals.” Given their rarity, how can we not cherish them and do all we can to preserve them and explain, teach and pass them on to the next generation? I would like to make two suggestions about how this can be done.

  First, a draft Aboriginal autonomy law has already been submitted to the legislature.

  The text of this draft law clearly states that each tribe would take on greater responsibility for preserving and upholding its own cultural assets. In the past, the Council for Cultural Affairs, which has since been upgraded into the Ministry of Culture, has taken on a lot of tasks on behalf of the Council of Indigenous Peoples. This is different from the way it works with the Hakka Affairs Council, where each organization’s role is clearly defined. As a result, Aborigines’ participation in government-led cultural preservation work is mostly indirect and passive and has been largely overlooked. For example, it appears that no Aborigines were invited to participate in the cultural affairs forum that was held by the Ministry of Culture recently.

  Therefore, the ministry and the Council of Indigenous Peoples should negotiate between themselves as early as possible about how to cooperate on preserving cultural assets. For example, the cultural assets review committees at county and city level that have relatively large Aboriginal populations should invite a certain number of Aborigines to be committee members, so that talented people and youth from the various tribes can participate and become experienced in the system of cultural asset preservation.

  Second, countries like the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all have national museums that have official collections and permanent exhibitions of indigenous peoples’ cultural objects as an affirmation of the main content of these countries’ cultural make-up. In this respect, although the National Taiwan Museum has held a large collection of Aboriginal cultural objects since the Japanese colonial period, space limitations have meant that most of them are kept in storage and have never been formally exhibited in full.

  As to the National Museum of Prehistory, the National Museum of Natural Science and the National Museum of Taiwan History, although they have all held some exhibitions about Aborigines, none of these has been official enough, and none of these museums has a big collection of Aboriginal objects. This poorly coordinated handling of Aboriginal cultural objects by various establishments shows that while the government may have good intentions, it does not attach sufficient importance to this issue.

  Learning to appreciate the great value of Aboriginal tribal culture, recognizing it as an important element of Taiwan’s cultural heritage and resolving to officially protect it are important tasks for everyone in the county today.

  Kwan Hwa-san is a professor at Tunghai University’s Department of Architecture.

  Translated by Julian Clegg
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