This month saw the online launch of an English-language book that it is hoped will enhance Taiwan studies at universities in Europe and further afield, providing a wider audience with unique insight into a field of study that is attracting increasing attention.
Taiwan’s Contemporary Indigenous Peoples is the result of a lecture series at London’s Centre of Taiwan Studies, part of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. These talks on issues related to Taiwanese Aborigines formed the basis of the new publication, the whole project facilitated by a grant from Taipei’s Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines (順益台灣原住民博物館).
“Within Taiwanese universities there has been a rapid growth in the numbers of Indigenous teaching and research programs in the last decade,” says Dafydd Fell, director of the centre. “There have also been parallel trends in Indigenous language promotion in the media, such as Indigenous Television, and in schools. Since some of these Indigenous studies programs in Taiwan are also developing English language courses, we are hoping our book can be widely used in Taiwan.”
Photos courtesy of Dafydd Fell
Fell added that within the field of international Taiwan Studies there has been a similar growth in interest in Aboriginal topics, but much of this work tended to be dispersed across different disciplines. The book brings together studies on modern Taiwanese Indigenous topics.
Both trends form part of a growing global interest in Indigenous studies that Taiwan is just one part of, with the nation providing fascinating examples of a number of aspects of contemporary indigeneity. Part of a multi-ethnic society with diverse cultural characteristics, Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples have lived on the island for thousands of years. Their languages belong to the Austronesian family and they have close cultural ties to Oceania and the South Pacific.
The book has four section themes: historical perspectives, the arts, education and politics. Chapters are written not only by academics but also by writers from within the Taiwanese Indigenous rights movement.
The authors who spoke about their respective chapters in the book at its launch, described by Fell as “four giants of Taiwan studies,” highlight the diversity of its content.
Niki Alsford showed that as a result of land dispossession, lack of employment opportunities and the deterioration of traditional livelihoods, there has been a significant increase in Indigenous domestic migration into urban environments. This has made it important for Indigenous peoples to maintain a framework of traditions and values compatible with multiple community-based, pan-Indigenous and wider Taiwanese identities.
Scott Simon talked about how Indigenous peoples have adapted Christianity to their local cultural context rather than passively accepting external values, defining contemporary religious communities and institutions as hybrid creations not foreign impositions.
Kerim Friedman used the concept of chronotope to discuss shifting representations of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples in documentary films, while Chang Bi-yu (張必瑜) discussed representations of Indigenous peoples in educational materials, focusing on the dominance of a “Han perspective” and the stigmatization and reduction of Indigenous peoples to limited social and physical spheres.
Fell says there has been growing interest in Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples among students at the Centre for Taiwan Studies.
“I think students are often curious about the way many of the trends we see in Indigenous society are quite different from the rest of Taiwan. For instance, patterns in Indigenous voting behavior and party identification,” he says.
A more inclusive approach to Indigenous cultures at present contrasts with past efforts aimed at enforcing assimilation.
“This did a huge amount of damage in the area of language policies, as so many Indigenous languages in Taiwan became endangered,” Fell says. “It is encouraging to see the way Indigenous cultures have become a source of pride and part of Taiwan’s national branding in recent years.”
Fell says that Taiwan has used Indigenous or Austronesian heritage as part of its international diplomacy efforts, particularly in its relations with the Pacific region, this forming the subject matter of one of the book’s chapters.
However, as pointed out at the book launch, Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples are still often misunderstood, with a tendency for them to be inaccurately portrayed as a homogeneous, exotic group.
There is also plenty of scope for further study of a number of important issues including Indigenous sovereignty, urban indigeneity (bearing in mind that more than 50 percent of Indigenous people now live in urban areas) and Indigenous knowledge, particularly relating to environmental issues.
The advent of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has spawned a new genre of fantasy and science fiction in which males (invariably white) argue that it is an “opportunity” or that the government should open up and let the virus run its course. After all, Omicron is “mild,” as numerous studies are now showing, and even more so among the previously infected and/or vaccinated population. It’s time, they argue, to accept that COVID-19 will be with us forever and re-open the country. The government must face reality, must “move from denial to acceptance” as one recent poster on LinkedIn put
It’s as if the outside world conspired to rob Yanshuei (鹽水) of its importance and prosperity. As waterways filled with silt, access to the ocean — which had made it possible for this little town, several kilometers from the sea in the northern part of Tainan, to become a major entrepot — was lost. The north-south railway, a key driver of economic development during the 1895-1945 period of Japanese rule, never arrived. Then, in the 1970s, the sugar industry went into terminal decline. Like Taiwan’s other old settlements, Yanshuei used to be a walled town. The defensive barrier is long
We weave our way through an old cemetery in the dark, as the sound of our quarry gets closer. At the foot of an old tomb, beneath a pile of rubble, we find what we are looking for. Tonight we embark on the seventh and final stage of the Taipei Grand Trail (台北大縱走). Starting with an ascent up to Zhinan Temple (指南宮), on past the famous Maokong Potholes (貓空壺穴), we then meander through the tea plantations and tea houses overlooking Taipei city, finally ending the epic adventure back down at National Chengchi University (國立政治大學). This section was deliberately left until the end
Are you in control of your smartphone or is it in control of you? Sometimes it is difficult to tell. One minute you might be using FaceTime to chat with loved ones or talking about your favorite TV show on Twitter. Next, you’re stuck in a TikTok “scroll hole” or tapping your 29th e-mail notification of the day and no longer able to focus on anything else. We often feel like we can’t pull ourselves away from our devices. As various psychologists and Silicon Valley whistleblowers have stated, that is by design. Many people are making efforts to resist and step away
RSS