Kuo-Ming Hsu

自1990年代中期以來，台灣原住民族紀錄片歷經將近30年的發展，早已形構出獨特的脈絡肌理，但具有歷史視野的系統性研究，至今仍付之闕如。承此，本論文將從發展史的角度切入，具體爬梳原住民族紀錄片的進展歷程，並且，錨定其中三個分期階段，施以更為清晰可見的歷史結構，從不同生產條件提供的多元化時期（1994-2005）、建置原住民族傳播管道的體制化時期（2005-2014），再到屢屢倍受國際影展肯定的國際化時期（2015-），透過這些歷時性階段的深入探討，不只見證解嚴後台灣政治轉型和社會變遷如何深刻影響原住民族群對於紀錄片製作的實踐行動，也充分體現原住民族紀錄片在生產方式、傳播管道、美學表現、影展策略的豐富議題。

在章節架構的布局上，首要側重政治體制統御、策動的具有主宰性的外部驅力，凸顯原住民族紀錄片於發軔之初相當直接的受制關係，但隨著原住民族文化生產場域和傳播生態的自主性增強，台灣紀錄片市場機制逐漸成熟，置身其間的原住民導演身臨這樣的趨勢變化，也開始折射出不同以往的創作向度。簡要地說，第二章在揭開原住民族紀錄片的興起背景時，就特別聚焦在國家文化政策的主導角色，彼此如何借力使力，到了第三章在梳理原住民族傳播權漸次法制化的進程，即著眼於紀錄影像生產與電視媒體組織的運作關係，最後第四章則是探究原住民導演如何回應這個產生結構性變化的社會環境，開創新局，拓展紀錄片創作的國際空間，當中尤以2010年代後出道的原住民青年世代導演對於影展策略、表現形式和製作分工有所突破，值得觀察。

最後，透過原住民族紀錄片的發展研究，充分體現鉅觀的社會結構與微觀的媒介過程之間複雜的連動性。尤其，對於原住民族來說，政治體制主導的政策定向是促成其與紀錄片交會的重要助力，但這也隱隱顯現當中的權力互動並不是完全對立的，而是一種充滿交涉、協商的關係運作。

Over the past thirty years, the filmmakers of Taiwan indigenous documentary have sought their own ways to theorize their works in the contexts since the 1990s. Obviously, a new visibility of a systematic study with historical view is still needed. This dissertation epitomizes vicissitudes of Taiwan indigenous documentary with its historical development. On the other hand, three stages of development are examined with a historical frame: diversity created by a variety of conditions of production (1994-2005), institutionalization of a mass medium of indigenous people in Taiwan (2005-2014), and praise in recognition of international film festivals (2015-the present). They are not only an account of how political transformation as well as social changes have an influence on indigenous people in Taiwan, but also an embodiment of production, medium, aesthetics, and marketing in film festivals.

The early development of Taiwan indigenous documentary closely hinged on politics and was dominated by external force. Nevertheless, the market of Taiwan documentary has been gradually lively and strong while the fields of cultural production and media publicity changed and became more and more independent. Hence, the filmmakers started to add a new dimension to their cinematic productions. Chapter Two focuses on the role that cultural policy plays in the emergence of Taiwan indigenous documentary. Chapter Three shows an intangibly interweaving of production of documentary and media in the process of institutionalization of the rights of indigenous people. Chapter Four is an observation of how indigenous filmmakers, especially those of youth generation who have produced films since 2010, respond to social changes. They make every endeavor to participate in the international film festivals and challenge strategies of film festivals, cinematic forms, and division of labor.

To sum up, a survey of the development of Taiwan indigenous documentary unveils a sophisticated interconnectedness of macro (social structure) and micro (medium). Though filmmakers of indigenous documentary in Taiwan are reinforced to address to the policy makers, they don’t regard them as their adversary. Instead, they sometimes play a pivotal role of supporter in the process of compromise and negotiation.

This research is based on the documents about the cultivation legends of Liuk Tui hakka settlements to emphasize “Kai-Ji (meaning “founding” in Chinese)” stories for discovering how settlement legends have constructed the cultural context of historical representation of “common origin,” which is a subjectivity of place for pinpointing and revealing a community. To make it specific, critics of folk literature tend to regard characters, events, or places as a part in textual analysis, ignoring the context of literary production, especially that of the settlement legends. Therefore, this research will make use of environmental psychology theories, and three space concepts, settlement locations, water sources and natural landscapes, as standing point for observation, and, in addition, with the reference of Taiwan Fort Map drawn by Taiwan Governor-General Office in 1904 to compare texts and space, helping the readers understand the process of becoming between Liuk Tui settlement legends and making it accessible to figure out how Hakka ancestors became familiar with their life environment and how they evoked the memory of the past of villages. At the end of this research, it suggested that the importance of Liuk Tui settlement legends is its historical representation in the process of village development as well as its common memories of village members. The most important part is the space-cultural-historical practice like this enables to continuously reunite, convert or create the “common origin” of settlements.

This paper reexamines the cultivation legends that currently exists in Liuk Tui Hakka settlements and attempts to discuss the fengshui practices involved. This paper also explores how the Chinese traditional fengshui culture is emphasized through the discursive practice of the cultivation legends and how the fengshui culture constructs the context and content of the community’s locality. Specifically, according to the narrative of the Liuk Tui cultivation legends, it’s obvious that the formation and development of the settlement’s spaces are not merely changed according to its environmental landscape. The spatial development is also influenced by the inspiration, recognition, and interpretation of fengshui culture, the actual practices of the fengshui masters, and the acknowledgment and reaction to fengshui culture among the general public. The interaction between settlement spaces and geomancy fengshui, in particular, reflected that the environmental knowledge of local residents has gradually developed into a multiple and complex spatial practice. Therefore, it is important to examine how the fengshui culture was acknowledged and practiced among different settlements of Liuk Tui under its social-geometrical-historical context. Through the distinctive literature genre of “legends”, how was the discursive practices of the fengshui culture which is identifiable, understandable, and applicable been developed is an essential prerequisite. Lastly, this paper also inquires what “locality” meaning does the fengshui practices based on cultivation legends produced and constructed. These observation and inquiries will help highlight the fengshui culture in Liuk Tui settlement and demonstrate the continuing changes and transformation of the application of the cultivation legends according to the local demands, which greatly influenced the settlement’s development.

This essay explores the Taiwanese anthropologist Tai-Li Hu’s three ethnographic films focusing on Taiwanese indigenous rituals in the 1980s—The Return of Gods and Ancestors: Paiwan Five-year Ceremony (1984), Songs of Pasta’ay (1988), and Returning Souls (2012). On the one hand, how Hu intermediates spiritual tradition by documenting the traditional rituals of indigenous tribes embodies contemporary changes. On the other hand, Hu stimulates incipient discussions about new spaces, new perspectives, and new discourses on traditional cultural revival and tribal building of the indigenous intellectuals, who return to tribes to act on “cultural activism” in her recent work, Returning Souls. Hu transforms the cultural context of tribe through tracing the origin of spiritual tradition accordingly. Furthermore, she presents the difficulties of negotiation with different dynamics engaging in reviving tribal cultures in light of cultural interventions in the contemporary society. The three documentaries represent a binary opposition between “the traditional” and “the modern” in the culture of Taiwan indigenous people with cinematic features and critical discourses in perspective. Spiritual tradition, which has shown an affinity for the vicissitudes of extrinsic surrounding of the society and cultural background, gives us a vision of creative transformation step by step. Bringing up an in-depth examination of spiritual tradition, these documentaries provide the leavening in a transcultural situation.

This paper aims to analyze the contemporary works of the history of the indigenous people in Taiwan. On the one hand, the author examines the transformation of historical vicissitude from “oral tradition” to “written text” to show how “the past in the present” is re-memorized, presented, and constructed. On the other hand, the author explores the dialectical relationship between “myth” and “history.” As the title implies, this paper draws a theoretical response to the well-known book chapter, “When Myth Becomes History,” by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Not only the government departments have coordinated the writing, revising, and publishing projects of “history of the indigenous people in Taiwan” actively, but also the indigenous intellectuals have realized the importance of construction of history, which plays an inevitable role in the subject matter of racial identities and subjectivity when they went back to revive the tribes since the 1990s. Nevertheless, how “the past” is selected, created, and quoted when the government departments intervene tactfully in the projects of “history of the indigenous people in Taiwan” in “cultural politics” terms? A crucial point that the author wants to make concerns the de-contextualization, re-contextualization, and textualization of “oral tradition.” This triangulation has ruptured the tradition of socio-cultural meanings and their practices of the rituals and everyday life in tribes. Meanwhile, this rupture might “reconstruct” the cultural roots and ancestral depth of emotion of the indigenous people with an “origin” of myth or history. The author believes that the argument mentioned above is a dialectical process concerning with historical construction and cultural politics for the indigenous people in Taiwan.

The emphasis of this study is put on community documentary, a less focused but gradually developed in the Taiwanese new documentary films. In the process of filmmaking, its main purpose is to encourage community residents to record their stories, to form residents’ attention, memory and identity and, moreover, to accumulate local value and represent the point of view of community residents. In 1994, “Community Empowerment” has become the government’s cultural policy to actively generate the force of “civil society” for constructing local subjectivity. Besides, “Quanjing Xuepai”, which has to be hereby mentioned, also appeared in the same period (1988-2006) and provided alternative thinking and development context on creation ideas and aesthetics performance of contemporary Taiwanese documentary films. Furthermore, “Quanjing Xuepai” is highly interactive with “Community Empowerment with Videos”, which was proposed at that time. Thus, under this background and social circumstances, this study mainly discusses two parts as below: First, which effects on politics and aesthetics of Taiwanese community documentaries will be caused in the later days after the documentary movements guided by “Community Empowerment” and “Quanjing Xuepai” were greatly launched by government’s cultural policy? Second, when we use these community documentaries taken in Meinung from 1999 to 2009 on the transformation of topic, purpose and description to deliberate how to make community documentaries become local practices of government’s cultural policy, does it include strong local subjective awareness? Or, could it be another crisis?

The prestigious Taiwan Indigenous Voice Bimonthly launched two literary prizes Taiwan Indigenous Voice Prize and China Motor Corporation Indigenous Literature Prize in 1995 and 2000. Through an analysis on both prizes, this article explores the ethnic struggle of indigenous literature over aesthetic value. First, in challenging the forms of literary and aesthetic hierarchy that exist between majority and minority writers, although the prizes aimed to emphasize special aspects of ‘history of tribe’ in order to break down the category of major literature, the judges did little to question their own aesthetic assumption that was strongly influenced by the majority. Second, in the effort to grant indigenous literature, paradoxically, the imagination of the indigenous as the ‘Other’ was embodied for the effort given by a large portion of Han ethnic judges. Through the investigation of the indigenous literary prizes, it is clear to see how the prizes presented as an ongoing negotiation between the major and the minor literature, and at the same time the prizes also produced a dialectic in which the ‘indigeneity’ developed between disappearance and emerging.

I believe literary criticisms that engage with language, form, and theme are too simplified to resolve power relation, aesthetic standards, canon debate, particular literary and cultural phenomena, etc. In addition, neither de-colonizing nor post-colonial discourse could theorize the issues of Taiwan indigenous literature, because actually both of them fix minor literature. Hence, I emphasize that the process of “negotiation” plays a very important role in the space of minor literature when it encounters the judgment of major literature by Tuobasi Tamapima's The Last Hunter.

This essay aims to problematize, deepen, and contextualize the discussion on prose of the crucial Taiwan writer and critic Yu Kwuan-chung to reconsider the unconcealed meaning of his coming up with “modern prose.” What is important is how “modern prose” is produced with consciousness of the traditional evaluation of literariness and the “poeticized poetics” due to Yu’s status of being a leading role of “modern prose.” In addition, how it is produced from the views of the aesthetic consciousness, the position of leading, and the literary tradition (the historical meaning of the genres) is also the question to ask. By dealing with the case study of “modern prose,” the shift of modern(ist) prose could be reexamined in a broader perspective to engage its interaction with historical vicissitudes.

This paper aims to discuss the new edition of Siraya mo i P'an Yin-hua by Yeh Shih-t'ao. On one hand, the main goal is to explore the conglomeration of (multi-)racial development. By using the spacial symbols of “Mother Earth” of Ping-pu women, Yeh Shih-t'ao ultimately constructs the interpretation of “Taiwan as a multi-racial immigrant society” with the sexual intercourse of “Mother Earth” and five male who are from other ethnic groups respectively. One the other hand, this paper further focuses on how racial issue strengthens the dominance of patriarchy through the P'an Yin-hua's being sexualized. The purpose of this argument is to discover Yeh Shih-t'ao's political ideologies of his practice of writing, sense of locality, and historical interpretation, etc, by mapping the role of indigenous female genitors who are “fertilized.” When intending to give Ping-pu women the extreme agency, the characterizations has to do with the problems like the existed differences and the native's horizon. Hence, the novel presents the distorted female who is connected to the complicated and paradoxical intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Undeniably, Yeh Shih-t'ao's multi-racial writing which leads to the construction of Taiwan consciousness (and its discourses) under the patriarchal structure could not be complete without P'an Yin-hua's being sexualized, even regarding it as the matrix of “the Taiwanese.”

The current researches on Taiwan Indigenous Literature are mostly from the perspective of minority writing back to observe the main stream. However, in this way the spiritual tradition in the indigenous culture is often ignored. Via the concept of “space” and “spiritual tradition”, this paper analyzes Miperepereper I Kalevelevan Aza Aris, written by female indigenous writer, Dadelavan Ibau, approaching to the space metaphor of myth, women and colonialism, and the system of medium’s bodily signs by which the group memory is reminded. Further, the comprehensive spirit and ceremonial writing in the text derive a different point of view from the worldviews of the Han people, their material culture and the interpretation of history. Regarded as a symbol of the indigenous groups, the spirit-oriented culture, through the complement and support of the past and present, will have a critical position in the study of the Taiwan Indigenous Literature.