Beyond 'Innocence': Amis Aboriginal Song in Taiwan as an Ecosystem

Shzr Ee Tan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351574082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica folk

Taiwan aboriginal song has received extensive media coverage since the launch and settlement of a copyright lawsuit following pop group Enigma's allegedly unauthorized use of Amis voices in the 1996 Olympics hit, Return To Innocence. Taking as her starting point the ripple effects of this case, Shzr Ee Tan explores the relationship of this song culture to contemporary Amis society. She presents Amis song in its multiple manifestations as an ecosystem, symbiotic components of which interact and feed back upon one another in cross-cutting platforms of village life, festival celebration, cultural performance, popular song, art music and Christian hymnody. Tan's investigation hinges upon drawing a conceptual line between ladhiw, the Amis term for 'song' - a word vested with connotations of life-force, tradition, ritual and taboo - and the foreign term of yinyue ('music' - borrowed from Mandarin). This difference forms the basis of how Amis song is (re)constructed through processes of modernization, Christianization and politico-economic change. A single Amis melody, for example, can exist in several guises that are contextually exclusive but functionally mutually-supportive. Thus, a weeding song (ladhiw), which may have lost its traditional context of existence following advancements in farming technology, becomes sustained within a larger ecosystem, finding new life on the interacting platforms of Amis Catholic hymnody, karaoke and tourist shows. The latter genres (collectively, yinyue) may not rely on traditional livelihoods for survival, but thrive on a traditional melody's deeper associations to local memory and idealized Amis identities. While these new and old genres are stylistically separate, they feed into each other and back into themselves - through transforming contexts and cross-referenced memes - in organic and developing cycles of song activity. Drawing from fieldwork conducted from 2000-2010 as well as a background in ethnomusicology and journalism, Ta

Chapter 1
The Story So Far

Historical Perspective

Taiwan is an island 390 km long and 140 km wide, situated off the coast of Fujian, China. Archaeological evidence dates the existence of settlers to Palaeolithic times of 50,000–5,000 BCE, when it was still joined to China (Ferrell 1969: 4–11). This period saw the migration of animals and hunter-gatherers from the Chinese mainland into Taiwan. The culture continued until about 5,000 years ago, when it suddenly vanished – possibly as a result of the physical partition of Taiwan from China. Agrarian culture was introduced across the sea, when the migration of peoples of Austronesian descent – ancestors of Taiwan’s current aborigines – took place over multiple trips. The post-migratory era developed into separate Neolithic cultures of north-western, central, south-western and eastern Taiwan. Records suggest that the custom of tooth-extraction, until recently still found among aborigines (Atayal, Saisiat and Bunun), had been practised in the north-western Neolithic age. However, it was not until the Common Era (Ferrell 1969: 9), that the Iron Age emerged.

Early Mentions of Aboriginal Song and Dance

From this period, writings on Taiwan’s aborigines proper and their musics began to appear, as Chinese travellers crossed the strait to visit. These were recorded in Chinese sources, notably in the Linhai Shuitu Zhi [臨海水土志: Account of the Coastal Lands] of the Three Kingdoms Period (220–280 CE). One shen Ying [沈瑩] wrote of ‘songs sung in drunken stupor’ [醉酒后歌] and ‘drinking songs and dances’ [飲酒歌舞] conducted during a funeral (Chen 1987: 484). The Suishu [隋 書: Annals of the Sui Dynasty 581–618 AD] contains references to a land known as Liuqiuguo [琉球國], postulated as modern Taiwan and Okinawa by Chen (1968:7) and Zhang (2002). Further records of non-Han settlers engaged in singing activity appear here:

Songs hail footsteps; a person sings – the crowd responds; the sounds are mournful.

[歌呼踏蹄，–人唱，众皆和，音颇哀怨] (Zhang 2002: 104)

There are records of trade contact between Taiwan and China in chronicles of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279 AD), when in 1206, Taiwan became a protectorate of the Chinese Empire. It was not until the Ming period (1368–1644 AD), however, that Fujianese Han began entering (eventually settling on) the island as a result of population expansion on the mainland. Mentions of musical activity during this period have been found in the Dongfan Ji [東蕃記: Account of Savages of the East] of 1603, by Chen Di [陳第]. He mentions aborigines at a party, drinking and eating (Zhang 2002: 104):

Joy brings forth dancing; mouths cry ‘woo woo’ as if in song.

[乐起跳舞，口亦乌乌若歌曲] (Zhang 2002: 104)

A recurrent theme in the writings of early Chinese scribes is the depiction of aboriginal song (or indeed aborigines in general) in relation to alcohol. This image of the indigenous person drunk on his home-brewed millet wine would be one to recur over the next few centuries, and still continues in both Han and aboriginal (self-)portrayals.¹

¹ Today, similar stereotypical reports of aboriginal connections with alcohol appear in media articles about ‘social problems’, in tourist campaigns lauding the taste of home brews, and also in song lyrics. The social and psychological environment of drinking has also been documented by Hsu Mutsu (1997: 109–114)

Arrival and Departure of the Dutch

In 1624, the Dutch East India Company [Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie] arrived and settled in south-western Taiwan, making the first known bid to colonise the island. Their landing was a reaction to Portuguese traders who had also arrived in Asia and established a lucrative trade between China and Japan (Campbell 1903: 457; Blussé 1984: 155–84).² The Dutch arrived with 1,200 mercenaries, officials, missionaries and African slaves at a time when there was a population of 64,000 aborigines (Campbell, 1903: 241, 326).

² A few years earlier in 1621, the Dominican Order had also dispatched missionaries from The Philippines to Taiwan, but they were not as politically established as the Dutch.

Taiwan’s first colonial masters began making the first detailed historical records of the island.These provide a somewhat different view from earlier Chinese accounts. The missionary Candidus described a subsistence agrarian culture among the aborigines of a village called Sinkan in south-western Taiwan that, due to the community’s matrilineal kinship system, saw women taking responsibility for millet farming while men spent most of their time sitting in the village, hunting in the woods or disappearing on occasional war raids (Shepherd 1981: 66–9).

Expressing disgust over the rituals of shamans, Candidus described how it was important that he ‘exterminate heathenish malpractice’ through kicking over sacrifices offered to local gods on the street (Campbell 1903: 25). While the Dutch had taken southern Taiwan, a small Spanish garrison had also been established in Keelung, northern Taiwan, in 1626. Most of this Spanish population left in 1640, when trade was deemed not lucrative enough. All remaining settlers were expelled by the Dutch in 1642. The Spanish stayed long enough, however, for a Jacinto Esquivel to recount a ‘spectacle’ at the village of Senar, during which ‘the Indians’ presented an eight-hour ‘devil-inspired dance’ which was pronounced ‘disgraceful’ (Shepherd 1981: 35).

While the Dutch had outstayed the Spanish, they did not remain long, maintaining their stronghold only until 1661. In this period, they managed to introduce oxen into farming technology, and began extracting taxes from the deerskin trade between the aborigines and Chinese as well as Japanese merchants. Taxes were also levied on rice, millet and sugar-cane farming. The exploitation of colonised communities was engineered through the tactical fomenting of ethnic tensions between aborigines and Chinese settlers, as well as warring aboriginal villages (Shepherd 1981: 321–52). Dutch missionaries, some of whom assumed parallel duties as government officials, managed in this time to translate the Bible into a romanised version of a now-defunct southern aboriginal language known as Siraya. Some aboriginal villages were converted to the faith of the New Reformed Church (Shepherd 1981: 42–57), although evidence of current remaining practices linked to the seventeenth century is questionable. Church services, then, were held regularly and the aborigines were called to attend them at appointed hours with the firing of muskets. Whether any music involved in these services could potentially have survived till today is difficult to gauge. In the mid-seventeenth century, some aborigines began using romanised script to codify their language for use in treaties. However, the practice was eradicated in 1661 with the next stage of Taiwan’s development: with the arrival of military leader Zheng Chenggong [鄭成功 a.k.a. Koxinga 國姓爺] from mainland China.

Koxinga and Qing Governance

Zheng was the son of a merchant who had married a Japanese woman. His capture of Taiwan brought sweeping changes, especially in terms of population. Zheng’s initial posse of 30,000 (largely soldiers of southern Chinese Hoklo – and to some extent, southern Chinese Hakka – ethnicity) expanded and soon made the aborigines a minority group. His arrival also brought the political tensions of a ming-turning-Qing China into Taiwan’s social landscape. In fact, Zheng, who was a Ming supporter, had been forced onto the island itself due to the Qing advance across mainland China. Following Zheng’s move, China cut off all relations to Taiwan. As a result, he and his successors had to finance war efforts against the Qing through taxing agriculture and trade in Taiwan, pushing Han settlers into reclaiming more land and edging the aborigines up into mountain ranges.

In 1683, Zheng’s rule was overthrown by a defecting admiral who had switched his allegiance to the Qing. This period saw the worsening of Han-aboriginal relations (Shepherd 1993). Official contact between the Han and aborigines had begun tenuously with the recruitment of aborigines to join the militia. The relationship descended into a militaristic and economic oppression of the aborigines by the Han. The high taxes expected of the aborigines could not be paid due to the loss of their traditional living by the deer trade in the wake of overhunting. This was further exacerbated by physical and sexual abuse from Han officials, who forced aborigines into slavery as servants and corvée labourers (Thompson 1964: 195–6; Shepherd 1993: 116–7).

During this period there were further accounts of aboriginal song. In the Taihai Shicha Lu [台海使槎碌] of 1722, there are references to rice-planting songs, songs for the giving away of brides, records of a musical instrument presumed to be the jaw harp or musical bow (Hsu and Cheng 1992: 29) and lively dancing at festivals (Hsu and Cheng 1992: 27–33). Such episodes of merry-making were ultimately punctuated by regular occurrences of strife – even in music. Censor Huang Shujing [黃叔璥] recounted, in the Taihai Shicha Lu, the lyrics of an aboriginal tune he had heard sung by a delivery boy. The boy had voiced, in song, his fear of punishment for being late (Thompson 1969: 63). As a result of random and sustained Chinese oppression, discontented aborigines began staging rebellions, kidnapping and killing their enemies, often decapitating them for trophies in accordance with preexisting head-hunting practices.

The uprisings led Qing administrators to re-strategise their policies. Among new measures explored were the provision of a lower tax rate to the aborigines and the establishment of a formal boundary between Han and aboriginal land. Chinese territories west of the boundary were also enlarged through the opportunistic play-off of ethnic tensions between rival aboriginal villages on either side. These developments were crucial to the establishment of the earliest classificatory schemes for Taiwan’s aborigines. The Han labelled the aborigines sheng fan [生番: ‘raw’ or ‘uncivilised’ barbarians], and shu fan [熟番: ‘cooked’/‘ripe’ or ‘civilised’ barbarians]. Administrators devised a rough dividing criterion through degrees of assimilation to Chinese ways. Plains aborigines – shu fan – assumed a higher status, now that they were also enlisted as fighters to quell Hoklo-Hakka riots that had erupted through the carving up of Taiwan by growing Han groups. Gradually, the sheng and shu categories were expanded to include overlapping sub-categories of the yefan [野番:‘wild’ aborigines], nanfan [南番: southern aborigines], beifan [北番: northern aborigines], huafan [化番: transformed aborigines] and pingpufan [平埔番: plains aborigines].

As the Qing Dynasty progressed, Taiwan became a stopover for traders pit-stopping between the East Indies and Japan. Foreign delegations – including the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and English – established links with the island. As Chinese authority weakened through the Opium Wars (1839–42; 1856–60), Taiwan was forced to open up with the signing of the Treaty of Tianjin (1858). Ports were made accessible to Westerners, who sent missions to the aborigines, sometimes converting entire villages at a time (Shepherd 1981: 42–57) in a second wave of Christian proselytising. It is possible that the aborigines had allied themselves religiously and politically with foreign powers as a means of countering Chinese abuse, as they were to do again later at the beginning of another wave of Christian conversion after World War II.

Japanese Colonisation

At the turn of the nineteenth century the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) erupt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Music Examples
• CD Contents
• Notes on Transliterations
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Return To (Whose?) Innocence
• 1 The Story So Far
• 2 In Search of an Amis Song Model
• 3 Mass Festival, Festival Mass
• 4 Performers and Audiences
• 5 Aboriginal Pop
• Conclusion: An Ecosystem of Taiwan Aboriginal Song
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography
• Discography
• Index