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Dance and Cultural Identity Among the Paiwan Tribe of Pingtung County, Taiwan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Madeline Kwok
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Extract

The field work for this study was conducted in Pingtung County, Taiwan over a five-month period in 1976 from February to July. The Paiwan tribe is one of the nine existing tribes in Taiwan; most of these people live in Pingtung County in the south (Fig. 1). Of the 300,000 Taiwan aborigines on the island today, approximately 45,000 are Paiwan. The methods employed in the collection of the data were: 1) observing and recording dances roughly in Labanotation, 2) participating in dancing, 3) filming dances, and 4) interviewing informants. Dances were observed in two ways – in their actual context, or especially elicited. Those elicited included some which are still performed today but were demonstrated for me by request apart from their natural context, and some which are no longer performed but were recalled by my informants. After my return from the field, Labanotation was refined and checked against films, and the raw data was then categorized and analysed. The purpose of the categorization was to identify the characteristics of Paiwan dances based on the data collected.

A total of 62 dances were witnessed in 12 villages of the 8 townships visited. Not all dance types were observed in each village (Figure 2). Some informants remember and can reconstruct more than others, so that data collected in each village may not necessarily represent the entire village repertoire of the present or the recent past. In many cases, the same movements were executed in dances of the same or different dance types. It is the associated song and song text rather than the movements that differentiates the dances.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 11 , Issue 1-2 , 1978 , pp. 35 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1978

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References

NOTES

Author's Note: I wish to express my thanks to the Pingtung County Government and the Institute of Ethnology in Taiwan and all those who have -helped make this study possible.

1. Anonymous. Pingtung Hsien T'ung Chi Yao Lan. No. 25 (A statistical report of Pingtung County No. 25). Pingtung Hsien Cheng Fu (Pingtung County Government). Pingtung, Taiwan, 1974, table 20.

2. Kwok, Madeline. “Dance of the Paiwan aboriginal people of Pingtung County, Taiwan with implications of dance for tribal classification.” Master's thesis. University of Hawaii, 1977Google Scholar. Part of this thesis was given as a paper entitled “Dance and ethnic identity among the Paiwan tribe of Pingtung County, Taiwan” at the twenty-fourth conference of the International Folk Music Council (IFMC), Honolulu, Hawaii, August, 1977.

A half-hour video tape comprised of excerpts from Paiwan dances filmed in the field is deposited in the Hawaii Archives of Ethnic Musics and Dances in the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

3. This ritual is celebrated once every five years in late autumn. The ancestors and other spirits are summoned from their dwelling places to the villages, and are ‘fed’ and ‘conducted’ by priests around the villages to witness that ancestral customs are being observed. Depending on the region, this ritual can last from five to 11 days. Regardless of the duration, the actual day of ritualistic activities occurs only on the last day. The preceding days are for food and wine preparation.