The Formation and Reinvention of the Bunun Culture in Taiwan
Ying’kuei Huang, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica
This paper will describe the historical process of the formation and reinvention of the Bunun culture from Japanese colonization until now. First it describes the shaping of Bunun ‘traditional culture’ under Japanese colonization. This traditional culture in turn influenced Bunun understandings of modernity and resulted in their adoption of new categories. Now, the Bunun seek to understand their situation -- the effects of recent capitalism, or neo-liberalism, and globalization -- by reinventing their culture both in traditionalist terms and in terms of the later invented cultural categories of modernity. New directions are resulting from the regionalization of local society and fundamental change in symbolic communications systems.
