New Advances in Formosan Linguistics

The present volume is a festschrift in honour of Lillian M. Huang, who, in a very few years, became a leading figure in Formosan linguistics after she obtained her PhD degree in 1987. Over the past twenty-eight years, she has been involved in important groundwork, in both academia and indigenous language policies in Taiwan, as we will show below (sections 3 and 4). She has been engaged in the development of both through her pre-eminent role in projects relating to typological studies on Formosan languages in the early 1990s, and on language teaching materials and proficiency tests since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Lillian may retire in a few years. Before she does, we thought it would be most appropriate to honour her by putting together papers by a number of scholars and students who have benefitted from or have been in contact with her in one way or another (e.g. through collaborative work, teaching, supervising, advising etc.). The idea of such a volume was conceived by Elizabeth Zeitoun in the autumn of 2009. Further plans were initially worked out with Stacy F. Teng, soon joined by Joy J. Wu. The three editors have been close to Lillian since the early and mid 1990s. Of the three, Zeitoun, who has been working with her on diverse projects for over twenty years, is her closest collaborator on the academic level. Both Wu and Teng were Lillian’s MA supervisees. Through her fieldwork courses, she introduced Wu to Amis and Teng to Puyuma, languages on which they are still working. The title of the present volume, New advances in Formosan linguistics, reflects our pursuit of publishing cutting-edge, provocative, and thoughtful papers that explore new directions and perspectives on Formosan languages and linguistics. It is worth noticing that this is the first collected volume on Formosan languages that has not issued from a workshop or a conference—the papers included in this volume are thus varied in terms of topic coverage—and the first that specifically deals with (and covers nearly all) the Formosan languages, a grouping understood in its broader context, that is, including Yami, a Batanic (Philippine) language spoken on Orchid Island under the political jurisdiction of Taiwan. (Note: first three paragraphs of foreward)

Outcasts of Empire

"Outcasts of Empire unveils the causes and consequences of capitalism’s failure to “batter down all Chinese walls” in modern Taiwan. Adopting micro- and macrohistorical perspectives, Paul D. Barclay argues that the interpreters, chiefs, and trading-post operators who mediated state-society relations on Taiwan’s “savage border” during successive Qing and Japanese regimes rose to prominence and faded to obscurity in concert with a series of “long nineteenth century” global transformations. Superior firepower and large economic reserves ultimately enabled Japanese statesmen to discard mediators on the border and sideline a cohort of indigenous headmen who played both sides of the fence to maintain their chiefly status. Even with reluctant “allies” marginalized, however, the colonial state lacked sufficient resources to integrate Taiwan’s indigenes into its disciplinary apparatus. The colonial state therefore created the Indigenous Territory, which exists to this day as a legacy of Japanese imperialism, local initiatives, and the global commodification of culture.

A POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE STATE’S REGISTRATION OF TRADITIONAL CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS

PhD thesisThis thesis draws upon postcolonial theory to examine to what extent the state’s registration system is an appropriate approach to protecting indigenous people’s traditional cultural expressions (TCEs). It specifically includes a case study on the performance of the state’s registration system in Taiwan in accordance with Taiwan’s Protection Act for the Traditional Intellectual Creations of Indigenous Peoples. A number of countries have established sui generis systems that provide for registration as a condition of acquiring exclusive rights over registered TCEs. Yet, the state will inevitably involve the legal acknowledgement of TCEs by registration. This mechanism has been criticised because it may manipulate the indigenous people’s tradition and identity. This thesis will explore this unresolved issue and expand upon the following research questions: How do we understand the legal protection of TCEs? Is the state’s involvement in the protection of TCEs really a negative measure which perpetuates the control over indigenous peoples’ cultures? Can registration of TCEs, which is influenced by the colonial history of intellectual property (IP) law and the modern state’s colonial control, become a platform for indigenous peoples’ negotiation with the state and for protecting TCEs as hybridity? The research methods are qualitative, beginning with an analysis of the characteristics of TCEs and international negotiations regarding the legal protections of TCEs. Observing Taiwanese indigenous peoples’ actions in the process of registration of TCEs, this 4 research finds that the emphasis of TCEs as hybridity can challenge the Orientalist imagination related to tradition and culture in conventional IP law. Moreover, a well-designed registration system of TCEs can be the platform for indigenous peoples to actively negotiate their cultural and historical perspectives with the modern state.Ministry of Education, TaiwanChiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange