 OK, so welcome to tonight's Sawa Central Taiwan Studies lecture. Tonight is our latest lecture in our contemporary Taiwan Indigenous Studies lecture series, sponsored by the Shunin Museum in Sintai Bay. What we're trying to do in this lecture series is to draw a series of heads that look at contemporary issues that face Taiwan's Indigenous. In the past, we've run projects that are a little bit more historical, but in this project, we want to really focus on what's happening in today's Taiwan-facing Indigenous. So when we first drew up the list of potential speakers for this project, the first person on the list was Professor Scott Simon from Ottawa. He's one of the leading thinkers working on a range of issues related to Taiwan's Indigenous people. He's someone who we know well because he features quite heavily in a number of our Taiwan Studies courses, and so I spoke in terms of politics, but also our cultural society course. Another reason why he's such a familiar figure is that he's quite a frequent visitor to service. I think this is something like his fifth talk. So in the past, for example, he's spoken about Taiwan's social movements in 2014, and he's spoken also broadly about English language publications on contemporary Indigenous folks. And one of the great things about Scott Simon, there's many great things about Scott, one of them is how productive he was. I just discovered yesterday he has a very interesting habit of having a daily target of what project he's going to write on. I think it's something that I need to learn from you. His work is also very diverse. He's not someone that can easily pitch in a hole. Another thing I admire about Scott is his language ability. So for example, when he's had sabbaticals in other locations, he's really embraced those locations. So for example, he's been based in Heidelberg, he's been based in Lyon, so he's published a book in French, which was your last book. What we've done with our speakers on this project is to ask them to do two talks. Last night we had a really fascinating talk about the relationship between humans and animals, particularly birds in Heidelberg's Indigenous communities. I think anyone that made that talk would say that they were really amazed by the talk. It sounded like a very narrow topic, but it really kind of wowed at us. Tonight's talk is a little bit different because tonight's talk is called the chapter talk. In other words, it's the talk that's hopefully leading to a chapter in our handbook on contemporary Indigenous studies. To a certain extent last night Scott hinted at this topic when he was touching on the issue of religious issues in Indigenous communities and religious divides. And that's the talk that he's going to focus on tonight. So let's give Scott a very big welcome home to London and so on. Thank you very much for your kind introduction. Thank you for putting this together and pleased to be able to contribute to this book project and to start thinking about it now. I'm starting at the end of my thinking about it from the chapter in my own book. So it's going to go in a different direction than the chapter in the textbook because it will be less theoretical than that and more descriptive of history of the different churches and so forth in Taiwan. But what I'll do is I'll be talking about making God's country a phenomenological approach to religious conversion among the Settic and Durga of Taiwan. And that's because Christianity is such a big part of Indigenous life in Taiwan. And so I think that as anthropologists working there, it's part of our responsibility to understand what that's all about. So I'll start here with this photograph, just a background slide. Look at the rainbow there. And for the Durga and Settic people, the rainbow bridge is a very important symbol. It's the bridge that they say takes their ancestors to have for the same thing. The old way of talking about it was that if a man had been a hunter or if a woman had been a good person at weaving, if they'd been working hard all of their life and they crossed the rainbow bridge and were asked by a giant crowd to wash their hands. And if they'd been working hard all of their life in their hands would bleed because they'd be full of blisters. And if they didn't bleed, then that meant that they were lazy all of their life. And so if they were tired of their other life, they'd get to mention the land of the ancestors. And if they'd been lazy all their life from crowd, they'd push them off the rainbow bridge into the waters below where they would be eaten by giant crabs. It's an interesting story that they sometimes tell. This picture was taken on our way from Alishan to Skadam when we crossed the mountains there. We was at an interesting site that we saw. It's not all in the photo, but there were actually three rainbows at the same time. And people were coming out and taking pictures of them because they hadn't seen that for decades. And some of the Dorugo people said it's a good sign from their ancestors that our mission was really so important. We were a group of indigenous people from the Mifcon Nation of Nova Scotia and indigenous from Australia and the North from New Zealand and Zol people from Alishan. And we were on our way to meet with the Dorugo. Their ancestors were apparently waiting for us. So... Well, I'll do it, I'll start by saying this is a really old topic in anthropology in some ways. Anthropologists have long tried to understand what is religion all about. And so there are many different theories and I think that we can't go through all of them either in a chapter or even in the book of writing or periods of night. Just to skim over some of the main ways that anthropologists have looked at religion. Some of them use a psychological approach and Freud, for example, saw this as a kind of neurosis. So I'm kind of looking at personal issues of faith and what kind of person would be religious. There were some authors such as William James and Mircea Eliana who tried to understand religion as a way of approaching the divine. William James has come up with a few ethnographies recently so that was one way of looking at religion. Durkheim, of course, he looked for the collective soul of society so he looked at rituals as a way in which societies constitute themselves. He's been very influential in anthropology so kind of looking at ritual as a way of understanding the way of social integration and understanding how people call of age and society and kind of looking for the soul of the society because it's part of the cultural perspective. Then Carl Marx, of course, and Marxist have looked at religion as a form of social or political domination and I think it's kind of worth looking at his classical quote here where he said that religion is the opium of the people. It's a much longer quote. They didn't have time and space to put it all there. But he said, man is no abstract being swatting outside the world. Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature in the heart of a heartless world and the soul of solace conditions. It is the opium. Back when Marx said that opium was basically the main killer that people had. So it's kind of in a way like aspirin of that people. Maybe some people do need pain killers to get on with life and to be able to work productively. But I think that the phrase at the beginning is very much a phenomenological perspective of things. So I'm saying that man is no abstract being swatting outside the world. So it's the question of being in the world and being social. Getting to some more recent approaches. There have been some cognitive approaches and evolutionary approaches. It's just that Scott Hattran and Pascal Boyer have looked at religion as a product of the biological evolution of the human brain. So that's looking at the way that the architecture of the brain works and how that needs to be able to perceive supernatural beings as part of a predator detection mechanism of the brain and so forth. So that's been one of the new approaches in recent years. Victor Turner, of course, was interested in liminality and community does. He was looking at special rituals and built religious and looking at the feeling that people have while they're participating in these things, especially the rite of passage because it was based on that kind of story. Maurice Bloch, who's from London, the influence of economics, is a very evocative argument of religion and rebounding violence. I've pulled the nail here because I think that's one that I want to bring up a little bit more. I think it's relevant to understanding some of the continuities that we see in religious practices in Taiwan to have indigenous communities from old days of headhunting into Christianity. And that being said, Christianity has been very embarrassing for anthropologists in some ways. They really haven't known how to deal with it. I think part of it is there's a feeling of perhaps collective guilt from Westerners about all of the missionary efforts and ties to colonialism and so forth. But even Taiwanese anthropologists like Huang He Gui, for example, have really struggled where to put that in. I remember I went to a lecture he gave at academia in Seneca about 20 years ago now. But I remember being amazed that listening to this lecture, we talked about Buddhist religious rituals and his methodology was to talk to elderly people and ask them about rituals they had observed 60 years in the past as if they could remember that in an accurate enough way. But he said nothing about the churches that I think were very important in those villages. So ignoring the contemporary religious context and kind of looking for the collective soul of each particular tribe in a very different kind of fashion it's only in the past 10 years or so that anthropologists in Oceania such as Joe Robinson, John Barker are really looking seriously at Christianity. And so now in the anthropology of Oceania there's a whole literature emerging about different Christianities and about how people have converted and become Christian on their own terms. And so I think that's an important body of literature to be thinking about. So now I'll get to Maurice Bluff and resolve the violence. I can hear an image of one of the most frequent rituals that we see in Turbu and Cedric villages. Those are the pink killings. And usually they'll explain it to people in Chinese as sattu. And so they'll say that for everything almost there's always a recent killer pig. So if there's a marriage then they might kill a larger number of pigs maybe half a dozen, maybe a dozen, maybe a wealthier family more than that. If there's a divorce they'll kill one pig. If somebody gets a raise on their job or they buy a car there's a reason to celebrate and they'll sacrifice that pig. And so the Turbu people will say that no, it doesn't matter if the humans are angry or sad a pig has to get killed and so the little pigs are a little bit... So basically I think that Maurice Bluff gives this idea of resounding violence as a way of understanding what's going on with these pink killings. Which the Turbu in their own language called Boda Gaia. Gaia G-A-Y-A means the sacred law and Boda means going through. So it's going through the sacred law it's kind of a rite of passages. They're announcing a transition in their life whether it's a marriage or a divorce or a new car or something. Telling the ancestors it's something important that's happened. They used to sacrifice pigs whenever somebody became a new member of the community or Allah. So it's always been an important part of their life. Now Maurice Bluff in his book on resounding violence said that human societies represent human life as a cycle of birth, growth, reproduction, aging and death. And this is for him a universal that all human societies have. But in spite of the fact that everybody is born as a relatively short life and then dies societies have to create some kind of political and social form that is perceived as being permanent. And so religion is a way in which they can do so. And so they make a move towards what Bluff called the transcendental. They have to look for something that transcends the immediate life of the individuals that are present. And he says it's usually done with a concrete vitality obtained from outside beings. Usually animals, he's talking about sacrifices in all of these cultures but sometimes plants other people's or women. And so as we're looking at many different kinds of rituals just this theme of violence. He talks about sacrifices and how it's related to hunting in different societies. But I think that killing the pig would be an example of some kind of concrete vitality that there's this energy that's obtained from the pigs and contributes to the sacrifice being made to the ancestors. And in return they say that in return the ancestors gave them success in their hunts and they're good at catching wild boars and other game animals. But it goes on throughout the life. It's something you often hear in the morning in the villages. You're awakened at dawn because the pigs are resisting being killed and squealing. And then everybody goes out to see what's happening who's getting married. And if it's the forest it's usually much more low-key. And just share the meat with immediate friends. If it's a marriage everybody in there along would have to get an equal part of the meat. And they take special care to cut up every part of the meat. The legs and the heart and everything are a fair share of everything. So I think that this varying as a resounding violence is that it's something that we can use when we're looking at many different rituals in life. There's head hunting where the pigs sacrifices. And I even think that this blood ritual is something that appeals to those who are thinking about the sacrifice that Christ made for the people on the cross. And I've actually talked to people in the village about this. Did you see any link between this head hunting as a sacrifice and Christ as a sacrifice and people are just, oh yeah, that's what we do. But maybe that's because we're talking about religion or drinking beer in the evenings but people are simply doing like that. And so. But I think that this theory of violence, like all of these other theories that we've seen so far is very little about the ordinary people entertaining life. So it's not really about the life of a church and the congregation of it and the services on Sunday morning or Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon and then the different groups that they have going on. Basically almost every day there are people going to the church for the different youth groups women's groups, men's groups, prayer groups and so forth. They're very active church girls and this idea of rebuilding violence isn't going to be addressed that kind. It's all very special types of issues. So instead of using any of those theories that I just mentioned, which are much more common in anthropology, I started to think through it from the perspective of phenomenology. Now what I mean by phenomenological I'm not really going into high degrees philosophy or anything like that but I'm thinking more in terms of the Timingoldian type of phenomenology that's coming down topology, Scottish anthropologist Timingold. And so I'm thinking in terms of religion, in terms of some of the themes that he talks about such as dwelling movement. And so it's a question of finding of creating a place for dwelling in the universe. There's also the question of movement. So these are issues that he brings up on his books. He doesn't really apply it as much to religion. I think that's something that I'm adding to this discussion. The idea is to look at religion from what it feels like to the participants. So what are these people experiencing as they're going to church? And they do quite often. It's not really looking at belief. I think that a lot of people haven't really talked too much about what they believe. It's not about doctrines. Certainly most people who are in church are not clear about doctrines. They're not going to theological seminary after all. And it's not about colonial power relations which is often what approaches an anthropologist. I think that colonial power relations are especially difficult in Taiwan where the missionaries are not foreigners. A phenomenological experience also includes the embodied experience of the ethnography. So there's the question of the anthropologists and their relationship with Christianity. And that's something that I think for western anthropologists is especially important. They will immediately identify us with Christianity because of our physical appearance. And so it's something that's important to acknowledge and to think through. So in a way that falls into the new ethnography of vernacular Christianity and the anthropology of Christianity. And the plural is important because there are different variants of Christianity. There's not one monolithic Christianity. So I think that the big question here is how did Christianity make its way to Taiwan? But how did indigenous people find a home in Jesus instead of making a home? And I think that maybe like these swallows, this is a birth relationship here, they made a home in the affordances of dwelling space for others. This was a photograph I took up in Nantou in the village of Goa. And it's in a little, one of the grocery stores that people like to hang out and drink. And the owner of the grocery store encouraged me to take pictures of these swallows and they come back every year and he's very pleased to have them in his home. And I think it's kind of a good metaphor for us that there's a structure that's already been built and then another creature comes and makes a home. And somehow indigenous people have found their home and it does sometimes seem strange to me to listen to them talking about what happened in Israel when 2000 years ago, I'm thinking that it's about their life today. So, a very big mystery I think there's another issue that's important, it's a totally different perspective. They're always talking about the along. The along is often translated as into Chinese as so it would be translated sometimes into English as Try, which I think is not a good translation. Or maybe it's community, but as I was thinking about it already in this book I think actually it would be better to translate it into German because it does fit better with the idea of a Heimat. So the idea of a home but also the community and the group of people might not be related by blood. But there's a sense of belonging and a sense of land is and there's a land and territory. So that's kind of the background to the home, but this is actually the picture I decided to put on the website as well. And I went through my photos and really chose this one carefully. I wanted to think about landscape, space and place and how that's changed over time. So what is the strategy for this home? Yeah, the tower went to the cross and that's the true Jesus Church. And so people have seen that online and they've been really happy to see it. Yeah, it's our church because I shared on Facebook my Facebook friends are most Indigenous friends and they knew me. So I've got the big church which is really the defining architecture of this particular village. Most villages have really big churches in them. But I think that the mountain behind it is very important. And so I chose this one because we can see that the mountain behind it has been pretty much denuded of forests. And so we've seen actually quite a bit of ecological destruction. Mountains are used for growing tea and cabbage. These are often Indigenous entrepreneurs too. Of course the Taroko National Park has protected their forests but in places outside of the park this is much more what the landscape looks like. And I kind of imagine it all being forest but not. And in fact all over Taiwan the Indigenous people were much higher in the mountains before the Japanese came but then especially after their own sites when they were moved downhill. And so I think part of the story is that Christianity happened after they lost so I think that's a very important thing that's happened over at colonial period. We also see other police stations in there and the electrical wires. And it's a very it's since the Japanese period they've basically settled in these villages. They were before nomadic peoples moving through the forest. There have been big changes in their life and the way that they can use space and the way that they can create places for themselves. It's all changed fundamentally since the colonial period. So since the 1930s. So that brings us to contemporary Taiwan and I think that almost everybody thinks about the Presbyterian Church first. It is a very important church in the social movement. In many ways we can say that it's the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan that has created the indigenous social the alliance of Taiwanese Aborigines was founded by Presbyterian networks. And so and actually even back to George Essie McKay we talked about that was being Aboriginal we didn't talk about that as being colonized and that was being a bit jinkery thing. Anyway, my first encounters with the Presbyterian Church were and the indigenous communities were in 2002 and so this is actually before I started doing indigenous research in Taiwan. I think you can see the photo here, the one on the right and see how long I've been doing this research. By just looking at how young I was in that picture. But I was invited to go to the Urban World Mission at Changrong Presbyterian University in China by Steve Chen from Oro. So it was very much of a Canadian project and so it was there in China and they had us you can see that they weren't this teacher that says who am I and so they were encouraging us to think about our identities and who we are and so it was all these little, they put us in separate groups and I was with the indigenous group because I didn't know who I am too but from this talk I think what's important is really looking at the indigenous groups that I would say what they were thinking about and I'm by a professor of sociology from York University who is a doctor at Fion who is also a minister of the United Church of Canada and it gives us a very Marxist lecture about how capitalism is spread around the world and that it's caused a lot of suffering and and so forth and then Dr. Albert Ling gives his lectures there and small groups and they talk about women's issues and issues of the poor and labor environment issues and there's a small group of indigenous people there so I joined them and they talked about their pain being caused by not being allowed to hunt because it's basically one of those and the hunting is to our culture but the tea ceremony is the Japanese culture and so brought that up and then at the end they were asked to make a map of their ideal Taiwan and so they're including the map people hunting happily and the animals living happily and so that's what we've seen here so that was one of my first encounters with the URM and the Presbyterian Church and I felt very comfortable with the Presbyterian Church because they tend to be one of those social justice churches the Ushan Seminary in Hualien actually came out in support of same-sex marriage for example and they've been kind of a progressive part of the Christianity and so I felt comfortable with them and actually one of the first field sides I have even when I was teaching university from 1999 to 2001 I had visited this church and that with Pastor Gao and talked about issues about indigenous people there and this Ji-Wang Presbyterian Church was founded in the Japanese period by a Darugawa woman and it was Ji-Wang and she had come back from Taipei and she brought with her these teachings and they met in a cave because the Japanese were discouraging people from converting to Christianity and so the Ji-Wang Presbyterian Church was very important in the name rectification created the Taipei tribe they became a tribe in 2004 so on the right-hand side right next to the cross you can see it said you're in Tom's identity so identity is a big issue and George Wessie Mackay was an important person in the history of the church so when I tell people I come from Canada they're all quite enthusiastic about meeting me and talking to me about the church and so forth and unknown to me at the time was and I found this out after my my aunt died and she left the Bibles that my grandmother had left and opened up and a piece of paper fell out and it was about an activity that their church had held to raise funds for George Wessie Mackay's activities in Taiwan and so what I didn't realize is that my grandmother before she got married and became Anglican she'd been Presbyterian and that her parents had been involved in raising funds for the missions in Taiwan and even mentioned in there the headhunters of Taiwan so it was quite interesting to discover that somehow my great-grandparents had been involved in creating this church that created the indigenous that I'm studying in Taiwan that comes together in a certain way in a very personal way and that created a kind of indigenous that I'm studying but Christianity has been added to a religion that was already there like I mentioned in the Rainbowl before the Szecek and Dorukul people actually had a very rich cosmology and a very rich religious tradition before Christianity came that's part of a way of looking at the world and there's many stories about animals and relations between humans and others and one of them that I think is particularly important is the origin story of humanity which happened in Nantou at this rock and the story is at the very beginning of time there was the rock opened up and three people emerged from the rock there were two men and one woman and as they came out of the rock they looked around at the world one of the men looked at the world and he saw all of these animals and plants and thought this was a really wonderful place because there's just so much life and we can hunt we can eat and there's some green plants and so forth and another man looked at it and he thought this is a really horrible place because there's so much death here and it's just such a horrible thing one has to kill one another to eat and so he turned back and went back inside the rock and then there was a double there kind of an earthquake and the rock closed up and he was stuck inside forever and then the first man and the first woman came out and became the ancestor of all of humanity it's passed through 100 years that was Adam and Eve and Eve and Baha so but there are a number of other religious specialists around there were the Masaboch who are kind of the menace women and they've pretty much disappeared I was able to meet two of them in my five years of in the first years when I was on my research there and one of them that I met in one room she passed away and I got some big interviews with her and another one in Tongda she's still around she does quite a bit of rituals when they have students coming or somebody who wants to learn about traditional life and she does a ritual but very rarely would actually an indigenous person saw her and there are stories about witches and honey somebody told me they were young there was a woman in their village who had a bird in the cage and a bird that she could use and then there's the bird divination that I talked about yesterday the idea of the bird behavior and their voices can tell you if it wasn't successful or not there were also rituals related to agriculture and health and of course there were rituals of head hunting which is a very important part of their religion Ferono Kyoto who also translated Durkheim into Japanese to really pioneer more about religion and ritual in Taiwan a book about that what we can see is there's a very rich traditional cosmology among the people there's the rainbow bridge the Hago Udup that I just talked about there's the idea of the people in Hualien somehow Nantou is a very special spiritual place where the ancestors came from there are lots of stories about that there are different taboos that they had there was a lot of things that they thought about the behavior of animals which is that dogs and so forth and pigs so what would you have to do to restore Gaia if for example the dog would bite the horse or the pigs were copulated in that house and then there was the importance of the community and so there was a very rich cosmology before the colonial period which I talked about Gaia the big killings is the ritual where the ancestors are and the truages and truages don't do that part of the ritual in some places they kill the pigs and share their meat and in Nantou I found that they don't even kill the pigs themselves they hire from a professional I've talked about they can avoid sorry there's a picture of the dogs here it's one of the hundreds which raises the volume of the equipment so in my chapter I talked about my own personal experiences with some of these things that I've talked about that it still has before I think I think that what is often ignored is the presence of Shintoism which I don't think anybody's ever studied and most indigenous people don't talk about that too much but there was the Japanese encouraged and very strongly to participate in Shinto rituals and so that's kind of I think explains a lot of the way in which we sum up the forest I think that's part of that one of the women told me about a Shinto shrine that had been taken down by the Republic of China government she said that they used to go there and they would ring this bell and clap their hands and bawl and if they rang the bell then it rang again by itself and that would be a sign that you're fair to be answered and if it didn't then it wouldn't be answered and she said that they tore it down and she said after they tore down the shrine they tried to make it an agricultural land but nothing ever grew there it was stayed barren and she said the Japanese left with their spirit stayed behind so I think there's some trace of Shintoism that's there they refer to the ancestors but also to ghosts in general as pudok quite a lot of fear of the pudok so quite a lot of fear of passing by cemetery and there are stories about their converges and I think those are probably some of the most important part is to look at how people have converted one of the people for example that I talked to from the church Jesus church said that when the church was first came into the community people really resisted them and he said they eventually recognized that the church was bringing to them something that was the same guy that they already had the difference was that the rules are written down in a book rather than in their old charts and he said to me that he said in a quote here Christianity helped us answer the one and only question unanswered by our old religion he said the question was what is the name of God so they didn't have that in their old religion he said the answer is Jesus he also gave me another name which is the God that belongs to the world together so he basically said that it was a continuation of Gaia and also at the Presbyterians told me that Gaia before told them that they had to be generous with one another they had to take care of their family and community and they had to be loyal in their marriages Christiane details them as well there was another woman I talked about who was in her age and she was saying that the old Gaia was terrible because it was all about head hunting and so she said that nowadays some people still make sacrifices before hunting and sacrifices of rice wine and so forth and they really shouldn't do that another woman said there's only one she should not pray twice so they did something some people don't accept there was another woman who gave me a story about her grandmother who was a very powerful medicine mother and her grandfather was a great head hunter with skull racks in front of his house so they were very big in the traditional religion her son had lost it and sometimes the heads would cry and they would turn their heads and so she said that they discovered that her grandmother discovered that Jesus had a magic even greater than her own and so she converted and she says that she suffered herself because of the sins of her grandparents and that's why she's had a son who's slightly retarded and a daughter who's been in the nursing home all of her life but the next generation will do well because they've come for life then there are issues about how to translate the word for God bottle which is the word for God evidently, true Jesus rejects calling it that at all because they don't want that word which is that spirits and ghosts in their language so they ironically can use the word komisa which is Japanese so coming back to the phenomenology of religion we look at the materiality of churches and so there's a difference in the places where people worship ritual no longer happens in the forest it's not something that happens in the open in this vegetarian month of vegetation Veronica called their old rituals invisible churches because they would have rituals outside in the current sort of forest nowadays it's in concrete buildings it's imposing pieces of architecture that draw their attention forward towards the altar and then upwards the Protestant church is a very austere and the Derwood's sedeck is really important for churches so we have here a photograph of the Presbyterian church on the top I love the dog that kind of behind us in all of the services and then the true Jesus church on the bottom here the true Jesus church they speak in tongues so they've got their practices in the area and then because of the architecture the Psalms reverberate and it just seems that you can't really tell where the Psalms are coming from and it really does give you a sense that the Holy Spirit has just filled up the room and there's a real part of it is the physicality and there are some of those cognitive approaches that have been attracted but I would go back to Marx here religion is always social and so there's a social aspect of the Presbyterian church is and then congregations for example in Milo where the Scotton and the homeless people lived down in the village it's always been a question to people why did they have to have two Presbyterian churches right across the street from one another in a community with just a few hundred people it would have been more sense to combine them and have one but the reason is that they came from two different in the month and they were moved down and they keep that up and so they go to the church that belongs to their own community the only time that they came together was a very short period of time when the minister at one church was married to a woman from the other island and so they managed to come together but after he passed away then they had two separate pastors together they really do prefer to have that separate community and identity so we're looking at really the orientation that the church has given in terms of time and space as well Christianity gives them a sense of belonging to a bigger story of humanity and in terms of really looking at the story of the resurrection and looking forward to the world and all of that is part of that in terms of space the Presbyterian church tends to give them an orientation really vis-a-vis the world and it gives them connections with Canada and with the West and with indigenous communities I'm part of that actually because I've taken durable people from the Presbyterian church in Taiwan and visit indigenous communities in Nova Scotia in Hokkaido and they tend to be involved in certain social networks like we see at the top of the Presbyterians meeting Taiwan foundation for democracy including the big proponent of tarot book name rectification and autonomy the Catholic church gives them a connection with their only China's only ally in Europe in the Vatican the true Jesus church gives them a relationship with China it was a church established in China in 1917 in February of 1919 but it gives them a relationship with China and with people who came from China after the Second World War and so it creates another kind of network because at one event at the church church today on Saturday there was a speaker from China who came this is relatively recently and gave a lecture about how China is not opening up and has more religious freedom than ever and he welcomes them to come and learn about that because the true Jesus church within the self patriotic church of China is very active and they share their churches with others who use it on Sunday days on Saturday they encourage them to come and visit and then after the service they always meet together in E and that was quite inconvenience I thought because they put the special guest right next to me and there was a pillar on the other side of him and so I was stuck talking with this man for the entire mea after he left somebody said if you notice the seating arrangement she said it's because none of us wanted to talk to him so the church was trying to do something politically in areas of resistance to that in the community and I've seen that among Presbyterians too the church often brings in this DPP message and then there's resistance and I think it's something that happens everywhere in the church especially yesterday but I think networks are the important thing when it comes to the churches they're creating networks so it's a really big part of what they're doing so I think that no matter what religion may be maybe many of those things that we just talked about in this social maybe it is a way of reducing pain I think that most of all of that is that they have all of these activities in the church and it makes it provides a number of things for people one thing it does is it creates a strong continuity with the identity of being alive so there's a real big overlap between church congregations and the small habits that we have been in in the mountains we came down and it could have kept that community alive somehow they've created a space in which they have rituals meals are probably more important than rituals and singing together and praying together being together and being there for one another when there's a wedding or a funeral or baptism or whatever there's that sense of being together it's important though that the conversion happened only after the Sejek and Drugu their indigenous people of course were evicted from their forests so there are no longer able to live as they did in fact most of them actually don't spend much time in the forest anyway I noticed that the hunters that I really like spending time with are the ones who are more syncretic with their practices quite often when they're in the village they will be Christian but then when they go into the mountains they'll make sacrifices as we ancestors and talk about the spirits of the mountain and so forth I think the conversion happened only after they needed foreign or Chinese allies so it's part of the story it doesn't explain everything but it's part of the attraction you know they can have relations with churches their organizations that go beyond time and it's been very useful for them as they've created the indigenous social movement the URM is one of the areas in which they actually came up with the term Yuanzu which then they lobbied to put into the constitution and became the base of all indigenous people and that came out and emerged from activities of the Presbyterian church of course the true Jesus church has its allies with the Chinese especially with the KMT but also with the Chinese Communist Party these activities also make people happy I think we have to just admit that the people are getting some pleasure from all of this it may not make a lot of sense to people who aren't into churches and going through church but they seem to really enjoy the singing, there's a joyfulness to it which people find meaningful the true Jesus church they speak at times at the beginning about 10 minutes of their service at the end of their conclusion and they say that that's the Holy Spirit that fills them and they find that to be their meaning so it's not really a question of belief I think but it's of doing things that make people find meaning and feel happy but I think we should not overlook those who don't attend church either and I think that there's a certain bias built into Christianity by going to churches I didn't have a few experiences with people who told me quite openly that they were not interested in that at all there was a time when I was crossing the streets with the Ji-Wang Presbyterian Church and somebody said we don't waste your time with that just sit down and have a beer with me instead it's always your time when I walked around at the very beginning of my research there in two villages I was asked by the local people to do a survey and kind of figure out opinions about different things I asked my own questions and the people asked their own questions and one of the questions was their religion and there were most people rather than about 90% of the people identified with one of the churches there but then there were others who said well if I'm not interested in the word so there really was this there are some people in the villages who really don't care about religion at all and I think it's important to understand that as well and then last but not least these churches all did their best to try to convey the faith at home and so that's in spite of the fact that I began with the Presbyterian church the other churches finally reached out and did their best to make me feel at home there was absolutely no pressure to convert to anything or speak in tongues but here are the people of the Church Jesus church who end up in Nantung who really tried to make me feel at home and I had a car with you for me on my last day I'm really welcoming every time I come back that's a part of it I think is just making a community and most people don't care about the doctors who talk about that at all it's just a question of being together and sharing meals and tea and so forth the true Jesus church they encourage people not to drink alcohol and I think that creates a different sense of community as well so that's a big part of it so I was thankful for that for some kind of so thank you for being here tonight and I just gave you the time to do it and now we can move on to the discussion so thank you all we don't have mics here are you okay standing still? not too much yet there oh, okay okay that was fantastic again loads of questions in my mind one of the kind across my mind was how representative are the citizens are these kind of conversion patterns repeated in most of the other nations or are they exceptional I mean are there for example groups that completely reject the Christianization okay there are no groups that completely reject like okay and I think the biggest difference is that the Roman Catholic church has been more successful in itself and Protestant churches have been more successful in the North and some people think that that has to do with their traditional social structure the Paiwan and the Lukai people had more of a hierarchical social structure with a nobility in common and much more comfortable in the church to come to hierarchy and the Presbyterians and through Jesus church are very egalitarian in their peoples and so each congregation is very independent and the Presbyterian church they have their elders but they say that's like the consul of Luta, the elders that they had before who is attained a majority as an adult male tradition as an adult female together has a certain kind of prestige in the way of talking and the elders together will collectively discern what happens in the church there's kind of the egalitarianism that they stress and then the true Jesus church is even more egalitarian because they'll say we don't even have pastors so what they have is within the congregation will take over the role of preparing a sermon and so forth but they don't have pastors and it's the relationship between the three churches back so if someone wanted to marry someone from another church would that be resisted? if somebody wanted to marry somebody from the true Jesus church that would be resisted so Catholic Presbyterians would be a little easier but the problem with the true Jesus church and intermarriage is the thing they don't have a Saturday they don't drink they have different rules about dealing with blood that's important for hunters so for example they can't they have to drain the blood so they can't take an animal that's been trapped and already died so how is that to inspect them perhaps more regularly? in terms of the conversion timing you mentioned the key moment was when groups moved downwards from the focus so here we're talking at some point in the Japanese Europe but at least from what I understood from discussions with Niki the Japanese were put a little pressure on Christian churches so how were they actually able to operate and operate seemingly very effectively in terms of the missionary in the colonial era did that come up in discussions with elders? yeah, especially in Fushins where the Presbyterian church was founded and the true Jesus church there was founded and so Ji-Wang had to have their church services educated and up in Scotton the church was established in the end of the Japanese period too so there are all the amount of things we have to have that we need in secret and the true Jesus church had an interesting story actually one of the persons I've heard most of was his father started the church and there's a story that he likes to tell about another man in the village he was the head of the the youth corps of the Japanese and they denounced him to the police and for being a missionary and they put him in a bamboo the intention set him in a bamboo hut and locked it up and then overnight there was a typhoon that blew the bamboo apart and so he was able to escape and so they like to tell the story of his father and the person that denounced him after the war became a president minister there's a lot of discussion and the president cheers there about what that means as well so we just have a question to your mic one of the curious things towards the Christians managed to instill an original sin and they helped and they managed to transmit an original sin I don't believe that they actually got the original sin I've never heard anybody talk about the original sin before I've only heard people talk about Gaya so I think that what's happening is that the churches come in and there was this old thought that was already there and they didn't really replace that with anything so that's why I'm talking about Christianity because for them it's the Gaya it's not about being born with sin it's about what you do in life today and so there's the theology is something very weak on they don't really think too much about that there's oh no there's the idea I think that if you do sin in a certain way if you do something that violates Gaya then something will happen to you so you might fall down in the mouth because it's still there so it hasn't really been replaced with the Christian theology that we know oh yeah okay I was interested in connection between dispossession and the transitarianism the established churches and it's done a lot in my year now during the and in the some 18th century when the higher churches which is on the land they could make a big profit from sheep on the land and people who were thousands of years on the land they already covered me but most of it goes and sheep help to church in particular other places the Presbyterian church supported the land but there was a schism and so we had a free Presbyterian church which supported the dispossessed people and so they had to embrace this new church which unfortunately had an even more rigorous non-treatable practice leading to this day members of the free church do not even celebrate Christmas is quite joyous and the other thing that I want to ask you is this and the Presbyterianism and as you said I used to go out into the countryside and smash up prehistoric a truth we can't prehistoric stones that contain not just the artwork but the arrangements one of them I think this is the same thing as the Taliban destroying the giant buildings and so on and there's a contemporary film group that's called Blazing Fiddles Blazing Fiddles now the Blazing does not refer to their high speed playing skills it refers to the fact that during times of Presbyterian Protestant religious revival there were bonfires of Fiddles Fiddles volunteering so in addition to Christmas and Christmas and this had not just this following there being more sort of fiddles at times of religious revival so unfortunately has the introduction of the Presbyterian religion noticeably affected traditional culture and if it has are people aware of it which is a supplement to the question what is it really told us for what it is okay the big question is sort of important but I think one of the like what I was saying I worked on the birds but there were people who didn't really want to talk about the birds because they said it's a sin and that was in both the true Jesus church and in the Presbyterian church people would bring this up but it was the Presbyterian church is split in a way because there are those who are big on the indigenous social movement they're looking for new symbols of indigenous aid and for them it's attractive to use the Shishila as a symbol and for them that's important others in the Presbyterian church are really against anything in the Presbyterian church so this comes up for example some people have created these cultural renaissance NGOs and they apply for funding from the government to have so called traditional rituals which have nothing to do with real traditional rituals but they'll do for example they'll do a head hunting ritual in which they'll use a thong as a surrogate for a human being that cut off the head for an audience of mostly tourists and so the one set of Presbyterians is very active in this and say well we're re-creating our traditions and then other Presbyterians say it's a sin to do all of this and so there are all kinds of things that are going on with the Massambal for example both the Presbyterians and the people that are afraid of this medicine so both of the medicine women that are coming from Roman Catholics because the Roman Catholic is much more open to the syncretism and so there are things with the Presbyterians that both have been harsher and then of the two the true Jesus church is the one that is the harshest on traditional culture so they really want people to participate in these big sacrifices they don't mind them sharing meat with one another but they don't want to have words spoken to the ancestors and pieces of meat attached to the trees and so forth to be a bead so then you're bringing the idea of believing that you are the one that is the person of the successful experience so bringing their traditional beliefs and religion into the Western foreign religion my question for you is why is it successful and can we take it in places or different kind of schools on the peak seems to be such a big thing now can you tell us what is the symbolism of the peak it's also important for times when these cultures so why is it important in every situation but I think that the thing they nobody I don't even know why is that thing but they tell me that throughout their life they have to make these regular sacrifices to the ancestors of pigs and it generally these rituals appropriately and the ancestors will reward us with success and hunting and so you guys haven't played y'all they're still hunting so there's generalized risks of crossing that's what people have told me but you're right most people don't there's always in each community there's a group of people who are hunting and those are usually the ones that spend a lot of time with but there is that why the localization of the western religion is still so successful well I think that its localization happens because when people first convert they didn't know they could do anything because they didn't have to convert if you don't know they didn't think they didn't think degrees of genealogy they just think that somebody some of them say well we converted it first because we wanted food from the missionaries so these were either conversions after World War II but I think that's a bit too simplistic as well but some people say we converted because we wanted food and clothing that they could buy because after the war we needed it back that's something that they it really takes a long time before people start to learn that doctrine is all about so I think it tickles for a generation the first generation of converts have never written one so they have no idea what this is all about so I think it really had to do with creating a new sense of home at a time of really intense social change and finding a way in which they can reach out to allies elsewhere and meet other people in their projects and generally the true Jesus Church is much more of a KFT church and I think it's a part of creating a good relationship with mainlanders with Chinese people who were coming to Taiwan and now that this is the 1950s the 1950s and the church started in the 1930s and the KFT came but it is the Chinese church that founded in Beijing the idea was that the founders of that church who don't need foreign missionaries who can interpret the Bible on their own they do it in a very different way they're very fundamentalist they also don't be Christmas and Easter because that's not in the Bible they have their sabbath on Saturday the Bible says nowadays they like to some of them actually look to what happens in the Jewish community because they see them as being really a part of that tradition too so I stay interested in the nature of yesterday and also to play the network to replace the international network to stay in the Bible so this also means the future energy is to create a network in the church so no tradition of creatures other household and a connection with the Chinese sister and people that sacrifice is kind of normal so the network I mean this is my question so the network yesterday you said it's an interconnected point and the network is interweaving the lines so this is it's two different types of community different types of the network so for this also not a really no tradition not a really community but they still kind of sometimes they go to church sometimes they still they kind of see the rainfall and they go to their ancestor they also still doing the bigger sacrifice to replace the network and the national network as the center of this which is and also actually a lot of household is different than communication or conducting and also today, yesterday you used the first to talk about the match work is because the match work is interweaving the lines particularly this rainfall it's really a line it's a really a line and the other end is the ancestor so this interweaving yeah so actually this needs to be easier to understand but my question is how to understand why this is created the match work I think I think that the big killing is definitely an example match work it's the meshing of human in lives and they're it's the missing of the the dogs as well in many ways because the dogs are the hunting partners but they also share the dogs and I think that's an important thing because they take the part of the pigs and they cut it up and kill the dogs the dogs are included in the community here so there's an old match work of things that are really local there and then the travelers that go out and they walk along their trap lines so there are lines there and then there are points but it doesn't it's definitely that networks replace match works is that they have to do it continuously and in the day they might get up at dawn if it happens on a Sunday and then have the big killing and then go to church and then have their meal together and then have the wedding in the afternoon and then eat more pork and this is pretty good and so these things can happen at the same time but I don't think they really see this Jesus Church is the church that talks about big rupture so they say after they've converted they gave up all of the old ways now if you actually spend time living with them you didn't give up all the old ways but they talk about it as if they have and so there are different Christianities going on at the same time and the Presbyterian Church likes to talk about continuities so to them they pick and choose from the traditions things that they can use as a symbol and they like to talk about continuities big question about non-believers yes they're totally the total sort of I think it's a strong talk to people who don't believe I think there's a pressure to be there for funerals and weddings and if you're there for the important family community things do you find a major difference between the place you do feel would be very rural to what extent are those indigenous people who are living in the big cities are their religious practices very different there are no internal things like language what about speakers a huge difference in the big cities what I did is before I did any contact before I did the field work actually while I was doing research in Taipei I was exploring the indigenous community and there were congregations that were actually like the Namis congregations in the machines that I visited and a Buddha one outside of China so I think part of what happens in the cities is I think there are a number of things going on I think one of the things going on is some of these people create a sense of having on in the city okay so you're going to church? I think that there are others who choose to go to other churches and then they meet with other people which is what we've got in life processing things and I think there are other people who go to other churches so they might become like seven day Adventists or something else and so because much more in question of individual belief you also talked about the issue of gay marriage and one of those one of the prefectarian churches is quite supportive to what extent this issue gets discussed when you were in the village but we've seen how sacred issues have become particularly over the last two years what was the kind of the mood in the villages you were in? I think the mood was very conservative so I think that the electrical cell in there but almost everybody knew it was very conservative okay and I knew about God so but they they kind of did that apply across the three churches? well you know the presbyterian church that I worked with most intimately in Wadiah they organized a bus trip to protest against the same sex marriage okay so that really made me angry at them for quite a while because the same group of people has never participated in a protest for indigenous rights but they'll go and protest against somebody else's rights and not even support their own rights so because one of the things that's coming out of Michael Cole's was the influence of American churches on some of these kind of pushing Taiwanese churches in a more conservative direction to what extent does that kind of tally with what you have observed in the field? it's in the field so Michael was in urban settings so they haven't really seen them right so is the decision being made in all the sport? no okay so my question is the photograph you showed of the church they had a big cross on top was it a near cross? yes like the Catholic churches in South Korea so we'll get a village on a town with only one Christian on top of their doggy and everybody has a look at I think they're quite common I was wondering what extent did Scott's observations kind of overlap with your own observations because you're being the same village? no it was a climate creation it was really important but have you had any nation's people that saw these churches as equal improvisation? no but let's pretend that I have not had any drool or sadistic people told me that I have one little guy friend and she said to me I think it's a tragedy that all of them down the east coast there are all these churches that represent a foreign religion and everybody just blindly follows this foreign religion what's that in Chinese? in my class there was this couple of Jehovah's Witnesses who tried to convert me and I'm very Italian and I don't mean that and also they were telling me what their form was and there was another guy who studied in Chinese because he was a professor and I found that extreme budget so I do really need this nowadays because there weren't any certain people I find that well they did this for so long and I'm not going to say that's an iteration anymore but I think it was my experience there and I would meet them every day I was wondering what would they do with the people from their communities here they don't find it annoying now what I've seen is it's been more of an idea it's just our community this is who we are the true Jesus people never tried to convert me at all the presentation is just a film but I belong but the true Jesus people would assume that I'm not part of them because it's a Chinese church but they never asked me if I wanted to convert they just welcomed me like at first I was really uncomfortable with them because they speak in tongues and I thought they must be much more conservative than the others but after a while I did start feeling comfortable with them because they were just as friendly as everybody else and I think it's better for my health to spend time with them because they are because they don't give me as much alcohol they give me zero alcohol whereas the Presbyterians like to try to get me into alcohol I think that it's worse for my health but is there any attempt to have we'll do it properly if someone was trying to convert let's say someone a privateer was trying to convert true Jesus so that would be that but even though they were deciding to do it they were deciding to do it because they can't really say what that's they're not along but it's really seen almost as a geographical thing it's like when a village I've been working in they perceive themselves as one of the five different along and Kala is the true Jesus one okay and then the other four are divided among three Presbyterian churches in the Roman Catholic Church and I think they've got their territory pretty much since decades ago and it's good and Kala is true Jesus church and there are those who have left the church including the guy whose father is found in the church and people are not too tolerant about those people okay I'll take your hand yeah just curious when in this kind of the youngsters to let the church be conversing or is it almost like since everybody do it humans do it especially second like nowadays generations lots of youngsters a lot more educated or they consume more information globally what happened to these problematic like who grow up from this kind of traditional and religious background and it's goes to sort of like like metropolitan international world and being like how where do they find the ground in their choice in the I think because it's been there for so long that almost everybody starts out as a child going up in the church and if you actually go to the church you'll see that the really dynamic part of the church are the teenagers so it really it's almost like a teenage thing all the singing and the dancing and the drums and everything then they go to the university maybe and then have different lives of people from the city know it's yeah I think they do discover these things but I think it can be difficult for someone now they feel a lot of social pressure to stay in the village at the same time I've heard other stories and again this is before I started doing the yoga work but I met a guy in Taipei who when he got age went back to his village a Thai village and I asked him but aren't they all Christians aren't they very conservative and he said well he feels that that's where people treat him the best and he's the most accepted there so that's one case yeah Mike you go there I'm just surprised that he didn't seem to think there was a conflict within the Christian society and you know that every distance would come down in the spirit of community and in the Catholic community and in the source of what was he he never seemed to find that what am I talking about well I think that when I said there were debates about the same sex marriage or about the things that women in the medicine way but there were certain conflicts in the community and I think that overall I think that the cultural damage has been stronger than anything else that's going on than a lot of damage has been done in the church people will often say that and especially in Fusha where there are five along and five different church congregations that it's partly because of the churches that they can't collaborate together in any part of one village community but that being said they never collaborated together as one community even before the churches came in because before they were scattered in the mountains so I don't think we're really playing with the church for creating those divisions but it does create other divisions and within each congregation there are also conflicts you know there the Jihuan church the pastor sent me a very pro-independence for Taiwan and for the DPP regular members of the conversation will be very critical of that they don't like to have these political pastors in the church of Guadrán there one of the elders said to me because I mentioned to him that this pastor never says anything about politics he said oh he would really like to talk about politics he wants very much to talk about the DPP out here Great and Sunset Mid and so forth is but we wouldn't let him then if he talks about politics he's going to lose his job so there are all kinds of conflicts and some of it's political you know I think it's benign in person as opposed to the Sun in the United States it's just incorporated in the laws of Texas okay on that note then I think we should thanks Scott for two amazing talks and he's kind of hinted that he might be willing to come back fairly soon maybe some school next year I think we'd like to kind of welcome we look forward to see how this chapter develops so let's give Scott another big round of applause