 Okay, so welcome to tonight's SOI Centre of Taiwan Studies seminar. Tonight I'm delighted to welcome back Professor Scott Simon. So Scott's someone who's given us a number of talks over the last ten years. The first time he was here was I think January of 2008 at our Cultural and State Conference. He then came back in 2014 when we had our conference on Taiwanese social movements, and on that occasion he gave us a talk on Indigenous social movements, which became part of our, from strawberries to sunflowers, social movements are the main job, book. And then in his most recent talk, three years ago, he spoke at the World Congress of Taiwan Studies, when he gave us an overview of Indigenous studies, and this became part of the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Taiwan Studies. Scott is based at the University of Ottawa in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, and in addition to being a scholar of Indigenous issues in Taiwan, he's also been someone who, like a number of us here in the audience, have been trying to promote Taiwan Studies. So he's the chair of Taiwan Studies at University of Ottawa, that he runs together with Andre La Liberté, and I think it's the longest running Taiwan Studies project in Canada. So we're delighted to welcome Scott back, and the other thing I should of course say is that he's currently on sabbatical. Scott is one of these people I think, I probably could say, many of us academics are quite envious of Scott, because I'm not sure how he does it, but he seems to get a lot of sabbaticals. So since I've met Scott, he's had sabbaticals in Leon, and in Heidelberg, and you must have had quite a lot of sabbaticals in Taiwan. Only one, okay. But this time he's on sabbatical at the University of Ethnology, the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, in Japan. And the current talk he's going to give us is, again, it's quite a new one. He'll also be speaking tomorrow on religion and Indigenous people in Taiwan, same time at seven o'clock. But let's now kind of give Scott a very big welcome back to London and so has. Thank you, everyone. I thank Nafid and Biu for inviting me to this. I want to thank A Long and everybody for coming here, and Jai Yun for all of her help, and Laura, we had a nice discussion tonight. It was a lot of fun. So I want to thank everybody for coming tonight. I know it was a football match tonight, so it was a decision for everybody to come. Thank you for that. So, you know in Canada we often thank also the ancestors to give us this land we walk on. And I think it's kind of funny to convey here because those are my own ancestors, but it's a pleasure to say that as well. Thank you to my ancestors. I'll say it in their language. Thank you. So, anyway, today I will be going through this talk called Thinking with Birds, Ornithomancy, and Indigeneity in Taiwan. Basically, for these talks for today and tomorrow as well, they're publications at different stages. And this particular one is an article which I wrote in French for the anthropology journal in Quebec called Anthropologie et Société. And so the original title is Pensee avec des oiseaux, Ornithomancy et l'Ottoctonie à Taiwan. So basically it's a long-going project that I've had looking at Ornithomancy, which is divination by observing the behavior of birds. And so we'll be looking at that in Taiwan as practiced by the Drugu people and the Szecek people. But it's practiced actually by all of the peoples in Taiwan. And it seems to be basically the same bird that everybody's looking at. But it's only the Drugu and the Szecek who have elevated their relationship with this bird to a national symbol. So when I was asked by Professor Frédéric Logrand at Laval University in Quebec if I had anything to say about divination, I immediately thought about this system of divination that Drugu people talk about an awful lot. And I'll go through that, but I found it to be a bit of an enigma because they talk about it an awful lot but nobody seems to actually do it or understand how it worked in the first place. So that may be a little bit more difficult than for example the work that Frédéric does in the Philippines where they actually still have an intimate relationship with birds in the forest. And I think that's actually very important because it shows what's happening in Taiwan with indigeneity and with indigenous rights issues. In a way which isn't necessarily so flattering to Taiwan as I think some of the officials would like us to say. So it's a way of reflecting upon birds and also about indigeneity and indigenous rights which as Deputy said it's been a preoccupation for my research for a very long time. I am getting into the human bird relationship and human animal relationship but I've come into that from an indigenous perspective because it really was indigenous people who brought me to that and it started with this bird called the Shishila and then they took me into the forest with them and showed me how they hunt and then I got an interest in the mammals of the forest as well. And so anyway it's very much related to the indigenous thing rather than to any of the intellectual discussions that are really interesting about human animal relations that are happening in anthropology right now. And if we've got time in the question and answer we can talk a bit about that or very interesting different perspectives on animals. There's multi-species ethnography, there's the ontological turn in anthropology, there's Tim Ingold's phenomenology, there's all kinds of things going on. I'll talk more about phenomenology tomorrow but it is quite interesting but I think we'll stick pretty much with this and rather than translating anything into English I thought I would put together slides which have photographs and an outline to remind me of what I wanted to talk about and then I can tell some stories that come from this article in French and if you like you can, it should be coming out in the July issue so it should be available next month. The journals can go behind schedule who knows but it should be available next month. So anyway, I'll be talking about the bird which is called the Shishin and that's the Sejek pronunciation and the Derubu pronunciation is with an N at the end, Shishin and my friend Gumu Dabas has told me you really should use that Hawaiian pronunciation because you're much more accurate with that because the L is very different than our L, it's more of a Shishin it's always difficult for me but anyway, I'm going to talk about the enigma of the Shishin and to begin with I'll just talk about how it's really spoken about as being very much of a sacred animal which is a very special relationship with the Derubu and I love this definition which Ferdinand Pécarral made in his 1979 Taroko French Dictionary in which he defined it as a very romantic way I think and Shishin is a bird of small size a privileged partner of Taroko indicator of chance or malchance by its voice or by its singing in every step it takes to make an expedition so basically it's this little teeny tiny bird which is the partner, the privileged partner of the Taroko people that tells them if they're going to have good luck or bad luck by its flight or by its singing in any activity which involves movement or an expedition and so basically in the past they would consult this bird before going on a head hunting expedition and so it was used in warfare I think it's one of the ways in which people could get out of head hunting expedition because they could see the bird on the path that says well we're not going to succeed anyway so we should not do this and I've heard that it's also been used in some agriculture rituals and it's been used very much in hunting and you're not going to, well I didn't put this in the article but an interesting thing that happened to me after doing my research on the Shishin I was invited to go on a bird watching expedition in Wulai Township around Taipei this German guy was leading it and the goal was to see the Wu Se Niao the Taiwanese barbet so as we were walking into the forest I saw the Shishin on the left hand side of the path and I said Bruno we're not going to find this barbet because the Shishin came on the left hand side of the path and he said what kind of superstition is that we spent the whole afternoon looking for the barbet we didn't see a single one so there you see what they look for when they're going into the forest for something and it's very important so I went to Taiwan, we'll talk about that in a moment but I went to Taiwan in 1912 and 13 to do a study on the Tarako people and their relationship with birds and everybody mentioned the Shishin and so I was quite interested in this and I said it was the way their ancestors communicate with them and tell them if they're going to be successful in hunting and they wanted to know how that worked and nobody could tell me and then my friend Yaya and she's one of my best friends in Taiwan she's about 12 years older than I am she's a respected elder in the community and she said to me if you want to understand the Shishin you should sit down in the forest and watch the bird for yourself and in a way she was giving a brand new research methodology of actually going out and spending time with the animals and taking notes of animal behavior but this is her house and actually the faded-out screen in the background is also taken from her home and it's a place that I like to visit every time I go to Taiwan I take students there every two years I took them there in 2015 and 17 we're planning another trip next time it's a rather challenging place and I'm like did you ever go there in the Taroko National Park it's a for Yaya it takes about an hour to walk up the mountain from the National Park Headquarters and then once she gets to the top there's about a three hour walk to her home along a fairly level path for that's Yaya at 63 for our students at 19 and 20 it took six hours to get to the top and then four hours along the level path it's a rather difficult walk to people who are unaccustomed to walking on these kinds of trails so Yaya's place is there are about 15 households up there that have chosen to have some kind of presence on the mountain they were moved down in order to make room for the Taroko National Park and they've slowly asserted their place there a few years ago got official addresses so the little number on their door they made jokes about asking somebody to actually send a letter there because the postman would have to which of course is impossible they just received solar panels there was actually an NGO in Tainan who raised funds so they could put solar panels on their homes and so they just installed those in 2017 when I took students up so Yaya was very happy to turn on her light because she had a light bulb but now she has a washing machine so things are really changing up there but for a long time it was considered to be a place where people could go and get a view of so-called traditional Aboriginal lifestyle because there was no electricity or running water but there is running water because they use the water from the streams and it's quite nice because you can drink the water straight from the top there and you can't do it in most of Taiwan so anyway Yaya suggested that I sit outside and watch for the shishio and she said it would come around every afternoon at around 3 p.m. and eat the fruits on her trees there and I spent two weeks actually living up here in this house, two weeks there and it did actually come by every afternoon about 3 p.m. and I could watch it and at that time I had not yet taken up photography I had not taken up bird photography at all I just had a little teeny digital camera and I couldn't take a picture of the shishio and actually people in the villages were very confused about this I was talking about birds when I wasn't taking any bird photographs because this is Taiwan, we all take pictures of things and one of my major informants, a retired police officer is in fact the person who convinced me that I should buy a better camera and that I should take up bird photography because he was already doing that and so I did eventually follow his advice but I first followed Yahya's advice and sat there and watched them and took notes and couldn't really figure them out it was still in English, I mean these birds and so it took time I have a number of questions about the shishio and I want to talk about that one of them is what kind of bird is the shishio now in a certain way this year in Japan we are learning a bit about the shishio one of the first Japanese anthropologists was Kano Pao Dao who worked in Orchid Island I don't know if you've ever read about him or his work but he was actually in high school in Taiwan and then went to university and even as a young adolescent he liked to run away from his class and go up into the mountains and meet with indigenous people he was into collecting insects he did some of the groundbreaking work on glaciers in Taiwan because everybody thought that Taiwan was so far south and so tropical that there was no glacial period in Taiwan but he actually found evidence that there had been glaciers in Taiwan and so anyway he was an interesting guy and he had an article in the very first year that the Japanese Wild Bird Society published their journal Yatcha Wild Bird and he had an article in there about none other than the shishio and so there was a lot there was research done in the Japanese period about the shishio and it actually figures in every single ethnography about the Ataya and Shedek and Turuko people so it was seen as very important but there's a question of which bird is that and Kano identified it as the Alchipi Morisonia or the Great Sheetful Veta and I think that's pretty much stuck there's pretty much consensus that that's what it is but within the villages themselves people would tell me but I'm not quite sure if that really is the shishio and so we'll talk about that a bit then there's the question about what is it that makes this particular bird effective as an almond why is it this bird and not another bird because there's so many different kinds of birds there you know the laughing thrush and so forth but why is it this little teeny tiny bird how does a sensorial relationship between humans and birds become part of a cultural system so in a way by thinking about humans and birds we're thinking about how cultures are made and then what does symbolism about this relationship mean in the political context of contemporary indigeneity it's quite of a challenge to try to think about all of this in one journal already I did my best to do that so basically I think it's important to give a little bit of an overview of all of these ethanol names that I'm tossing around here it's quite complicated basically the Japanese ethnographers created a classification of nine ethnic groups and that stuck around until Chun Sui Bien became president and then there was this whole process of ethnogenesis in which new groups became recognized they called it Chun Mi so named rectification movement and so from the attire group was established the Dorogo became independent in 2004 so they were no longer considered to be attire they're mostly in Hua Lian and they've got a population as of January of 2018 of 31,375 basically the name rectification movement which I've written about was a project of the Presbyterian Synod in Hua Lian and so it's basically coming out of Xiuling Xiang and with some cooperation from Wanrong Xiang and a little bit of reluctant cooperation from Zuo Xi Xiang and then very strong opposition from people in Nantou they belong to a different synod of the Presbyterian Church so we'll get a little bit more tomorrow but it was very much of a conflict within the Presbyterian Church which led all of this to happen so the Dorogo were established in 2004 the Sedeck who had allies in Hua Lian were able to establish themselves in 2008 as an independent tribe they've got a population of about 9,942 mostly in Nantou and so that happened then so that's why we have the Dorogo and the Sedeck tribe there's another spelling for the Tairuko which is taroko that's from the Japanese period so some of the Japanese ethnographies talk about taroko and zoku both of these ethnic terms go back to the Japanese time so you can pick and choose your Japanese documents to say that's the name rectification that we need from a linguistic perspective we can say that the Ataya language is split into three major language groups which would be the Sedeck, Skolek and Chili I know nothing about those other two but I do know about Sedeck the spelling here is S-A-D-Y-A-Q is from the Pekaroro dictionary and it means human beings so that's the word that I use in my book which I wrote in French and it says so anyway within the Sedeck groups then there are three dialects or languages which would be the Turugu which is the predominant one in Hualien then there are the Doda people and the Dikatae people and they also have different names there's the Dalsai and all of these names you'll find in Japanese period documentation anyway basically those three groups migrated from Nantou to Hualien along three different river valleys and developed three different dialects they're basically numerically about the same proportion in the population in Nantou and so the Turugu didn't get first through in Nantou they had to find some form of a compromise so they called themselves Sedeck and they actually spell it in three different ways every time they write it down they've got the Sedeckuzu and then they spell it in the three ways that they put over here on the right Sedeck is and then Sedeck and then Sedeck because the Dikatae people stretch out their vowels so that's kind of complex anyway it's kind of via the way that they became those two tribes and it was a very emotional process for the people who were involved in it most ordinary people were not involved in it and they found it to be a rather ridiculous way that their locally leads were looking for new resources so that was happening so the research that I've done is based on a very long process basically I've been spending my whole life on these indigenous issues I started doing my Taiwan research with my PhD I went to Taiwan in 1996 it was only while I was in Taiwan that first time for five years I started making indigenous friends so I went to Ottawa in 2004 and my friends were saying we'll come back and do research with us so I did in 2004 to 2007 I had a three year project called the underside of America Ethnic Dimensions of Development in Taiwan and so that was about what does development mean to them that led to a book about the relationship between indigenous people and the state that was the book that I wrote in French and then I was thinking about how to come up with a new project and by about 2008 when my job was elected I started to get a little bit cold about politics and I thought well maybe all these people are taking me out into the forest to go hunting and traveling and so forth I thought I'd write about animals so in 2010 I got funding from the Ministry of Education in Taiwan to do a project on the cultures of human animal relations in rural Taiwan and that was kind of a test case and I thought it was successful enough that in 2012 I went back to Taiwan into six months of field work on a project called Emissaries of the Ancestors or an Ethnology of Taiwan's Durugu people and that was funded by Jiang Jinguo Foundation and then in order to think through some of the theoretical issues there I had a grant from the Ontario Bodden-Vortenberg exchange program to do a project called Animism and Human Animal Relations in the Changing Austronesian World and that was in Heidelberg and then this year I'm working on a project called Museum of Ethnology which is called Minpaku the ecological adaptation of material culture in Taiwan and neighboring islands and we're going to have a conference there next month that I'm helping to organize and then there's a five year project just beginning which is called Austronesian World's Human Animal Entanglements in the Pacific Anthropocene which will take me and my colleagues and students into Taiwan into Japan, into Guam and so we've got a big project over the next five years which is much bigger than Taiwan but still based in Taiwan and I think that's quite important so basically on this map you can see my field sites that I mentioned in the article here because I've been going around from different Durugu villages but we'll talk about the villages of Boado and Sado and Skadan is where Yahya's house is and so there's three villages this is where I've the other ones I talked about in this particular article so we can see here that they're really close to one another but it's the Taroko National Park is in the middle and it's rather treacherous I love that picture talking across those stones but basically as I just said Kano Tano identified the Shishira as the Alchipi Morisonia on the June 2, 1934 issue of Yajou so it's quite interesting I think that these birds in Taiwan play a very important role in the development of Ornithology in Japan we're not going to talk about Japanese Ornithology today but it's quite interesting that the Japanese names for the birds are they often have a basic name for the bird and then if there's like a subspecies where they might say the big heron or the little one, the lesser egret that many birds actually the basic name is from a Japanese species that doesn't even exist in Japan because back then Taiwan was part of Japan so things have changed and that's quite interesting but we're going to think over there right now but those ethnographies document Ornithomancy in many tribes is being important now this particular photograph you can see that the dog is looking across and you can see there what is the dog looking at actually you see a row you see a path and there are probably some birds there but there's a big rock over there at the top and that rock is actually related to the birds and it's related to three different kinds of birds because there's a story about that rock that in ancient times this was a really big rock and nobody could move it and the big animals of the forest the humans tried to move it the bears tried to move it and nobody could move this rock and so the birds decided that they're going to move this rock and so they got together and discussed it and first of all the jagon the crow was going to move the rock and the crows moved the rock and dropped it on its foot and then and then flew away and because it injured its foot that's why crows hop around on one foot and then the second one was the sheepy which is the black bull bull which has red feet and a red beak people make a joke they say the name is easy to remember the sheepy the things you get with it for a wedding the sheepy to remember that so the sheepy then came up and thought they're going to move it and the sheepy actually injured itself and so it bled and that's why its feet and its beak are red to this day and then the little tiny, the tiniest bird of the forest the she-shell, they came up and the she-shell decided that what they have to do is to cooperate with one another and all together they'll move this giant rock and so they were able to do that and so the she-shell did that and then the humans were very impressed by this behavior and so they said we want to know your name and the birds said we're just a bird I didn't reveal their name and so the humans had to give it a name and they chose the name of she-shell so they don't know the real name we call it she-shell and then the she-shell told them that because of this we will have a privileged relationship from now on and whenever you go hunting you have to look to us first and we will tell you if you're going to succeed or not so that's one of the myths and there are a few others but that's basically what we'll talk about today so the path is important basically we see in the Japanese ethnography it's like Sayama in 1917 he said the she-shell crying loudly on the left or on the right is a good sign so if it's on either side and it's full of energy and it's singing loudly that's a good sign you're going to catch whatever you're going to try to catch if it's listless and has no energy or it's crossing the path in front of you it's a bad sign if it's flying on either side it's a good sign that's what he wrote in 1917 now most people say this is what I'm interviewing them they say it's a good sign if it's on the right so if the bird appears on your right hand side it's good you'll find something it's on the left it's bad it's very bad if it crosses in front of you it means somebody has gotten sick or died at home and so you should go back to the village one person told me this is all very idiosyncratic for me it's when it appears on the left hand side of the path that it's good and on the right hand side it's bad so there's something very idiosyncratic about whether it's good on the right and left and so forth but what's important for everything is that it appears to them when they're walking on a modern path so it's kind of like that road that I take my students up with EIA it's very important that they're observing birds around them as they're walking on a path and it's very important to understand that they're doing this because they want something to eat this happens while they're hunting this is why I have to remove this photograph on the computer this is a munchak and so somebody has trapped this so it's important that they're trying to figure out if they're going to be successful or not in the hunting and so I'll have to keep that in mind it's for gain now it's there for purpose for that now the way that I got knowledge about the shishiya was for those first six months of field research is going around to the village and talking to people about birds and I would first of all start with freelisting so I would say to them how many birds do you know let's make a list and then I would find out who knows the most and then we actually had some interviews where we sat down and we made a taxonomy of the birds so they had to group them into the higher level taxonomies and so forth and we'd look at field guys of birds and we'd look at them and we'd look at field guys of birds and they would tell me the name and we'd try to identify with the birds that we had the pictures of so that was the way we did it and it was happening at a time when the shishiya was quite important to them so in 2007 in Pudi they actually had a meeting where the siddic nationalists swore allegiance to themselves as the people of the shishiya and in their handbook that they passed around actually identified it as being the al-chipi morasonia in 2011, I'm sure everybody many people have seen the film Warriors of the Rainbowl it actually shows up quite a few times in that film it's a computer animation I believe but there's a shishiya that flies around in that film quite a few times at one point, Mona Ludo says that we the shishiya of the forest are going to drive out the Japanese crow so the crow is the symbol of Japan there then when I did those free listing exercises what I found interesting is that people didn't always think of the shishiya first so quite often we'd go through a list of other birds and then people would say hey there's an after-thigh you know there's a shishiya too that we should talk about because it's our national bird and so there was a way to do a run it through a computer software program and figure out where it comes out in terms of salience which includes the number of people who mentioned the bird but it also includes where it comes in their list and it tends to be fairly low on the list so it came out as only the 12th most salient bird in those exercises very interesting, I did 21 interviews with experts like this guy here and less than half, so 10 out of 21 could actually tell me in a field guy which one is the shishiya so most of them were unable to do that now that's because they don't go into the mountains with binoculars in their hands they're not bird watchers and so these birds are at a distance and they're not seeing them close up and you can't really tell the scale from looking at a bird guide because they all look like they're the size of the page that they're printed on so that was difficult they would have done a better job in shishiya I think now interestingly some people said that there are other birds that are also shishiya and so they would talk about shishiya and friends so they're pointing out to something shishiya doesn't always come along we always heard that birds of a flock that birds of a feather flock together and the shishiya taught me that that's not true at all that actually birds do come in mixed flocks and so this is one of them so you know I thought about this through this research project and then in 2015 I took students up to see yaya and Logan this guy here as he's cutting up this piece of wood which is a lemugas tree he said to me that what happens is that there's this tree in the forest and we like to take good care of this tree because it has a fruit and there are birds that come and eat the fruit and then there are other animals that go in trees like flying squirrels and monkeys and they eat the fruit and as they eat it they drop some of it to the ground and that attracts the animals that we like to hunt like the munchak and the wild boar and so we know that where this tree lives we're going to have the animals that we like and that's why the bird comes too so that's why the bird is very good as an indicator of gain because wherever this shishio shows up it means the fruit is there and so it means the animals are there too and so he said I'll show you that and he said come back with me and we'll go walking in the forest in November or December and I can show you the shishio so I decided that I would do that and so last November I made a special trip of about 10 days actually 11 days to go visit logging and we went to look for the shishio but first of all we went and talked to Dada because he is the oldest person around who is very well known for his knowledge of birds and so we went to visit Dada and he's a bit of a traditionalist in fact he's probably the only traditionalist in that village, he has no interest in church he's interested in traditional way of living with animals and so he said our ancestors were very intelligent they could use this tiny bird to communicate with us and he had this very lively discussion with me in Japanese about how if they find the right hand side of the path it's a good thing on the left hand side it's a bad thing and so forth he speaks Japanese much better than his Chinese so he's much more comfortable with that for the Presbyterians the shishio is a political symbol for Dada it's not it's his ancestors for the churches the shishio is a dangerous superstition a relic of the evils of the past there are all kinds of different perspectives on this bird in the villages so religion has changed things quite a bit it's made the shishio less important I think that's why the bird showed up so low on their salience it's part of the story it's not the entire story but it's part of it so anyway, Logan and I went walking we decided that now I've taken up bird photography I want to take a picture of the shishio and Logan says I'm going to take you there I'm going to take a picture of the shishio I'll show you how this works and how they communicate with us and basically he ended up showing me why they don't communicate with us anymore so we started in Hualien we started in the Taroko National Park first thing we were having we were going up the steep path and there are Chinese tourists there and they were from Shanghai and so we talked to them a little bit and we said David give them a chance to get up there and they started walking in front of us and it didn't take very long maybe five or six minutes before they decided the path was too steep they would just turn back but it's interesting that this is a place where tourists go so we walked around quite a bit we saw acorns falling on the ground and Logan took this time to show me how to tell if the fallen acorns indicate the presence of flying squirrels or not he said that many young hunters from the Darugutra they can't tell so when they see acorns on the ground they think that it must have been a squirrel that's been eating it and it's actually quite evident if you think about it the squirrels are after the knot itself and so if it's the knot that's disappeared then a little pup at the top and the branch that's fallen to the ground you pretty know that it's the squirrel that's eating it but if somebody's been eating the leaves and then the knot has fallen to the ground then there's a caterpillar but he said many young people don't realize which is which and they are looking for flying squirrels in a place where there are caterpillars so he also went along looking at the paths and he could tell he's walking along the path looking down and he could tell where an animal has come down the slope and emerge from the way the vegetation is broken basically by looking at the surrounding area and the basic size of this place where the vegetation is broken he has some ideas in his head already but then he can look around maybe there'll be some scott on the ground or maybe there'll be some footprints to be seen and then he can tell what kind of animal it is and he can guess at its gender and at its age and can make a lot of guesses about it and be very accurate about it so and actually now living in the forest I know what animals walk around it's actually quite easy but it's a form of knowledge that he has that he can access quite easily when he's walking through the forest and it's important because he does do some trapping so but we looked for the Shishita and we couldn't find it and there are poobles all over the place that day so he finally just said today is pooblet day let's go back so that's what we did that was our trip in Hualien then we decided to go to Nantou take his motorcycle across the central mountain highway in Taiwan and we went to visit an elder in the village Machi who told us be very careful of your dreams before you go and if you have a bad dream you should take the train to Nantou instead of the motorcycle it's dangerous to ride your motorcycle neither one of us had any nightmares so we went ahead by motorcycle and anyway we were a bit more successful in Nantou we went to the village to the village where I did research there and then we headed up the mountain the Nankou historical trail which is the trail that the Taroko people took on their way to Hualien and it's also the trail that the Japanese used it's the Taroko battle and they conquered the Taroko territory so it's very important and looking at something interesting in the Darugu language is there's a different word for the paths that are taken by humans and by non-human animals so the word for a road in Darugu for a human would be Edo but if it's an animal or a bird flying down its path a set path through these trees from one tree to another would be its Duga and he said sometimes they use the word Duga for human path but only in a very special situation like the path that that alcoholic takes to the pub every night that's his Duga so so there's those two words and that reminded me this is actually one reason why I like Tim Ingle because Tim Ingle's way of thinking about nature is very similar to this Taroko way of talking about nature Ingle said each such trail is but one strand in a tissue of trails that together compromise the texture of the life world this texture is what I mean when I speak of organisms being constituted within a relational field it is a field not of interconnected points but of interwoven lines not a network but a mesh work and so I decided to think about the Shishir and these humans to be part of the same mesh work of lives that include birds and mammals and fruit trees and humans and so it's a mesh work of things and so I think that what happens is that as these young men are growing up into men and becoming hunters they start to have an awareness of the way that things are related in the ecology of the forest subconsciously they know that there is some relationship between the behavior of the bird the Shishir and the game animals and Logan has tried to explain it to me in a very naturalist way and I think he's trying very hard to tell it to me in words because it's a knowledge that they have which is very difficult to express in words I think that in the Japanese period it was difficult for them to express in words so when some ethnographer came and said do you have any system of divination they probably said well what's that and they said well it's a way of knowing what's going to happen in the future and then somebody said Shishir that's our divination so it became that but I think it's basically a product of years of apprenticeship as people learn how to be hunters it's like other ways in which they understand what's happening in the mesh work of lives in the forest another example would be the smell of cobras which I found very mysterious at first because this was on one of my very early tracks up to Yahya's place when my friend Isau is now working for the government but we were walking through a place and he said be very careful here because I can smell the cobras and that just something mystified me how could he possibly smell cobras because he had very refined sense of humor and now after years of walking through the same forest when I get to that particular place I can actually smell the mustiness of the cobras they are there and they do have the smell but it takes years before you realize what that smell is so what's happening is that these trails are becoming more and more populated by hikers so there is a lot of tourism going on in Taiwan and hikers drive out other animals so things are happening there and you can't hunt what people are hiking on so anyway ornithological knowledge on the Alchipe so I consulted some of what ornithologists have said about this bird because I wanted to see if that's similar to or dissimilar from what people have said and I found very interesting it's often very complementary one thing is that the Alchipe which is the ornithological way of saying that she's seal is the most numerous and dominant species up to 2800 meters so basically this is the bird most commonly seen in Durugu hunting territory so geographically it covers the same space as the Durugu but it covers a larger area than other birds and so what happens is the she's seal is going along its dugar, its road and it's going through different parts of the forest some of which are occupied by different other kinds of birds who will follow the she's seal for part of its search for food and so other birds join and they leave and the ornithologists call them multi species flock and so that's why the Durugu call it seal and friend so basically they're pointing to the same reality that the ornithologists will call a multi species flock these flocks come together not during the whole year but they come together during the non reproductive season for the birds which is the important part for the ornithologists which is from September to February and that happens to correspond to the Durugu hunting season which traditionally happened after the millet crop now the cry that it makes is loud and repetitive so basically what's useful for the birds is that the she's seal is the one that tells them where the food is so they follow it along and then it also cries out when there's a predator and when there's a predator from the sky like a hawk it makes one cry and dives down into the bushes and if there's a predator or a possible predator from below this is what's important to the hunters if there's a boar or a muntjac or something walking underneath the bush then it makes another cry and it flies up and that's when the hunters will see it so I think basically what happens is that if there's a mammal walking underneath the bush and a place where the hunter can't see it or hear it but a bird sees it or hears it and then flies away then they see it on the side of the path and depending on the particular terrain of their hunting territory different hunters will see it on the left hand or the right hand side because that's they have dangerous cliffs and so forth and so it really depends on where the vegetation and the pathways are and so I think that this particular cry and behavior of the bird is actually something that exists in nature and that's when they were asked about do you have a system of divination that it became a system of divination so anyway finally, Logan and I saw Ashishia which emerged on the right hand side of the path and it's a very small loud and rapid bird so it's been very difficult for me to take any respectable photos and I was lucky enough to get one good photo there were a few others that were okay but this one was good enough so I was very lucky and happy with that photo Ashishia so I think there are a number of conclusions to make Ashishia is the Alchepe Morisonia and its friends I think the best way to think about Ashishia is that it's the prototypical species in a multi-species flock so actually all of those other species of birds like the Mejiro the white Japanese white eye and so forth that come along with it for part of its journey are also Ashishia but they're the friends the Alchepe Morisonia would be the prototypical Ashishia all the others are kind of the ones that come along with it some of the really experienced people could give me the derugu names for all of those I think that the Ashishia is part of a mesh work of communication that's happening in the forest we don't feel this today none of the derugu people feel this today because we buy our chicken and our fish from the supermarket and we're not hungry when we're walking along the path we're not dependent on catching anything but I think for a long time it was very important that they be attuned to the other living things around them in a mesh work and there are ways in which species communicate with one another and the Ashishia was a very important part of that when they were asked by ethnographers about systems of divination this sprang to mind ethnographers wrote it down it became a defining characteristic of derugu culture so derugu culture in a very real sense emerges from humans thinking about the relationships that they have with other creatures it's not the relationship itself it's talking about it makes it into culture now what happens in Taiwan is because the hunting has been criminalized hunting by daytime so diurnal hunting is no longer possible and these birds come out in the daytime so nowadays when they go hunting they tend to put headlamps on and they go out at night and they shine the lights around in the forest and then the light reflects from the animal's eyes and then they can shoot the animal most hunters are actually elderly people who trap so that's not where you would need a bird to help you identify the location of the animal you would use your own eyes to figure out where its dugar its path is and then lay your trap so they don't really need it to hunt anymore it's really the way from memory it's only because it's written down on those ethnographies that it became a symbol and so now the shishile is a political symbol but I think it's a very potent and important one because it says we are the people of the shishile we are the people of the forest and these colonial policies have removed us from the forest and there's that we've lost something there and so we need to have our forest back so it's a very potent way of claiming territory and so I conclude my article in this talk by saying I hope that in this case it's also a good omen or a good auger for their future so thank you everybody and these are my acknowledgments for the people who have been very supportive of my research until now there's quite a number of organizations that have been involved so thank you everybody for your attention thank you so that was something very very different I mean I think we knew from the title of the talk it was going to be something fresh and original but we really just like all your previous so house talk we really got a sense of your kind of passion for field work very different type of field work and I wasn't originally aware about how long you've been involved in this project it's almost 10 years since you started this kind of human animal relationship research one kind of character I was really interested in in your talk was and was that his book that he had in his hand because I was thinking about to what extent is his real rich knowledge actually being lost and for example do youngsters actually listen to him but is he able to actually pass on that knowledge to those young hunters or do they just think they know it anyway okay so you mean the elderly man yes so but yes I see what you mean so basically the book was the guidebook to the time of these birds he was very interested in that he had taken that but Dadao I think he's doing a really good job of passing on knowledge the people will go to him if they want to learn how to hunt in that forest so young people do go to him and in addition to the people of his own village there are Taiwanese people who go there because he runs an eco tourism lodge any of you any of you can go and see him and so he does a very good job of that and one thing that he does is he really emphasizes the value of parochial culture and traditional knowledge and he's one of the ones who has always done the sacrifices in the village so when everybody else is doing their church things and there's a big killing one who takes a little tiny bit of each piece of meat and wraps it up in a leaf and then ties it to a tree or some high place so I think he's keeping those memories alive for people and now there's a whole generation of young indigenous people going to Dong Hua University and taking courses and doing theses and so on about indigenous issues and they go and talk to him so I think that he's a very important national treasure and a very important resource and he is getting quite old and we don't know how long he's going to be able to do this he's I think maybe 87 years old now but he's still walking he's still walking he's amazing because he's still walking up that path carrying rice for his customers and he's much better at walking up that path than most 20 year old Taiwanese people you also talked about religion, about the difference between the Presbyterian and the true Jesus church so would this clash just be even just be within one village so basically most across Taiwan there are differences, the Catholic church is much stronger in the south the Taiwan and the Lukai people but in most villages there are competing somewhat competing churches the true Jesus is more of a Pentecostal as they speak in tongues and so forth and then the Presbyterians but generally it's not individuals that choose to go to one church or another it's the whole clan okay then it converts to one so basically it'll be almost like there's a strong relationship between the kinship structure and then the church denomination so does that mean then the true Jesus church would completely reject traditional indigenous culture so they're very fundamentalist and so what they encourage people to think of and they don't have the idea of culture they have to apologize to it, it's a little bit different but they want people to think of a rupture and that the past are all evil spirits like the Shishio demonic spirit that they're supposed to remove from their life so they're not allowed to have that as part of their practice and some of them were even afraid to talk about it and so some people would say to me we shouldn't even be telling you these things now I understand that you're an anthropologist you're interested in our traditions and our culture so we'll tell you but it's very dangerous to talk about that so some of them are really hesitant okay so I mean if we think okay if we think about things like indigenous social movements then they would completely reject those as well I wouldn't say that they completely reject but they're definitely not as interested as the Presbyterians and the Presbyterians are the ones who've been the leaders of the social movement okay let's move to some more questions thank you so much oh that's right the thing that one of these surprised me I don't think you mentioned about the calls until you got to the Ornithologists and that really you would have thought that was very much the craft of hunting and so on is that would that be more to do with locking being a trapper and therefore not needing to actually you know look for the birds themselves I mean most people that kind of small bird they're much more likely to hear than to ever see surely and it kind of surprises me that it doesn't seem to be any folklore about it's cool though about the rest yeah that's more of a call than a bird song because it's mostly the predator call that's important because that's going to identify something and I think you're right that there's not that much to talk about calls of the birds and I think that just like we are they're more interested in the visual parts of the birds and that's an interesting observation actually because we in anthropology we tend to think that western society is very visually oriented and that somehow other societies might be yeah using other senses more yeah but I think that the drug of people are using their eyes as well to look at birds and logging is definitely using his eyes to look at what these paths are for the animals that's a very interesting observation okay yeah and thank you very much okay I'm I'm interesting on the much work this is very interesting the kind of ideas okay so normally we say about network right network is a point but much work you say much work is lying so the first question is much work because you already translated from indigenous language into English so I want to know in Chinese character okay well how does this mean much work well you have like the duvar at the end of the mesh work because we have to we have to come up with the word for it in Chinese character but if a Chinese character what would be zongwen English different word in English too mesh work means it's not a my law because that would be a network yeah mesh work we have to come up with something different wouldn't we could I suggest tartan could I suggest tartan no maybe wang wang no hard it's very difficult it's a new word because even in English it's a new word mesh is much more not tartan no because this this is a way I've been thinking about European culture rather than these isolated things developing everywhere it's actually always been interconnected interconnected yeah so I see this interesting because network is more kind of interconnected point but this mesh work is more kind of interweaving the lines so I think at least we need to come up with a good translation I wonder how has Tim and Gold been translated into Chinese do you know maybe maybe I don't know I mean just the first thing but they say this they only say in indigenous language they never say in Mandarin well I think it's that mesh work is from Tim and Gold it's not from indigenous language so the words from the indigenous language were which mean so it's the line it's there rather than the points so that the idea is there but they've never said anything that would be translated as mesh work that's Tim and Gold's work okay and also you use the long part of the mesh work of communication normally we think of the part it should be the small part or larger part but you use the long long part P-A-R-T long part yeah long I think it is interesting okay yeah either just as a matter of interest I apologize for using the S-word again there is a Scottish garlic saying it is a pity for the one who goes to the shore when the birds themselves are deserting it so that is a reflection of magic interaction I think with with other animals my question relates to the first question you mentioned the crows they had a meeting to discuss what they should do about removing the stone can you tell us which language they had that discussion in the reason I mentioned is just because several years ago there was an article in Le Monde which discussed a species of bird from western Africa whose call changed as you move north so in the article they described this as a different dialect but my real question is this most people consider if the bird is on the left hand side that is a bad thing so of course in East Asia in the areas affected by Chinese culture certainly to be left handed is seen as a bad thing I am left handed in Europe to be some likely sinister to be left handed is considered to be a bad thing where does this idea that left handedness is bad come from in indigenous culture yeah that's a good question you know I think that I don't know where it comes from but I think there is an interesting book that I read actually a 19th century book by a German ethnologist named Ludwig Hopf Ludwig Hopf he actually took the time to go through the ethnographies of his time to look at birds and the signs that they make and how it is used in fortune telling and he found that this is pretty much a human universal but the left hand side is considered to be the bad side if birds are on the left hand side rather than the right hand side of the fan and I think that the when I talked to people about it and they gave me all kinds of different answers and when we go back to the Japanese ethnographies and we see that it's not always on the left hand side the actual relationship with the birds in the forest the left hand side is not the bad side but somehow as people are thinking through it and talking about it the left hand becomes the bad side and it seems to be a human universal but I can't explain it okay so is that a direct on this one? I just want to talk about the French the left gauche so is that linked to English? gauche is a bad thing is it? that's what I wanted to say but you get it thank you because I have to say I echo quite a few questions first actually I was quite taken by the phrase you use matchwork of lives you know this is such a beautiful picture you portray is such a harmonious thing so I'm just trying to ask you because you mentioned about the tourism what's the impact bringing into this matchwork of lives that's one thing another thing is talking about the involvement of church to what degree that really actually challenging the traditional way of life and has the enhancement of the indigenous people's status bring that back as a more valuable assets for them thank you I think tourism was very important because one of the things I learned from this trick with loging was just how present tourists are in the mountains in Taiwan but he made money out of making a living out of it loking does because he's a guy he carries things for tourists and Dano is he owns this lodge at the top of the mountain and Yaya takes in tourists so these people are all making money from tourism but the tourists are obviously increasing in numbers and they're displacing people from their territory they cannot hunt even though they're legalizing hunting on the same paths that are being used by tourists and even if you were to say at night the tourists are there by the day time or even if the tourists are on these nicely cultivated paths and then the people would trap are making their own paths the fact of the matter is that if there are a lot of hikers then the animals go further up the mountains or they find some place else to go and so the animals are not as present because they can't overlap with the hikers they try to move away from people and obviously you can't put traps or somebody might step on it and so they're displacing hunting and trapping and indigenous life ways and I think that's a threat to them that's something that really needs to be explored a lot more especially by the indigenous people themselves and then yeah the church has its impact that's what I'm going to talk about tomorrow I don't want to get into too much did you get a sense of any anti-tourist sentiment? I remember in your talk in 2015 I think you talked about where communities had blocked a road to what extent is this an issue in this area as well there was a town when they blocked a road and that was because there was a village inside more closer to the mountains that was getting nothing from the tourism of the civilians that was on the house I was bringing them in and walking through that territory so there's a little bit of an internal conflict there but everywhere I've been there's been an idea among people who are not benefiting from tourism that has its negative impact and they want to talk about that so even in this particular place they were talking about the behavior of tourists who would walk through their property or even look inside their home and say they're just leaving trash and it was I was horrified by that trip to Nantong and Nangau trail that there were places where humans had defecated on the trail and so it was filthy it was really a dirty place so it would be a good idea if they started hunting the tourists then then some for example in Galshaw one of the things that struck me is different types of tourists have different images so tour groups have a very bad image of big tour buses while independent tourists have a better reputation and you talked about the case where you met up with that the group from Shanghai who didn't decline very far to what extent is there any kind of anti Chinese sentiment in some of these discussions it's come up it didn't come up that time but it's come up they like to joke about the ones the Chinese tourists that died because of getting hit by rocks ah okay in the tarot court tarot court and so some of them joked and said that their ancestors don't like the Chinese tourists coming and some of them joked and said the monkeys don't like but yeah that's going on yeah go ahead yeah and I think that she lives but I think there are a lot of them and like the Chinese bamboo partridge makes a sound that becomes its name the file questions okay I'll go back to you I just want to say bothered by left and right you just turn around then you'll turn into a different direction isn't it so it made no sense if you look at a bird turning on your left you just turn like this but you've got your path though because you're walking along a path it's definitely going to make me kind of change the way I walk and I keep thinking about the birds on the left on the right and the birds are moving all the time so as you're walking forward along a path and it's on your left hand side it's not going to let you walk in front of it and then turn around it's not going to be gone by the time you turn around okay humans are animals I just wondered if any other animals have this project I wonder because they might are there primates might have this project okay yeah great thank you for your talk it's really interesting inside of this area but not from academic background so I'm curious if you today just believe me most Taiwanese people probably don't know this bird as well as you do of course if you're about to tell a friend a Taiwanese person say why you shouldn't know this bird what is the the simplest thing you can tell them why we shouldn't know this bird what does it mean for Taiwanese people in the simplest form yeah I think that it's they can have that particular bird but I think that everybody not just Taiwanese people should be familiar with the other lives around them and take an appreciation because the birds and everything they make our world you know what birds move seeds around so they move plants around I think it's important to really appreciate the ecology that we live from to understand the relationship between different lives in order to say well we need to protect that forest we need to protect that wetland because there's often an argument that maybe we should put the economy first we should put a factory there and I think people have to learn to appreciate the other lives that are disturbed by human development because otherwise we live in an increasingly polluted and nasty world where it's a world of death so I think that's an important lesson and if getting them interested in any bird gets them interested in nature then that's a good thing by the way is this the only case where an indigenous nation has chosen a bird as its national symbol oh no what else Canada I mean within Taiwan and Taiwanese nations or peoples adopt birds as their okay so why is Trukel different from the others do you have a theory about that I think that they like this little teeny shishie because it's small and I have decided that it's very cooperative with one another I think it fits into their political philosophy of not having been leaders was it because they are a small tribe so they think they are working together actually make things work better than the more powerful bigger they tend to have this political ethos of not wanting it's called Gaia which is the idea that one should not accumulate power or wealth for oneself that everybody should be equal wow and so there's a big criticism of anybody who tries to stand up and become better than others that was in the film warriors of the rainbow it was part of the critique of Mona Luda at the beginning of the film shot somebody and said never walk in front of me because there was an idea that him wanting to be that leader was a moral flaw so I think that it kind of fits into their political philosophy that doesn't mean that they thought through it consciously but I think that it does Gaia Gaia okay I think on that point then we can continue our discussion over some wire so thanks again and we'll be back here tomorrow at 7 DLT DLT thank you