Chapter 1: Overview
1.2 Definitions of Concepts
1.2.1 Feminism, Sexism and Patriarchy Feminism
Feminist theologian Elisabeth S. Fiorenza defines feminism as “the radical notion that wo/men are people”,46 and she proclaims that “wo/men” should acquire full civilian right. (2007: 42-3, 62) In her view, feminism conveys a collection of politics that stimulates women’s awareness of their conditions and consolidates their will to confront systematic sexual inequalities. Moreover, feminism permeates in
45 In Norman Wilson’s view, history refers to “an attempt to correct an imbalance in the male-centered accounts of history…” He disagrees that herstory merely serves to move women from “footnotes” to
“topics” of history without challenging the old mode male-centric writing of history. Instead, herstory should unfold “a new field expressed women’s experiences on their own terms.” (2005: 116)
46 Fiorenza deliberately draws a slash between “wo” and “men” to overturn the essentialist interpretation of women and to arouse feminist consciousness. Fiorenza states that the rendition of wo/men conveys multiple connotations and addresses women and dispossessed, underprivileged males as well. Besides, with the slashed term “wo/men”, Fiorenza also marks linguistic violence, which, neglects and excludes women from men-favored narratives or discourses (2007: 2). In a positive sense, the slash “invites” men to study and imagine women’s experiences and emotions. Similar practice applies to s/he and fe/male. (2007: 63) Introducing the term of “wo/men”, Fiorenza stresses that both women and men should cultivate a feminist consciousness and work together to tear down unjust social systems.
every fabric of women’s life, ranging from political, economical, legal, lingual, cultural spheres to class, ethnic and environmental dimensions. (Cudd and Andreasen, 2005: 7-9). With diverse backgrounds, women in different communities face different challenges. Therefore, feminisms should be pluralized and differentiated on the basis of specific, local contexts.
Herstorically, feminist theories underwent several stages of transformation.
The first wave of feminist movement arose in the late 18th century and focused on political and economical issues, such as the contemporary suffragist movement for women, and equal pay for equal workload, which guaranteed female laborers with the same treatment their male colleagues had.47 After the Second World War, the
second-wave feminism emerged and shifted the feministic focus on cultural issues.
One significant event was the publication of Simone Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in 1949, in which Beauvoir criticizes her first-wave predecessors for confining the inequalities women endure to political and legal domains while failing to identify sexism as the root of oppression against women. In Beauvoir’s view, androcentric culture permeates into every aspect of social life and all institutions; thereby, it is necessary to tackle the problems through radical transformation of personal life and political surroundings, not merely a mild reform of existing political structures.48
The third-wave feminism unraveled in the late 1980s, starting to address diversity among women.49 Feminists at the stage criticized that the second-wave feminism only addressed middle-class college-educated white elite but ignored the experiences of women with non-Euro-American, non-White backgrounds. (Cudd &
Andreasen, 2005: 1-3; hooks, 1984/2005: 60-68) Concurrently ecofeminism debuted as a new interdisciplinary field that interconnects feminist theories with ecology, issues on indigenous peoples, science and environmental ethics. (Warren, 1998:
xi-xiii)
Afro-American feminist writer Alice Walker invents the term “womanism” to replace Euro-American white-centric feminism and to highlight a different breed of
“feminism of color” based on experiences of Afro-American women. Dissatisfied with middle-class white-dominant mainstream feminism, which attributed the oppression against women to gender problems, Walker contends that Afro-American women are inflicted not only by sexism but also by racism. Thereby, Afro-American women should invent a feminist philosophy, which, unlike the theorization of white
47 Most scholars speculate that feminism takes its root in the Enlightenment. The first-wave feminism culminated in the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. (Liao, 2003: 106-108; Cudd and Andreasen, 2005: 1-3)
48 Although Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is claimed to affect the trajectory of feminist theorization in the ensuing decades, by 1950s feminism was only recognized as a distinct minority academic field.
(Cudd & Andreasen, 2005: 1)
49 Many participants of the third-wave feminism are women of color from “the Third World”, such as bell hooks, Chandra Talpade Monhanty, and Gayatri C. Spivak.
feminists, must address both sexual and racial oppressions. The invention of
“womanist” obtains much support among female theologists of Hispanic and Asian backgrounds. (Chen Wen-shan, 2005: 32 & 187).
The dissertation may well take the example of “womanist” and invent a Taiwan-based jargon, for instance, “inaism” to brand an embryonic Siraya-based Taiwanese feminism.50 However, to avoid confusion, the dissertation continues to adopt the term “feminism” in consideration of transparency in its meaning and wide acceptability.
Sexism and Patriarchy
Ann E. Cudd and Leslie E. Jones view sexism as “a historically and globally pervasive form of oppression against women”, “a systematic, pervasive, but often subtle” force that works through “institutional structures, interpersonal interactions and the attitudes expressing in them.” Effects of sexism refer to “the practice of excluding women” and the language that “relegate activities and attitudes of women to a lower status.” (2005: 74-78)
As already mentioned, the oppression women have endured relates to a wide spectrum of socio-political factors, not merely confined to sex/gender affairs. Thus, feminists should address issues more than gender inequalities between men and wo/men, and expand their concerns to various forms of injustice that interrelate with sexism and operate in different social, political, religious, ethnic and cultural
mechanisms. (Fiorenza, 2007:7-9).
Patriarchy is constructed as a multi-lateral hierarchy in which elite males, such as husband, father, landlord, master, king, and emperor, rule and dominate power and resources. One goal that feminism embraces is to liberate both women and men from the manipulation of patriarchy.
Similar to the rendering of feminism, Fiorenza has a divergent opinion about the term “patriarchy”. Fiorenza contends that “patriarchy” derives from a
male-elite-dominant bipolarized epistemology, which categories entities into two extremes in accordance with the gender line, such as masculine/feminine, father/mother, as if gender difference were a natural phenomenon rather than a product of social construction, and the oppression against women were merely implemented by men as individuals. Inspired by the German word “Herrschaft”, Fiorenza invents “kyriarchy”, which governs all oppressions of political, social and religious hierarchies mostly under the control of elite male clique. In Fiorenza’s view,
“kyriarchy” is more wide-spanned and precise than “patriarchy” in terms of pinpointing the entangled oppressive structures. Thus she suggests supplanting
“patriarchy” with “kyriarchy.” (ibid: 7-34, 112) Nevertheless, due to the similar
50 Ina connotes “woman” or “mother” in the Sirayan language.
consideration of comprehensibility and acceptability, the dissertation sticks with
“patriarchy” to refer to the multi-layered oppressive system that is often coined with the image of men to represent authority.
1.2.2 Lowland Austronesian/Indigenous Groups/Peoples
The dissertation applies with the term “lowland Austronesian groups/peoples”
or “lowland indigenous groups/peoples” to refer to the Austronesian indigenous communities that used to populate Taiwan’s coasts and plains for thousands of years prior to the Dutch reign in the 17th century. Due to consecutive colonial rules and sinicization in the last four centuries, many descendents of lowland Austronesian groups left their forebears’ home villages and resettled in the hinterland in the vicinity of “mountain indigenous groups/peoples”, who have mostly inhabited the mountains for generations.51 Lowland Austronesian peoples along with their “mountain”
counterparts were dubbed with a collective title “Formosans” in archives of the Dutch era.52
So far in existent documents and precedent researches, lowland Austronesian groups are frequently rendered as “plain aborigines” or “Ping-pu”. In fact, the name of lowland Austronesian groups has undergone a series of transitions, and each shift tells the changes of the collective consciousness of the peoples or the hegemonic ideology, both of which exert power in historical surroundings.
In the Ching period, lowland indigenous groups were categorized as
“Sek-hoan”, literally meaning “cooked barbarians”. The word “hoan” already emerged in Chinese documents in the early 17the century, referring to all non-Han groups, including foreigners, for instance, Europeans.53 “Hoan” transmits a strong tint of Chinese-Han racism and ostracism. With strong self-centeredness, the Chinese Han people used to take pride in claiming their country the center of the cosmos and dub themselves “humans”,54 while condescending all non-Han peoples to the category of “hoan”, implicating that hoan were in the periphery, in an inferior, sub-human status, and less competent than Chinese Han. (Li Khieu, 2001: 89-100)
During the Ching’s reign, lowland Austronesian peoples were taxed and
51 The term “mountain indigenous groups/peoples” is actually a misnomer. Not all of the mountain Austronesian indigenous communities are located in mountainous regions. The exceptions include the Pangcah (formerly known as Amis) people, who live in coastal plain in the east, and the Yamis people, who reside in the Orchid Island. However, to distinguish “mountain indigenous peoples” from lowland indigenous peoples, the dissertation continues to use this misnomer.
52 Plenty of examples with the collective proper noun “Formosans” frequent the four volumes of de Dagregisters van het Kasteel Zeelandia, Taiwan 1629-1662, as well as correspondence between the Dutch authorities in Formosa and their supervisors in Batavia and the Netherland.
53 In 1603, Chinese author Tan Te wrote an article about Taiwan indigenous peoples and entitled it A Record of Barbarians in the East (Tong Hoan Ki). Chinese Han dubbed Europeans “red-haired hoan”, as Caucasians had blonde hair.
54 Chinese Han’s self-centeredness demonstrates in the naming of their country, Tiong-goan (中原), Tiong-thou (中土), and Tiong-kok (中國), literally meaning “the middle kingdom”.
imposed upon heavy compulsory obligations, which, in the view of the Ching authorities, signaled full submission of lowlanders to Ching’s “civilian rule.”
Accordingly, lowland Austronesian indigenes were dubbed “cooked”, as they were considered immersed in Ching’s “civilizing process.”55 By contrast, “chhenn-hoan”, literally meaning “raw barbarians”, referred to mountain Austronesian groups, who lived outside the range of Ching’s control and were not taxed or enforced to fulfill compulsory obligations.56 Accordingly mountain Austronesians were supposed
“uncooked”, not absorbed in Ching’s “civilizing process” yet. (Khoo, 1996: 58-77) Both of the titles “sek-hoan” and “chhen-hoan” are abolished, because both the word
“hoan” and the metaphorical adjectives about food convey discrimination.
The term “Penn-pou sek-hoan” (plain cooked barbarians) and “Penn-pou hoan”
(plain barbarians) emerged in several documents in the Ching era from 1761 to 1894, which will be discussed in the next chapter.
It was until the Japanese era that “plain aborigine” became an entity of ethno-cultural categorization. Then Japanese anthropologists classified Taiwan’s indigenous peoples on the basis of their inhabitant localities and lingual-cultural characteristics. (Koeh, 1995: 36; Michio, 2006: 1-22) “Sek hoan” were renamed as
“penn-pou-chok” (plain aborigines), which kept being used up to now, while
“chhenn-hoan” were switched to Takasagozoku (高砂族).
Despite the contribution of Japanese research on Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, it is undeniable that anthropology or ethnography often functioned as a system of empire-governed representation that helped consolidate the colonial control. (Lichi, 1997: 160-161). Japanese anthropologists started to cooperate with the Japanese colonial authorities at the beginning of their rule in Taiwan, as it is the policy of the Japanese government to enhance anthropological work and plan extensive field survey so as to reinforce their colonial rule. (Michio, 2006: 27-8) Furthermore, classifying and naming rights are frequently seized by a colonial regime, who dominates the power to represent “the other.” A Makattao activist Phoann Khiam-beng once revealed that he disliked the collective title “plain aborigines”:
“Initially my forebears did not call themselves “Penn-pou.” What group of people are we? Call me Makattao!”57 To him, the term “Penn-pou” or “plain aborigines” was enforced upon his ethnic community by colonial powers, re-invoking the agony that Makattao was deprived of the right of self-representation. (Field notes: August 7,
55 The term “civilizing process” originates from Chiu Hsin-hui’s book The Colonial ‘Civilizing Process in Dutch Formosa, 1624-1662.
56 The division and naming of lowland and mountain Austronesian groups involve a metaphor of culinary methods. Originally, prehistoric humans ate raw food, and they only started eating cooked food after learning the use of fire. Therefore, in the metaphorical structure, “raw” implies “prior to civilization” or “primitiveness”, while “cooked” indicates “being civilized” and “more progressed.”
57 Makattao is a lowland indigenous people inhabit Ko-hiong, Pin-tong, Tai-tang and Hoa-lian.
2013)
Sirayan descendent and law scholar Jolan Hsieh adopted the rendition “PingPu”, which is a Mandarin transliteration of “Penn-pou”, in her book Collective Rights of Indigenous People--Identity-based Movement of Plain Indigenou in Taiwan. “PingPu”, produces a dual-layer colonial hue--one relates to the Japanese while the other regards Chinese-Han.
In April, 2009, the term “lowland Austronesian indigenous people” was introduced in Siraya’s consciousness-raising movement, which culminated into an unprecedented mass rally of 5000 people in front of the presidential office in
downtown Taipei on May 2, 2009. (About lowland Austronesian indigenous peoples, retrieved February 26, 2014) The new title specifies “Austronesian” as an ethnic entity contrasting Chinese Han, implicating that the Austronesians are equal counterparts of the Chinese Han people. The adjective “indigenous” manifests the herstorical reality that Austronesian forebears had been living in Taiwan prior to Chinese Han immigration. “Lowland” mirrors the fact that after several waves of exoduses and resettlements nowadays lowland Austronesian strongholds scatter not only in plains and coasts but also in hinterland along the foot of mountains.
1.3 Scopes of Research and Literature Review