Advocacy and Representation 8/30 (Ying-wen Yu)

Reading from Samuel Bayard’s “The Materials of Folklore” (1953) to Doug Enders’ and Jeannie Thomas’s “Bluegrass and ‘White Trash’” (2000), it is quite interesting for me to see how definitions and contents of a certain field of study have changed overtime. The definition of “Folklore” is not clear-cut as time goes by; instead, it complicates itself with the expansion and inclusion of different aspects concerning the change of culture. To be honest, I had to google definitions of “ethnography,” “anthropology,” “cultural anthropology,” and even “cultural studies” to try to figure out a more definite definition of what “folklore” is. However, googling those terms didn’t help much because there are so many overlapping aspects in these studies. That being said, I find Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s “Mistaken Dichotomies” echos the current conditions in Taiwan not only in academy but also in the making of government policies.In her essay, Kirschenblatt-Gimblett proposes “four areas of concern: Advocacy, representation, art, and critical discourse” (142). I especially find advocacy and representation intriguing when the applying what she says to the Taiwanese society.

It was not until  two to three decades ago did the Taiwanese government pay attention to the aboriginal cultures in Taiwan. In order to make people learn the diverse cultures in Taiwan, the government constructed a theme park with aboriginal houses, festivals and ceremony replicas. As a child, my parents usually took me there for sightseeing during weekends and schools would hold outings as well. I found the theme park amusing because there were so many shows about different ceremonies and festivals going on. If I missed the 2pm show, I could always watch one at 3pm. There were cultural artifacts from nine main tribes in Taiwan. To be honest, I could recite the names without any mistake but had absolutely no idea on the cultural backgrounds of each tribe because we were asked to know who were there in Taiwan before European or Japanese colonization. As time goes by, more and more aborigines people voice out that there are more than nine tribes and that they want their original tribal names back. Yes, the government added some tribes to the official list and yes, students are requested to recite more names. But do they really know the cultural backgrounds of tribes? They may have the ability to distinguish a certain artifact from another but for the students, these things belong to the past. It is ironic that the government serving as the most powerful and influential advocate but still represents the aboriginal cultures as the product of the past. 

In Discourse (2004) Sara Mills, applying Foucault’s idea on power relation, points out that there is discursive formation behind every representation be it cultural or political. She suggests that aboriginal people or native people alike are usually put in “the past” in the scale of time that they belong to the past and are not capable of progress. If the government as one of the influential advocates still propagande such wrongly portrayed images to the public, how do people understand the “real” or “living” cultures in the country? How can a government seemingly support rights for aborigines and help “preserve” culture on one hand and at the same time take away the land, names and resources from these people and try to “modernize” them so as to adapt to the “modern society?” In Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s essay she writes, “dependence on government funding shapes the language of advocacy and blunts its critical potential” (142). I can’t help but wonder, does government, as an advocate, really change the way people view “folk,” “native,” “aboriginal” or “indigenous?” Or does it perpetuate the cultural representation that “folk,” “native,” “aboriginal” or “indigenous” belongs to the past?