CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION AND A NEW ETHNIC GROUP MOVEMENT: THE CASE OF THE SAKIZAYA IN EASTERN TAIWAN

Abstract

After the Kuomintang of China (KMT) succeeded the Japanese government in Taiwan in 1945, officials continued to apply the then current method of categorizing Taiwanese aborigines into nine groups. However, since the 1980s, many aboriginal groups have launched Name Rectification Campaigns calling for “independence” from their originally designated groups.Dutch records in the seventeenth century identify the Sakizaya as a distinct people, different from the Amis. The decline of the Sakizaya was initiated in 1878 by the Jia-Li-Wan event. After defeat by Qing soldiers, the Sakizayas obscured their identities by mixing themselves among the Amis. By the time that the Japanese began their ethnographic research in the early twentieth century, the Sakizayas had become relatively “Amis-ized,” and were regarded as a sub-branch of the Amis for both academic and official purposes. The Sakizaya's new ethnic group movement was initiated in 1990. Seventeen years later, on January 17, 2007, the Sakizaya gained official recognition as an independent aboriginal group.This article intends to investigate the strategies of movement activists. It not only examines the concept of cultural construction, but also explains why this concept is so important in understanding the case of the Sakizaya.