Headhunting as a Façade of the Violence of the Colonized in Seediq Bale (2011)

Abstract

Wei Te-Sheng’s Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (2011) is a Taiwanese historical epic film that posits the Seediq aboriginals’ gaya doctrine and headhunting tradition as the core value that underlies their decision to carry out the Wushe Incident against the Japanese colonizers. While the film seemingly revolves around the Seediq tribesmen’s attempt to practise gaya through headhunting, it paradoxically shows the disintegration of the original meaning of the headhunting custom under the extremely oppressive colonial regime. This paper argues that the enmeshing of the terms “tradition,” “ritual,” and “massacre” as a convenient and dramatic mode of storytelling has resulted in shifting the critical focus away from the more pressing subject of the constructive nature of anticolonial violence. By drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon’s notion of violence as a force that recovers the coherence and self-knowledge of the colonized, this paper aims to provide reasons for and potential ways to separate ritualistic violence of headhunting from violence as a positive mechanism through which the colonized can reconstruct their identity and achieve anticolonial freedom. By rejecting the straightforward reading of the viscerality of the aboriginal violence as an inexorable product of the aboriginal culture and breaking the link between the Wushe Incident with the Atayal aboriginal people’s headhunting ritual, this paper hopes to extend both the scope and the significance of the film as a cultural text that points to the constructive nature of anticolonial violence.