Is revitalizing culture a beautiful dream? Objects, archives, and images of indigenous Taiwan in Hu Tai-Li’s documentary Returning Souls (2012)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that Returning Souls, directed by anthropologist Hu Tai-Li, expresses cultural revitalization sensuously, sensibly, and dialectically in documenting the repatriation of ancestral souls to the indigenous Taiwanese village Tafalong. The images in Returning, through montage, offer a way of accessing and representing the dialectical tensions of myth, indigeneity, historical reality, and secularization among the indigenous Tafalong people. In examining their autonomy and vitality, Hu presents a splintered world populated with fragmented histories and constructed through humor acts and interplays among ritual-images and myth-images. Moreover, she explores the image-spectator relation structure, using images to stimulate meanings relevant to her innermost concern for the indigenous Taiwanese through sensory experiences and embodied knowledge and materiality, toward regional aesthetics. In engagingly juxtaposing and interposing images, Hu’s radical cinematic deployments based on the historical enmeshment of the indigenous Taiwanese work toward ushering in new possibilities for archiving indigenous material in the future.