Penghu Settlements as Materialization of a Socio-Cognitive Grammar: Integrating environmental conditions with cultural practices

Abstract

Spurred by the devastating effects of climate change, topical research in the humanities and social sciences attempts to shed light on how indigenous and traditional communities have in the past coped with the challenges of climate. To develop a cultural perspective on the climate, we collect, compare and merge emic and etic accounts of the climate and climatic threats. To conceptualize, formalize and model these cultural perceptions of the climate, we develop the notion of a context-sensitive socio-cognitive grammar. This grammar, we hypothesize, has formed uniformly under the geographic, geological and climatic meso-conditions of the Penghu archipelago, which is densely connected through language, common migration histories, marriage, collaboration, trade and religious practices. Despite its uniformity, the grammar can, due to its context-sensitive nature, interact with contextual micro-conditions, such as elevations and coastlines, and consequently trigger optimized local adaptation to specific environments. In this paper, we will sketch the global geological and climatic conditions of the Penghu () archipelago and relate to it a set of socio-cognitive rules that potentially underlie the arrangement of settlements on the archipelago. Each rule can be associated with an emic and etic perceptions of risk and benefits. Comparing these hypothesized rules to our fieldwork observations, i.e. the factual location and orientation of sites such as houses, temples, tombs, etc., we measure the fit, i.e. the degree to which hypothesized rules match the complex physical reality. By ranking the rules according to their fit, we obtain through the risks and benefits associated with each rule a ranking of the emic and etic perceptions of climatic risks. These hierarchies of risk perception can be compared across communities and interpreted in the light of the local environmental conditions.