Mountains, rivers and ancestors: the Paiwan landscape and social memory

Abstract

ABSTRACT Landscape is often thought of as the materialization of memory, fixing social and individual histories in space. It is a meaningfully constituted physical and social environment whereby meaning is ascribed through people’s engagement and experience. As people creates, modifies, and moves through a spatial environment, the mediation between spatial experience andperception spontaneously creates, legitimizes, and reinforces social relationships and ideas. The embodiment of social memories in landscapes is crucial to how people perceive and understand the world around them through daily experience and dwelling. This research uses two Paiwan tribes, Laiyi and Kaushi, and their abandoned settlement sites to explore the Paiwan landscape and investigate how perception and experience facilitates the creation and maintenance of social memory. With the help of geographical information systems (GIS), this research demonstrates how perception influences the experience and the shaping of Paiwanlandscapes. The results suggest that, although the two tribes use the landscape differently, they both maintain the same coherent and core Paiwan concept, that of ‘Returning’. Furthermore, social memory of Paiwan is transmitted and passed on both at the settlement and at the household scale whereby the core concept of ‘returning to the ancestors’ are manifested differently in local regions.