PhD student Te-Chen Lu discusses their research into the knowledge systems and practice of slate house-building as a strategy for politics of identity and cultural revitalisation by Kacalisian indigenous groupings in southern Taiwan.
‘Living House’ in the Present Age: The Changing History of Indigenous Self-builders and the Slate Culture among the Kacalisian in Southern Taiwan since the 1980s
Speaker: Te-Chen Lu
This research explores how the self-builders of Kacalisian (the Paiwan and Rukai) indigenous groupings in southern Taiwan utilise their knowledge systems and practices of slate house-building as strategies for politics of identity and cultural revitalisation, in the context of an ongoing returning homeland movement. Following the viewpoint of ‘technodiversity’ studies in the anthropology of technics (Hui 2020), and as a counter-narrative to established understandings of the vernacular in architecture, the research moves between the closer scale of body techniques of constructing and inhabiting, and localised experience to the macrocosmic relationship between ‘slate culture’ and the wider social/environmental milieu, in order to provide a critical contribution to the study of Austronesian house societies as living heritage in the present age. This research will partake in and document the complete construction process of a slate house via ethnographic film and chaîne opératoire together with the Paiwan artisan families in Piuma community, Pingtung County.
