Paiwan Erotic

Rank is the first thing to understand about the Paiwan. Where most of Taiwan's indigenous peoples organize themselves around age grades or rough kin equality, the Paiwan inherit status: a chiefly line, the mamazangiljan, holds a village's land and hunting grounds and takes a share of what is taken from them, while commoner houses farm, hunt and pay in millet and game. Title descends to the firstborn child regardless of sex, so women lead villages as a matter of course rather than as an exception. What actually inherits is less the individual than the house: a named building of stacked slate, dark and cool, whose name outlives every generation that sleeps in it. Their country is the southern end of Taiwan's Central Mountain Range and the coast on either side of it, roughly today's Pingtung County and the southern reach of Taitung, steep river valleys dropping toward the Pacific and the Taiwan Strait. The language, also called Paiwan, is Formosan, one of the deep primary branches of Austronesian, which is to say it sits nearer the root of that family than Tagalog, Malay, Malagasy or Hawaiian do. Linguists reconstructing Proto-Austronesian lean on it heavily.

Almost all Paiwan today are Christian, mostly Presbyterian or Catholic, after mass conversions from the 1950s, but the older ritual world was never fully displaced. Priestesses, pulingau, still officiate in some villages, and a few communities keep the Maleveq, the five year ceremony, in which ancestral spirits are called down from the mountains, honored, and then sent away again; men spear a rattan ball flung high into the air, each ball carrying a fortune or a misfortune. Three things count as treasure: ancient clay jars, bronze knives, and glass beads, each bead with its own name and history, still central to bridewealth. Carve a lintel or embroider a shoulder and the same two figures appear, the hundred pacer snake and the human head, both restricted by rank, as tattoos once were on the hands of noblewomen and the chests of men. The wider world first learned the name in 1871, when Paiwan at Mudan killed shipwrecked Ryukyuan sailors and Japan used the deaths as grounds for its 1874 expedition to Taiwan, a campaign that reordered regional politics well beyond the island. Later the Japanese administration moved mountain villages down to the foothills; Typhoon Morakot moved several more in 2009, and the old slate settlements stand empty above the new ones. Meanwhile the language is on the pop charts: Abao sings in Paiwan and wins national awards for it, and the double nose flute, once a nobleman's instrument for courtship and mourning, is being taught again.