Puyuma Erotic

Ask a Puyuma elder where the people come from and the answer depends on which village you are standing in. The southern communities around Zhiben trace their beginnings to a stone that split open at Panapanayan, on the coast south of town. The Nanwang group, now folded into the edge of Taitung City, traces its own to bamboo. The two accounts are not a disagreement anyone is trying to settle. They are the clearest statement of how the Puyuma are put together: a confederation of villages, historically about eight of them, each with its own ritual house and its own claim on the past, sharing a language and a plain. That plain is the Beinan valley in Taitung County, where the Central Mountain Range drops toward the Pacific on Taiwan's southeast coast, and it holds some of the best farmland on that side of the island. Holding it made them formidable. In the eighteenth century, after Puyuma fighters helped Qing forces run down rebels who had fled east across the mountains, their leaders were rewarded with rank and recognition, and for roughly a century the head man of Nanwang appears in Chinese records as the King of Puyuma, collecting tribute from Amis and Paiwan villages up and down the coast.

Their language counts in the standard classifications as one of the primary branches of Austronesian rather than a twig on someone else's, which is why linguists working on the spread of Austronesian out of Taiwan keep coming back to it. Fluent speakers are mostly old now, and village language programs are pushing against that. Public life ran, and in places still runs, through the palakuwan, the men's house, where boys entered an age grade system in their early teens and worked upward through years of service and hunting before they counted as adults. The domestic side ran the other way: marriage was traditionally uxorilocal, house and land passed through women, and the temaramaw, ritual specialists who read betel nut and treat spiritual sickness, have usually been women. The year turns at the Mangayaw in late December, a hunting and initiation season that ends with elders crowning the returning men with garlands. Flowers worn on the head, by men, women, children and guests alike, have become the single most recognizable Puyuma image. About fourteen thousand people are registered today, most of them Presbyterian or Catholic and keeping the ancestral shrines anyway, working in Taitung or in the cities on the west coast. The singer Chang Hui-mei, A-Mei, comes from a Puyuma village, which in Taiwan is about as visible as an Indigenous identity gets.