ATAYAL

Atayal Culture

The Atayal with a population of 86,042 is the second largest Aboriginal tribe in Taiwan. They live in the mountainous areas from Puli, Nantou County, to Yuli, Hualien County. Because of this wide range of settlement dialects and customs among the sub-tribes differ greatly. Researchers have classified the Atayal tribe into two groups proper: the Atayal Proper and Sedeq Proper. Sedeq Proper is divided into Taroko group, Tauda group and Dechitaya group; and it further divided by the Central Mountain Ranges into the Eastern group and the Western group. Sedeq group, Taroko group and Taosa group settle at the Taroko area; of the three the Taroko, self-named Torok, are the majority. Two to three hundred years ago, the Torok, originally lived at the upper reaches of Chosui River, moved and settled along Liwu River. Seventy-nine tribal ruins have been found. In traditional Atayal society, men are gallant, women good at weaving. They practice the patrilineal inheritance, monogamy and nuclear family system. In a settlement the tribesmen have one to several Gaya groups (Common Ceremonial Group). An elected chief with great reputation undertakes administration and defense. Several tribes in the same river region ally for mutual help. Religious belief is mainly Utux (Worship of Ancestral Spirits), as well as all religious ceremonies. The tribal priest is a healer and prayer for blessing.

Economic Life

Agriculture and hunting

The Atayal practice traditional agriculture of slash-and-burn method, inter-cropping, shifting and fallowing, with hunting, gathering, fishing and husbandry as secondary means of sustenance. Millet is the main staple food, supplemented by hill-rice, yams and taros. Women do the seeding and weeding while men handle the heavy laborious work. The whole cultivating process of millet, regarded as a sacred crop, from seeding, planting to reaping is marked by a series of festivals. Women are forbidden to participate in hunting which is the second most important method of food production. Only male tribesmen hunt; the tradition encourages the Atayal men to be valiant. There are two types of hunting, the regular and the ritual. The ritual ceremony is held before the harvest festival. Members of the ritual group form the hunting team. Men go either alone or as a team of three or four to set the traps on the hunting ground in the mountain. Usually a boy as little as ten joins the hunting team with his father and older brothers to learn how to set the traps to catch the game. Not until he has his first success will he be regarded as a hunter. Hunters observe many taboos, for examples, they divine before hunting and keep their hunting gears from the female contact. In the past, the game was exchanged with Chinese for daily necessities. Its skull is the possession of the chief hunter, and the group members share the rest.
The monetary system brought in during the Japanese occupation gradually destroyed the Atayal's has way of life in planting and hunting. The economic change of the 1 970s brought further greater impact upon the Atayal tribesmen. Large-scaled movement to the urban areas for job opportunity has been hindered by their lack of skill, education and connection; most work as labors as a result.

Food and dietary habit

The traditional Atayal society is self-sufficient. They live on millet, yam and taro with animal meat, river fish and gathered wild vegetables as supplementary food. In those days of no iron or pottery pots, food was either boiled, grilled, stone-boiled or bamboo-stuffed and boiled into what we call bamboo rice today.
The old stove was made with three stones posited in an upturned U, or it was made of logs. Since flinting was a rather difficult way to make a fire in the old time, it was customary to keep the fire on.
In the past, one cultivated one's own tobacco, and made one's own millet wine. Then sweet rice was used instead and cultivating yeast added in. Wine ritual is performed before drinking. The drinkers wet their fingers in wine cups, sprinkle the wine drops around, chant and offer it to the ancestral spirits. The ritual is also performed before a meal. Better food, such as meat, fish or liver, is usually given first to the elders and children, illustrating the Atayal's respect for the old and nurturing care for the young. Today the Atayal at Taroko area still retain the tradition of making rice cake and bamboo rice for important festivities.

Clothing

Like any other oceanic people, the Atayal pay more attention to ornaments than to clothing ; therefore they have more the former than the latter. Hemp is the usual weaving material; the Atayal women are very good at weaving. Both short and long tops are sleeveless trunks the long ones are like knee-length coats, the short ones barely reach the belly. All are made with two cloth panels, sewn once for the back seam, and the front opening is fastened with two braided ties. The ceremonial clothing has white background with woven geometric patterns on the back and the front. Dresses with beadwork are the most spectacular pieces, called shell weaving in the old time. Skirts are made of striped panels circling around the waist, and a slant square seal is hung on the chest as a vest. During the cold seasons of fall and winter, one wears something like a robe, made of four linen panels sewn into a long stole, laid across the body trunk and tied on the left shoulder. Or one wears something made of the animal skin and a rattan bowl hat on the head. For the festivities the Atayal put on long coats decorated with bells sewn on. When the wearers dance, the tinkling bells rhythmically mark the dance steps, adding jollity to the festivity. Today, only on special occasions can one see the ceremonially dressed Atayal tribesmen.

Social Norms and

Rituals

A week after the birth of her son, the traditional Atayal mother, carries the baby with his umbilical cord in a rattan hunting basket along the hunting route and prays for his good fortune. Then the date for his naming ceremony with the family gathering will be selected. Atayal names are given according to the baby's sex, for instant, Yuking-Piho for a boy, Pui-Litan for a girl. The first part of the compound name is the personal name; the second part the father or mother' s house name, following the patrilineal or matrilineal naming system.
The Atayal is a monogamous patriarchal society. The male after marriage must move out and live near the parents' house. The youngest son inherits the family possession. Marriage with near relatives is strictly prohibited. Incest taboo group includes fifth degree of paternal relatives and fourth degree of maternal relatives.
The young Atayal are free to choose their own mates but can not transgress the proper behavior limit, or the offender should seek propitiation by butchering a pig as an offering. Marriage requires the parental consent on both sides. The man goes to the woman's house to ask for permission to marriage; a wedding date is set; all members of the ritual group go hunting; and both families prepare to make wine. The ceremony is held at the groom's house. His wedding gifts for the bride are mostly of shell money or beaded dresses and some pigs, while the bride comes with dowry of her own things and beaded dresses, as well as knifes, guns, bows and arrows for the groom. The groom must also give knifes to the bride's brothers. Weddings are usually held during the fallowing. Pre-marital sex is forbidden, else the ancestral spirits are offended and misfortune descends on the relatives and the whole settlement. In the past, if two men were courting the same woman, the winner was decided in a physical competition.
Today the Atayal at Taroko still retain the old custom of slaughtering pigs and giving pork to bride's and groom's relatives, just as Chinese giving out engagement cakes for the wedding. The traditional Atayal funeral was an indoor burial. The dead in a reflexive position was ceremonially dressed and wrapped in blankets. Close family members buried the deceased, placed facing the riverbank, under his bed in a hole of five to six feet deep. His cherished daily possessions were put in before the stone slabs and soil were piled on and packed down. The bereft refrained from drinking and singing before his spirit was sent off and the mourning ended a month later. Then family members and friends gathered to drink, and life went on as normal again. During the Japanese occupation the burial had been changed and held outdoors. Now most funerals are Christian because of their religious conversion.

Facial Tattoos

In the old days, the Atayal and the Sedeq wore facial tattoos; all other aborigines tattooed only their body. The Atayal were the most ardent among all, thus named "Tattoo-faced Aborigines." The Japanese banned the custom since the Occupation.
The facial tattoos are culturally significant in the Atayal tradition. Everyone at 7 or 8 must be tattooed on the forehead for tribal identification.
At 14 or 1 5, a young man would be tattooed on the chin after his first successful head-hunting. (When the head-hunting initiation rite was banned, the human head was replaced by a large wild game like a boar.) A young woman would be tattooed on the checks when she had mastered weaving. Facial marks pronounced their adulthood, maturity and marriage-ability. Furthermore, facial tattoos served not only cosmetically but also as identifications. The marks were their posthumous passports to the realm of ancestral spirits; they were also proofs of their successful adulthood. The dead would be allowed to cross the bridge of spirit to reunite with their ancestors.

Weaving

The Atayal are recognized among Taiwanese aborigines as very skillful weavers. Weaving used to be very common and weavers' skills very advanced. The Atayal depended upon women to produce necessary material for special occasions of their lives: baby blankets for the newborn, ceremonial dresses for the newly wed, the household cloth, and the shrouds for the deceased.
Women in Atayal society were bestowed due social status by their skills in weaving. Only after they had mastered the skills, maidens were allowed to wear facial tattoos and ready to marry. If especially outstanding in weaving, she by displaying more distinctively patterned tattoos became an object of admiration and admiration, a perfect mate for a 'very brave young man.
Traditionally, weaving was strictly a woman's job from planting hemp to the finished products, untouched by man's hand, otherwise a taboo would be broken. The material was hemp; the juice of natural vegetation provided the necessary dyes, for example, roots for the brown dye. The whole process was long and tedious. Wool and cotton yarns brought in by Chinese and Japanese were later substituted for hemp and chemical dyes were also used. Nowadays naturally dyed cloth is very rare.

Looms are traditional dowries. The Atayal loom is a combination, the horizontal loom of warp beam type, made by a dexterous man in the village. Two methods, plain-weaving and twill-weaving, are used to create intricate yet varied designs. Regional distinctions in color and pattern reveal the wide settlement of the Atayal in Taiwan. One other characteristic difference of the Atayal weaving is in-weaving; colored woof threads are shuttled between the warp threads to create various works of different designs. Red, black and blue in color and stripe, square, triangle and diamond in pattern are preferred. Those in Taroko area prefer material in white decorated with small diamond patterns, which they make into traditional costumes.
Woven cloth is still used extensively in Atayal society. Mothers prepare the woven cloth as daughters' dowry. The material is also used as blankets, tablecloth, gifts and sales goods. However, the rapid social change in Taiwan and the infringement of materialist culture threaten the success in preserving such traditional craftsmanship.

Construction

The Atayal, long being mountain-dwellers, usually choose to build and farm on hill terraces, settling high for defense purpose. But due to the narrow-valley formation of Taroko, their settlements are scattered and far between. Settlers on different altitudes and different natural surroundings use different building material. But houses are mainly built with bamboo and wood logs. House building is a communal event in which male relatives, friends and neighbors gather to help. All buildings are done by men only from material gathering, ground-breaking marked with a divining ceremony, framing, roofing and walling.
After the completion, the owner holds a house-warming party for relatives, friends and neighbors. Traditional Atayal constructions are mainly houses, granaries and chicken coops. Farmers build simple farming-huts in the hill-farms; hunters, hunting-huts in the hunting ground. Traditional houses are gable-roofed, usually small in size because of the nuclear family system.

Language and Arts

Language

All Taiwanese Aborigines are of Austronesian or Malayo-polynesian lingustic family, which includes islands on the Pacific and Indian Ocean and parts of the Indo-China Peninsula. Tae linguistic family further subdivides into a total of three hundred to five hundred kinds. There are more than twenty aboriginal languages in Taiwan, but some of them have already disappeared totally.
The Atayal language is divided into the Atayal and the Sedeq. The Atayal of the Taroko area speak Taroko dialect and Taoseq dialect; of the two, the Taroko dialect speakers who live at Ran-ai Village, Nan-tou County, Shu-lin Village, Wan-zon Village and Zuo-chi Village of Hualien County are in a great majority.

Music and dance

The Atayal music is simple; their musical instruments are few - the Atayal Jew's harp, bamboo flute and wooden Jew's harp. The number of strings classifies the Atayal Jew's harps into single-suing, double-string, four-string and five-string. A 30-cm straight bamboo flute has four holes at front and one in the back. The not very popular wooden Jew's harp with four strings in Re, Mi, So, La, is made of a special wood the way the four-string Atayal Jew's harps are made.
The Atayal love singing, whose songs are mostly ceremonial, festival, drinking or working songs.
Singing and dancing always go together. The festival songs are choral pieces in sad and simple melodies for outdoor group dancing, sung in repetition or alternate repetition; drinking songs are for indoor feasts, usually sung in solo, or in harmonic or antiphonal arrangements; weeding songs and grain-pounding songs are for the farming season.
Dances, both ritual and drinking dance, are accompanied rhythmically by songs. In a ritual dance, grouped by settlement or ritual group, some tens of men and women cross hand to link into a long line or a circle; but in a drinking dance three to four people join in to dance side by side or face to face.

Bamboo and rattan basket-

weaving

Bamboo or rattan baskets are very common in Taiwanese aboriginal societies; most are utilitarian containers used in daily life. The Atayal craft the most outstanding models.
Bamboo is collected from the wild. Basket making is a male exclusive. Most of traditional Atayal men know how to make baskets, since a boy from 11 or 12 starts to learn the necessary skills.
A basket with a base, a body and a rim is made by base forming, weaving and rimming. The techniques show ways of doing checker, twill, hexagonal, wicker patterns by weaving, twining and coiling.
The Atayal use many kinds of baskets in their daily life. Basket weaving indeed has become a distinction of their culture.

Religion and Belief

The Atayal worship ancestral spirits (Utux) that rule all. There are good Utux and bad Utux the former are the spirits of those who died of natural causes, the latter, of unnatural causes. The bad Utux may bring upon the tribesmen misfortune, like sickness or nervous breakdown, because they can not return to the realm of ancestral spirits nor receive the offerings from the living, therefore they are harmful to humans.
For the Atayal, the good Utux are the more important Utux, the guardians of their offspring.
The good Utux protect and also punish according to the ancestral Gaya that commands Atayal morality, rituals and taboos. To avoid the disasters, to ask for good speed and good harvest, tribesmen should obey Gaya. If Gaya is offended, one can pray for indulgence from Utux by slaughtering a pig as an offering. The members of the Gaya group also corporate in hunting, praying, propitiating and purifying.
But Christianity was brought into the settlements at the end of the Japanese Occupation and the beginning of Chinese rule after the Retrocession.
The Atayal at the Taroko area thus gradually converted and joined the Catholic, Jesuit, or Presbyterian Church. The traditional Gaya can no longer retain the vivid and effective role in the daily life of the Atayal tribe.

TAROKO NATIONAL PARK HEADQUARTERS
1998.06 (NOT FOR SALE)