ABSTRACT
Until the arrival of the Japanese in 1895, women were in charge of the domestic world, brought up the children, gardened and gathered food. It seems that the Puyuma were not great farmers, as Imbault-Huart (1893: 253) writes: ‘They [the savages] leave much land uncultivated.’ Women stabilised the world inside the stockades. Men spent their time between the men’s house and the mountain, but they slept regularly in their wives’ houses, where they had to knock at the door before entering. Men guarded the frontiers, and their nomadic life ensured the stability of the world inside the village. Prohibition of hunting and war imposed by the colonial government destabilised the social balance. The women then farmed the land more intensively and the men, rendered inactive, where thrown into the feminine world of farming. Farming was certainly not a valorising task. Today, it is still the women who hire themselves out to the Taiwanese as farmhands. The herds of zebus once watched over by the children have disappeared.
