ABSTRACT
During a tour of Taiwan lasting some three weeks in August and September 1997 which I made in the company of Dr. David Faure, we visited Lanyu or Orchid Island (also known as Botel Tobago) from September 10 through 12. The two evenings we were there we had supper in the home of Mr. Shiyman Feaien (Kuo Chien-p’ing) and his wife in the village of Iraralay (Lang Tao). On the 11th, he accompanied us on a tour of the island, including among items of interest the nuclear waste disposal plant against which he had helped lead a demonstration in 1995. On that evening, before being shown an hour and a half long video of the demonstration and upon request, I showed slides of the eastern Indonesian whaling and fishing village of Lamalera, Lembata about which I had recently written a book (Barnes 1996). In return he showed us slides of Yami fishing ritual and house building. Fortunately, given my lack of any of the relevant languages, Shiyman Feaien has good English. Whaling is not part of the Yami fishery, and my hosts could not understand why Lamalera bothers to take whales. My attempts to explain did not satisfy them. When I mentioned that like the Yami, people in Lamalera catch flying fish and said that at certain seasons a single man in a boat might catch as many as 200 in a day, their response was that in Lanyu fishing with nets they can catch as many as 2000 in a night. What Lanyu and Lamalera have in common, other than speaking languages of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family and a common interest in taking protein from the sea, is a shared tradition of boat construction.
