ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes relationships between the signifying dimension and form of indigenous people’s dances in Taiwan. European writings on the indigenous Taiwanese came partly from the Christian missionaries who had strong motivations towards converting them. Their writings also carried an explicit tone that labelled the unconverted indigenous people ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’. Following the strong assimilation of Chinese immigrants, during the colonizing period by Japan from 1896–1945, the indigenous people were subjected to a scientific classification. The chapter focuses on the most important formal characteristics, the ‘root metaphor’, of holding hands, and examines its reproduction in various dances. The cultural metaphor of holding hands as a representation of dancing, and marrying the ‘other’ has been well presented in these nineteenth-century Chinese historical accounts of indigenous people. The hands held provide an embodied reminder of the basic human structure necessary for the collectivity to be formed and social relations to be included, in different patterns.
