ABSTRACT
This chapter considers music-related events that lie at the exceptional end of Buklavu’s spectrum of activities and completes a move from daily to weekly to the annual. If it compresses the Bunun year and way of life into the microcosm of a single, colourful day, this does not mean the Ear-Shooting Festival is treated casually by its participants. We might note that the Ear-Shooting Festival not only stimulates the sense receptors with sites, smells, tastes, physical sensations, and sounds distinct from those of everyday life, it combines them in ways that exceed daily norms. The chapter discusses how far a particular contribution of music can be located in all this. The answer relates strongly to the hidden but deep relationship between religious practice and festivalization in Buklavu and other Bunun villages. Women’s costumes in this area had once been made from ramie, a type of hemp, cultivated by Bunun women in plots on the mountainside.
