
Pi-Chen Liu
Pi-Chen Liu - Academia Sinica
14 - 16 - 17 october 2023
LIU Pi-Chen takes us into her kitchen to assist any student working on a thesis or dissertation. In this podcast (in French), she provides all the ingredients for success by revisiting the intimacy of several fascinating research fields.

Sticky grains, wild plant-women, and sensory ecology: a reflection on ritual plants and their taboos among the Pangcah/Amis of Taiwan.
For the Pangcah, rituals and taboos cannot be separated from plants. In ritual action, they divide them into three categories. The first are the grains that have a deity and a soul, at the heart of animistic and shamanic rituals. These spirits cling to people (like the substance of grains) to ask to be nourished, or they are aggressive and cause illness. The second category consists of leafy plants whose consumption is forbidden before rituals. They are likened to unmarried women and carry sexual connotations. The third category includes “wrapped” plants (beans, bamboo shoots) that are eaten only during rituals. This lecture explores the cosmology of the Pangcah and analyzes the mediating role of sensory experience in the encounter between people-plants-spirits.

Head hunting, deer hunting: exchange of life and human fertility among the Kavalan of Taiwan.
Initiated in the late 1980s, Taiwan’s democracy has offered Indigenous peoples new opportunities to assert their place in society by revitalizing their culture, with head hunting being one of its cornerstones. Banned during the Japanese occupation of the island (1895-1945), head hunting is no longer practiced today, but the rituals associated with it remain central to cosmogonies and fundamental concepts linked to the construction of the individual, identity, and social ties. Although transformed, the rituals related to this practice continue in villages, where they are major events to which young people, who have migrated to cities, must participate. Additionally, these cultural activities now attract tourism and government funding. Through the analysis of various Kavalan myths and rituals, and the collection of oral narratives, we will highlight the connections between head hunting, the mythological origins of neighboring groups, human fertility, hunting game (deer), and natural events (rain) within a symbolic system that we aim to understand through a politico-religious perspective.

Deer-lover, rooster-husband, and female shamans. Gender disjunction among the Kavalan (Taiwan).
The Kavalan, Austronesians from the eastern coast of Taiwan, lived, until the 1950s, within a matrilineal and matrilocal society with diachronic polyandry. We will attempt to demonstrate that, in their system of representation and kinship as well as in their social practices, gender functions both as the effect and instrument of power. Taking into account the politics of gender, we aim to highlight the specific characteristics of the definitions of the female and male subjects as social beings among the Kavalan over the past century.
