Articulating the sinicisation process in a Taiwan Paiwan Indigenous village: Vusam culture as a resilience pivot

The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to welcome Professor Hong-zen Wang to give a talk as part of this year’s Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School on Paiwan Indigenous social life, Sinicisation, and the Vusam system as a site of cultural resilience in Taiwan.

This talk will be about how the Indigenous Paiwan community in Taiwan negotiates long-term Sinicisation pressures through the Vusam system – a foundational institution governing inheritance, authority, and familial continuity. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation in a Vulculj Paiwan village, the study theorises Vusam as a resilience pivot through which Paiwan families actively articulate, rather than merely resist or preserve, their cultural practices within a Han-dominated ethno-racial order.

Despite sustained Han-centric governance and cultural hierarchies, Paiwan families maintain Indigenous naming practices, balance formal Sinicised education with intergenerational cultural transmission, and navigate between class-based matrimonial norms and individual romantic agency. Vusam individuals characteristically circulate between urban labour markets and village life, mediating economic and cultural obligations simultaneously.

By foregrounding articulation and institutional resilience, this study addresses a scholarly gap that has privileged narratives of cultural loss or symbolic resistance, contributing to broader debates on Sinicisation, ethno-racial privilege, and Indigenous agency within settler colonial contexts across Greater China.