Cultural Ecosystem of the Seediq’s Traditional Weaving Techniques—A Comparison of the Learning Differences Between Urban and Indigenous Communities
Authors: Hwang Shyh-Huei , Huang Hsiu-Mei 
Published: March 2019

The Seediq tribe is one of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples, and they have very traditional weaving techniques. Women of the Seediq weave clothes and quilts for their families as they believe that only women with good weaving skill can pass through the Rainbow Bridge and be reunited with ancestors after they die. However, due to changing society, there is little demand for weaving today, and the norms observed by their ancestors are gradually disappearing, resulting in the declining number of locals capable of weaving. The weaving techniques of these Indigenous people are on the verge of disappearing. Unfortunately, when the government took measures to preserve the techniques by registering Seta Bakan as the preserver of intangible cultural heritage, and launched training classes to save such techniques, no locals were initially interested in learning weaving. After non-Seediq people were allowed to participate in learning, the course attracted weaving lovers from all over the island. The course included five learning phases within four years, which were given in urban communities. In the fourth year, the weaving teacher was invited to carry out a course to teach in her Indigenous village. Both courses have the same teacher teaching the same techniques. However, the perceptions and feelings of learning vary among members of different cultural backgrounds. UNESCO has extended the protection of intangible cultural heritage from technical objects to the maintenance and inheritance of community, thus, this study focuses on the interaction and feeling of students during the weaving courses given in two communities, analyzes how the differences of feeling and cultural background influence the learning perceptions of the students of the two communities, and examines the significance and functions of rebuilding the cultural ecosystem for the sustainable inheritance of skills. The conclusion of this study is that urban communities learn weaving purposefully because they have no cultural or technical background, while the courses for indigenous communities feature the frequent recurrence of traditional “old value”. The different learning motivations, feelings, and perceptions of the two communities can be complementary and mutually supportive to each other. After exploring the cultural context, this study finds that the cultural ecosystem generated by indigenous weavers includes Gaya belief, Natural knowledge, Indigenous languages, Personal practice, Generational links, and Social interaction, which are strongly bound to each other. However, social changes can weaken or even break the cultural ecosystem; the learning courses of the two communities create opportunities for re-connection. Native tribes are the best field to build an ideal cultural ecosystem; while the urban communities play the role of an acupuncture massage stick that stimulates the ethnic consciousness and learning motivation of Indigenous peoples, which preserves and provides the techniques and external knowledge. Admittedly these two communities contribute to cultural inheritance, respectively. The analysis of this study provides an important reference for the feasible routes of carrying forward indigenous techniques on the brink of disappearing in the current society of cultural initiative, and provides the opportunity for reconnecting cultural ecosystem through technique acquisition.