The Atayal and Bunun Spirit-Healing Traditions in Japanese Taiwan

Record summary

Japanese-era ethnographies of Indigenous peoples in Taiwan recorded ritual specialists, ancestor relations, illness explanations, taboo violations, protective rites, and encounters with dangerous or dissatisfied spirits. Atayal and Bunun materials are useful for comparison because they preserve local categories that should not be collapsed into Christian demonology or generic “possession.” They also show how colonial ethnographers converted oral traditions into fixed textual descriptions. The traditions and ethnographic corpus are identifiable, but precise attribution depends on the community, village, compiler, and publication, since broad tribal labels conceal substantial regional variation.