11 February 2009

Le carnet magique de Tafalong


L'an dernier, j'ai participé à la réalisation d'un documentaire se déroulant dans un village aborigène situé sur la côte Est de Taiwan. Cette expérience a été pour moi l'occasion de mieux connaître une partie à la fois géographique et culturelle de l'île. Taiwan reconnait en effet officiellement 14 peuples aborigènes dont celui des Amis, mais on ressent relativement peu leur présence à Taipei. L'expérience entière mérite plus qu'un simple post de blog (et fera d'ailleurs peut-être l'objet d'un récit plus long), je vous laisse d'abord "feuilleter" le site créé par Nicolas Priniotakis (en charge de notre nouveau département audiovisuel) et cliquer sur les liens mentionnés dans l'extrait de la newsletter de décembre ci-dessous:

http://erenlai.com/tafalong/

(Lettre de Décembre)
Tafalong est habité par le peuple Amis, l’un des quatorze groupes aborigènes de Taïwan. Nous avons suivi pendant toute cette année une jeune femme Amis, Nakao Eki, qui pour la première fois en neuf ans est retournée dans son village : de cette expérience, nous avons tiré un film documentaire, intitulé « On the Fifth Day, the Sea Tide Rose* », et dont vous retrouverez certains moments forts ce mois-ci sur notre site. Vous pourrez notamment y découvrir une nouvelle manière de narrer et d’écouter l’histoire orale des peuples aborigènes d'Asie.

Le grand-père de Nakao chante un air ancestral qui raconte les origines du village de Tafalong : Tafalong a niyaro.

Un autre personnage important du film est Haruko, la tante de Nakao, qui a perdu récemment l’un de ses fils. Elle et ses petites-filles revêtent ici les costumes traditionnels Amis pour entonner un dernier chant d'adieu avant le “Ilisin”, une fête durant laquelle les hommes de la tribu dansent en mémoire du fils décédé d’Haruko.

Soyez le témoin d’un spectacle insolite : des femmes âgées de Tafalong se réunissent chaque semaine dans la cour de l’église catholique et font revivre leur enfance par l’intermédiaire des kimonos qu’elles portent et des comptines qu’elles chantent, dans un mélange de religiosité et de divertissement.

Alice


As comments made about articles on eRenlai cannot appear directly on the website, I post below a comment we received a couple of weeks ago about an article written by Alice Lin. This is also the right time to introduce Alice: she has started to work for eRenlai as our English editor since December. Born in Taiwan, she has grown up in Namibia and lived in a lot of different countries including New Zealand, Singapour, France and Morocco. She recounts her numerous travels in her article Down with Zugunruhe which triggered the reader's comment below. Alice has many talents among which singing in !Xhosa, also listen to her and her friend Brenda here.

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This article is an extremely interesting testimonial. It reminds us that nomadism is an interesting and vast subject, as much of the past as of the future; discussing this subject may act as a valuable catalyst, may bring new ideas, even inspire new fields of research -at least in my case-... It is the second time in recent years, and from a very different angle, both apparently very important in terms of sociology, that I hear about 'nomadism' as a key subject, worth deeper analyses. Here with Alice Lin it is the angle of 'animal migratory behavior', engrained in the genes of a few species or individuals. The first time it was a more futuristic, theoretical and sociological angle. It was in browsing through the book "Une Brève histoire de l'avenir" (Paris Fayard 2006) by Jacques Attali (see his bilingual site www.attali.com). Very roughly the well-known and very prolific French essayist Attali describes the future, in a few decades, as an increasingly unified small planet where dominate two main social classes, the nomads (the 'higher', better educated and richest class) and the others, the (more) sedentary people. Whatever one may think of Attali's works and personality, I just discover here in checking this reference that he wrote a more precise book on the subject of human nomads, which I didn't read yet, "L'homme nomade", Paris Fayard 2003 (I didn't check translations of his books in other languages). Besides, amongst other ideas popping up in my mind with the term 'nomadism' right now, there is, with cheap flights and Internet, the link with this other important subject (one of my pet subjects) the possibly worrying 'acceleration of history', directly related to the growing size, complexity, but also interlinkage and unification, of the human society, due to technology (even if history repeats itself ...probably because the human body and brain doesn't evolve at all at the same pace than human society and technology -like nothing new with nomadism since the Paleolithic and probably in a thousand years through galaxies !-; ... thus human history may seem to be accelerating like a point moving along a spiral, towards -or away from ?-, a kind of noosphere or omega point !).Other ideas are popping up: the growing and bumpy disappearance of the concept of nation and/or state (especially in light of the present world economic crisis -the present sudden return of the nation-state is just a in my view reflex bursts of slowly dying complex bodies, for which wars and guns still unhappily remain the ultimate solution-), and thus the obvious necessity of a wider and better world governance of our small 'planet-village',...; on the opposite, the necessity somewhere in the genes of some living species -especially h. s. sapiens - of a 'home', of the German concept of 'heimat', a 'nest' where to grow up quietly and safely, where to acquire memories, an education, a conscience... The theme of 'nomadism' is also indeed linked to the subjects of education, languages and cultures, religions, family, friends and social links, freedom (of movement)(itself linked to the concept of democracy; where do I vote if I am a nomad ?, should I or can I if need be 'vote with my feet' ?), etc. etc.Besides, it was my first time on erenlai.com; congratulations for this site.


Arthur Syel

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Down With Zugunruhe
 
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