[Lecture] Rethinking Cloth Politics: Revitalising Barkcloth within the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists

Abstract:

In the pre-Columbian world, Austronesian speakers were the most widely dispersed ethnolinguistic population. The languages spread south from Taiwan and across the Pacific. This was not a single event of mass migration, but rather a process of interconnected movement and language convergence over thousands of years.

Ethnobotanical evidence for this migration includes the paper mulberry tree to make barkcloth. Its use is not unique to the Pacific; it has strong origins in Uganda where it is entered on the UNESCO Cultural Heritage Lists. This paper explores not only the role that barkcloth had among the trading networks of early Pacific voyagers, but also how this textile has been repurposed, interpreted, and ‘mended’ through layers of coloniality within the Pacific and resulting national memory. By doing so, it helps us to reconsider assumptions made about Indigenous subjectivity. In particular, the knowledge and practice of barkcloth making and its interpretation. This paper will give light to the shared historical narratives of barkcloth production within museums and galleries, concentrating largely on the discourses within heritage studies. Moreover, by examining the fluidity of barkcloth movement, it forces us to reconsider—or mend—issues of Indigenous sovereignty. The settler colonisation of Taiwan from the seventeenth century has resulted in a lack of political representation and acknowledgement of the island and its history within international organisations, in particular UNESCO. Attention to this is important in that it argues for the recognition of Taiwan as the site of the earliest form of barkcloth production within the Pacific and the first phase of the Austronesian migration.

Biography:

Niki Alsford is a Professor in Asia Pacific Studies and the Director of Asia Pacific Institutes at the University of Central Lancashire. He holds the position of Research Associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies at SOAS, the University of London, and is an Associate Member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. In 2023, he was honoured as the Ewha Global Fellow at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea.

As an anthropologist, Alsford primarily focuses his research on Taiwan and the Pacific Islands. He serves as the book series editor for the Taiwan Series at BRILL and the Korean Series at Routledge.

Alsford authored Transitions to Modernity in Taiwan: The Spirit of 1895 and the Cession of Formosa to Japan, published by Routledge in 2017. His forthcoming book, Taiwan Lives: A Socio-Political History, is scheduled to be published by the University of Washington Press in autumn 2023.