대만 원주민의 ‘머리사냥(Headhunting)’과 조상숭배: 도리이 류조[鳥居龍藏]의 민족지를 중심으로

Abstract

As Japan expanded its colonies such as Taiwan, Joseon and etc., the discourse justifying colonial rule was needed; as a result, the theory of mixed race was advocated among anthropologists at Tokyo Imperial University. Torii Ryuzo also advocated the theory of mixed race, saying, "The Ainu people firstly lived in the Japanese archipelago, and then the Tungus people arrived from continent to Japan in the late Neolithic; they became the 'archaic Japanese', the core of the Japanese ancestors. The minority of Indonesians and Indians later arrived marginally influenced the formation of the Japanese.” As the basis for this mixed-ethnic theory, Torii Ryuzo mentioned that the origin of the ancient Shinto that remained in East Asia was shamanism; as the medium of shamanism, he assumed the cultures of the East Asian ethnic groups, including Korea were the same and formed a lineage of the native Japanese by finding the origin of the ancient Shinto. Shortly after ceding Taiwan, Torii Ryuzo traveled to Taiwan to investigate the 'head hunting' customs of indigenous people. Every five years, Taiwan indigenous people held ancestral rites, at that time the skulls on the shelve were served as ancestors. In addition, there was a custom of receiving a ball, which symbolized the head and was thrown high into the sky, through a bamboo spear during the premise of the ancestral ritual. It symbolizes the emergence of a god or ancestor who controls abundance, and piercing the ball with a bamboo spear is signified as a religious act of taking various good luck from these gods and ancestors. As a result, Torii Ryuzo regarded the head hunting as a "ancestor worship" of Taiwanese natives and identified it with the ancestral worship of Japanese Shinto. In other words, the ancestral worship through the head hunting serves as cultural evidence of the Indonesian people that formed some archaic Japanese. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify the correlation with the Japanese ancient Shinto and ancestral worship of Taiwan indigenous people based on Torii Ryuzo’s ethnographies. And then this paper will examine how the theory of mixed race using head hunting might influence on the Japanese government's religious policy toward Taiwan indigenous people.