A case study of our strategic work with the indigenous Thao people in the central mountains of Taiwan.
For centuries, the Thao indigenous women of Taiwan pound their pestles on their ancestral stone to call their husbands back from hunting in the mountains. A small group of elderly women shamans still practice their ritual music today, which involves the rhythmic pounding on ancestral stones with 5 to 8 feet tall pestle instruments (chu yin). During my time as Executive Director of the San Francisco World Music Festival, I advocated for global synergy and the diversity of cultures around the world by designing programs that preserve, evolve, and sustain the cultural lifeline between established and emerging traditional music artists and their larger global village context, especially in the Ita Thao Village at Sun Moon Lake’s De Hua Village in Nantou, Taiwan.
Although the majority of the Thao people still live in Nantou, Taiwan, next to the Sun Moon Lake Resort, and with a few as tourist stage performers and vendors, most of the Thao people’s culture, music, language and traditional ways of life are fast disappearing as their youth continue to leave their village for work elsewhere. The Thao elders are concerned that their culture and people may not survive past the next few generations as outside societies and modernization of their lands continue to erode their traditional ways of life. Our efforts to document their plight, launch a Thao pestle instruments micro-enterprise, and put them on the "world stage" in San Francisco via real-time satellite transmission of their ritual performance provides an important opportunity for the Thao elders to use their pestle music to "call humanity" to give their endangered culture a fighting chance.
Coming up with “out of the box” creative and sustainable eco-solutions is the calling card of Y Chen & Associates, especially for real life, on the ground social justice causes.
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