**1. Introduction**

Cultural heritage is a cornerstone of local and indigenous identity. The heritagization process is based on place and local culture characterized by traditions, according to some scholars, in order to promote cultural identity and to establish political control over the acculturation process [1]. The concept of heritagization has often been used in relation to cultural tourism. However, it has also been used in other cultural areas, such as music, in discussing how lived culture can be transformed into heritage to be safeguarded [2]. Here we use the concept to refer to the renewal of cultural heritage by strengthening and promoting the roots of indigenous traditions of knowledge and practice (which are themselves changing), towards social and economic development options that are culturally appropriate. Many indigenous societies around the world are involved in various kinds of cultural renewal efforts, identified by terms such as revival, revitalization, and restoration.

**Citation:** Yeh, J.H.-y.; Lin, S.-c.; Lai, S.-c.; Huang, Y.-h.; Yi-fong, C.; Lee, Y.-t.; Berkes, F. Taiwanese Indigenous Cultural Heritage and Revitalization: Community Practices and Local Development. *Sustainability* **2021**, *13*, 1799. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su13041799

Academic Editors: Marc A. Rosen and Asterios Bakolas Received: 16 November 2020 Accepted: 3 February 2021 Published: 7 February 2021

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In Hawaii, for example, scholars have called it cultural renaissance [3] and biocultural restoration [4].

Indigenous peoples in Taiwan face a double problem. The first one is that development, especially culturally appropriate development, is a priority. However, as with other indigenous peoples of the world, achieving such development is a challenge. Indigenous communities often seem destined to play the roles scripted by others. In some scripts, they are heroic people resisting development; in others, they are the victims of progress [5]. Part of the dynamic is that culture is never static but changing all the time. Traditional practices are modified and enriched by outside technologies and knowledge, resulting in cultural adjustments and changes in the local economy. A promising development strategy is to deal with these changes from a position of strength based on the "roots" of cultural heritage. Such renewal of cultural heritage may shape and control the development process, conferring a kind of indigenous resilience. "Opting in" to the regional, national, and global economy makes more sense than resisting development, and often involves local cultural roots and social enterprises [6]. Such social enterprises are based on an economic model that provides for broad goals—economic, social, cultural, and political—providing multiple benefits such as self-determination, cultural revitalization, capacity development, as well as employment and cash income [7,8].

The second problem is that Taiwan has a disaster-prone geography. In addition to frequent earthquakes, Taiwan is increasingly vulnerable to typhoons, in part due to climate change. In particular, the Typhoon Morakot of 2009 resulted in a spate of studies dealing with disaster risk reduction and post-disaster recovery over the past decade (see the introduction paper to this Special Issue). These natural disasters, combined with colonial administration policies to relocate traditional communities, have resulted in social disasters from institutional violence and injustice. Much of Taiwanese indigenous peoples' community revitalization efforts can be characterized as a reaction to the colonial legacy of an unjust past. However, the "native point of view" from indigenous livelihood and its related historical trajectory has been absent in the conventional framework of cultural heritage studies. Note that indigenous peoples only obtained name rectification in 1994 from the condescending term of "mountain compatriots/barbarians." Such exoticizing and othering views meant that the indigenous peoples were usually presented as objects or cultural specimens, rather than as subjects in their own right. The six projects in this paper are examples of contemporary efforts to connect indigenous subjects and the idea of "traditional futures". With a future that remembers cultural meaning from the past, these projects reflect on an alternative economy against neoliberal forces of governmentality, and make cultural heritage a living tradition.

Taiwan's 16 officially recognized indigenous tribes with a total population of nearly 400,000 are considered to be the northernmost representatives of Austronesian culture. Geographically, the majority of Taiwan's indigenous tribes are located in the mountainous interior, on the east coast, and offshore on Orchid Island. In response to the environmental devastation from natural disasters, cultural heritage development has emerged as an important economic diversification strategy. Indigenous cultural festivals, food, ecotourism, historical commemorations, and performances are all seen as effective means of attracting tourists to reach goals of economic diversification. Indigenous peoples are aware of the popularity of their attractive and distinctive cultural and natural resources and heritage. They use these as resources in exhibitions and performances to reconnect and recall the significance of local places and regions. However, what do we mean by cultural heritage in the context of sustainable development?

This paper focuses on how heritage for development is negotiated through various processes. It demonstrates that revitalization is dynamic, diverse, and sometimes contested, and always socially and culturally embedded. As a research focus, this integrated project involves connecting various indigenous communities (Figure 1) that are transforming cultural heritage into local economic forms that draw upon traditional knowledge and practice. The project also seeks the origins of these developments from a wider political and

economic perspective. Community practices and local development involve negotiation between communities and external agents of change. Clifford [9,10] points out that the revival of tradition involves the pragmatic selection and critical reconfiguration of "roots". Is the renewal of cultural heritage necessary to connect to the capitalist market? What are the best mechanisms for facilitating the conservation and appreciation of indigenous culture toward development? As Cajete [11] puts it, "Western notions of development and its paradigm of 'progress' with little regard for social, cultural, and ecological consequences is an extension of colonialism". Many indigenous peoples throughout the world have been searching for alternatives, "new paradigms of 'development' ... more in line with [indigenous] cultural and spiritual ethos.". Our paper is part of the search for an "Indigenized conceptual framework of sustainable community development" toward revitalization and renewal [11].

**Figure 1.** Map of Taiwan and locations of six research project sites.

To treat traditions as historical practices does not simply mean to return to the past. Rather, it means seeking origin stories for social transformation. Through prosperous ecotourism, indigenous culture and local knowledge are re-packaged as intangible cultural heritage and successfully create vernacular characters. These vernacular characters contain a potential path toward local subsistence economy and alternative tourism and other development. Within a development framework of indigenous community practices and local economies, the project attempts to rethink the meaning and value of indigenous agriculture and food sovereignty, legends and ceremonies, traditional artisanal techniques, community kitchens, and ecotourism. This not only strengthens the building of diverse cultural heritage, but also leads to consolidated constructions of indigenous identity. The project engages two important alternative historical perspectives. The first is Clifford's [9] "traditional future" in which "returns" are used to re-examine and respond to diverse contemporary social development landscape and indigenous community development. The second is when "tradition" is instead viewed as an "historical practice". This requires

paying attention to the links between physical memories and artisanal techniques and to the importance of cultural heritagization in local economic resistance strategies and indigenous community participation models. This second alternative, tradition as historical practice, is the perspective examined here.

Within the processes of globalization and neoliberalism, contemporary indigenous peoples have emphasized ethnic, cultural, and subjective representation in cultural revitalization. In Taiwan, as elsewhere in the indigenous world, more and more indigenous people are choosing to return to their communities to rediscover, acquire, and collect traditional cultural heritage. Moreover, through the activation and re-implementation of the practice of cultural heritage, as well as negotiations and collaborations with and resistance against mainstream social recognition and economic markets, new survival strategies and directions have emerged. Examples include ecotourism, ethnic handicraft markets, re-cultivation of farmland by indigenous people with the return of small farmers to their communities, repatriation of ethnic artifacts by museums, performance and exhibition of legends and ceremonies, and promotion of indigenous food culture.

The aim of this research is to investigate how indigenous people transform their traditional knowledge and create the possibility of livelihood and lifestyle renewal. The process of returning to and transforming local knowledge involves three dimensions of relations—relations to nature, object, and spirit. Taiwan's indigenous cultures were deeply rooted in these three dimensions (nature, object, and spirit) that need to be accounted for in the renewal of cultural heritage. Community practices provide the cultural mechanism to accomplish this, as shown in Figure 2. The six cases complement one another by dealing with nature (food, land, and ecology), object (weaving craft and fermentation products), and spirit (cultural revival).

**Figure 2.** How the six cases fit together: Cultural mechanisms are provided by indigenous community practices and local development in the renewal of indigenous cultural heritage.

However, indigenous communities face contestation from external forces, and they are compelled to negotiate with the state or settler colonialism, which holds power, capital, and history. The process of struggle is engaged at the community level where cultural revitalization and local development come into focus (Figure 2). The six cases are dealing organically with the forces to create an upward spiral for indigenous cultural heritage involving land, economy, ceremony, food, handcraft, and ecotourism. Thus, the cases highlight cultural identity and ethnic subjectivity, the capability of indigenous communities to cope with social change, and the agency to rebuild transformative tradition.

The transformation and innovation of indigenous cultural heritage provide indigenous peoples with more possibilities for cultural identification and development, offering an understanding of how to engage, transform, and represent different forms of cultural heritage in the face of changing contemporary society. This paper seeks to probe these different developments through six interrelated case studies within a research approach that involves assessing the management and revitalization of cultural and natural resources as they merge with socio-cultural explorations of local knowledge and development practices. By approaching heritage from a socio-cultural perspective and applying theories of globalization and representation, the project examines how heritage is constructed, interpreted, and represented in indigenous Taiwan.

We argue that an empirically grounded understanding of how indigenous heritage is (re)produced through the mediation of unequal power relations, and how processes of alternative paradigms of development [11] is a prerequisite for any serious attempt to instigate dialogue that would allow all stakeholders to benefit from sustainable development initiatives. The major goal of the paper is to show that cultural revitalization is a significant context for understanding social, cultural, economic, and political action in indigenous communities. Building upon earlier research by the authors, the paper analyzes several patterns of development and uses case studies to illustrate the arguments.
