In: Online – Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet, 02.1 (2006),

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Abstract

Michael Rudolph’s article Nativism, Ethnic Revival, and the Reappearance of Indigenous Religions in the ROC: The Use of the Internet in the Construction of Taiwanese Identities deals with rituals presented on Taiwanese Websites in the context of identity construction. Since the mid-nineties, long abandoned and very un-Chinese ritual practices suddenly seemed to become popular again in China’s runaway-province Taiwan: in spite of the fact that most of the island’s 2% of indigenous population had been Christianized for half a century, intellectual elites of different aboriginal groups now referred to ancestor-gods, tattooing and even headhunting again as essential parts of their own traditional repertoire, often making abundant use of the Internet in order to propagate these convictions to a broader Chinese speaking public. This contribution not only scrutinises the political context that made such a development possible, but also assesses this practice in terms of the identity construction of the specific ethnic groups.