Festival, Statue of Virgin Mary, and Place-making: A Case Study of a Catholic Village in Taiwan

This paper is concerned with how local Catholics perceive Bamkin as a particular place by re-enacting the annual festival of the Virgin Mary every December. I argue that local believers incorporate themselves with the statue of the Virgin Mary of Bamkin through intimately physical engagement in the festival. And central to the ritual process are bodily experiences by which a sense of oneness with the statue and the place is invoked. However, as Jonathan Amith(2005) suggests, place-making always involves place-breaking. I also discuss how the symbol of Virgin Mary represents internal differences and conflicts among Bamkin Catholics.
At the end, this paper proposes a challenge to the study of Plains Aborigines in Taiwan. Based on the assumption of ethnicity, researchers construct images of reified and objectified “Pingpu” cultures; furthermore, these academic discourses form an essentialized identity among “Pingpu” people. But the case study of Bamkin shows that converting to Catholicism provides a chance for local people to resituate the past, redefine the present, and reformulate a different identity.