Brill Series in Taiwan Studies – serie

In Assessing the Landscape of Taiwan and Korean Studies in Comparison, the chapters offer a reflection on the state of the field of Taiwan and Korea Studies. For the editors, the volume’s purpose was to identify not just their similarities, but also a reflection on their differences. Both have national identities formed in a colonial period. The surrender of Japan in 1945 ignited the light of independence for Korea, but this would be ideologically split within five years. For Taiwan, that end forced it into a born-again form of nationalism with the arrival of the Chinese Nationalists.Taiwan and South Korea’s economic development illustrate a progressive transition and key to understanding this is the relationship between ‘modernization’ and ‘democracy’. By looking at Korea and Taiwan, the chapters in the volume broaden an understanding of the interconnectivity of the region.

This is the first book-length study of the reception of Christianity and the epistemic outcomes of contact between Protestant and Catholic missionaries and Indigenous Austronesians in the contact zone of seventeenth-century colonial Taiwan.In the Age of European Expansion, Dutch Reformed and Spanish Catholic missionaries attempted to win the souls of Indigenous Austronesian people in Taiwan. Christopher Joby examines the strategies that the missionaries employed to overcome the gap between their own cultures and languages and those of the Indigenous Austronesians or Formosans in the contact zone of seventeenth-century Taiwan, and evaluates the success of these strategies. As such, this book is a reception history of the texts, beliefs, and practices that Reformed Protestant and Catholic missionaries introduced to convert the Formosans to their mode of Christianity. Using many linguistic and non-linguistic examples, this approach allows for a ‘complementary colour perspective’ by comparing the epistemic outcomes of the Dutch Reformed and Spanish Catholic missions.

Reorientating Taiwan: Ocean, Selfhood, and the Pacific redefines how you see Taiwan, moving beyond land-centred perspective to embrace its deep connection with the Pacific. This interdisciplinary collection takes you on a journey through anthropology, literature, ecology, and art, revealing Taiwan as a cradle of Austronesian expansion and a hub of oceanic entanglements. You’ll discover how Taiwan’s vibrant marine culture influences its identity, from Indigenous traditions to contemporary environmental activism. This book invites you to explore Taiwan’s cultural and ecological narratives in a way that is both profound and transformative.

In this book, Valdis Gauss anthologizes the Formosan anthropogonic myths from all of Taiwan’s Austronesian tribes. Over 250 origin texts, sourced from dozens of linguistic, anthropological, historical, and mythological corpora as well as other publications have been collated and analysed rendering the present literary survey far more comprehensive than any prior study on this subject. Over 100 Formosan myths, many of which were never previously available in English have been translated here for the first time. In the absence of longstanding traditional orthographical records, the Austronesian tribes that inhabit the island of Taiwan have relied on the transmission of oral literatures for the preservation of historical events since the dawn of time. The earliest historical events that are still recited by tribal elders relate to the origins of the gods and first ancestors of mankind. This anthology continues the tradition of collecting and transcribing these myths for everyone interested in the corpus of literature from Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples.