伊利幸

The tradition & historical record

The Amis people of Taiwan celebrate many small and larger harvest festivals and ceremonies through the year. ¹

The “Harvest Festival”, also known as the “Harvest Ceremony”, is one of the most important festival for indigenous tribes in Taiwan and it is held to celebrate the harvest. The ceremony lasts approximately seven days. The “Harvest Festival” is held during July, August, and September. Normally, different tribes will select different times to celebrate in the same area. Previously, the main purpose of the festival was to pray to the ancestral gods to bless successfully harvested crops, and to wish for a bumper grain harvest, growth of population and stock breeding in the coming year. After the rituals, people gather for dinner, dancing, a camp-fire party and games. Currently, besides the worship of ancestors and gods, the celebration of the Harvest Festival is also an important program to attract the increasing number of tourists. Amis Harvest Festival is held on the full moon day after the autumn harvest. In the past, in order to celebrate the harvest of millet, the ceremony was held after the reaping of the millet. Since rice has become the main crop for Amis, now the ceremony is held after the gathering of rice. The Amis in the Taitung area celebrates in lunar July; the one in Hualien area celebrates in lunar August. The characteristics of celebration for different tribes are varied, and the duration for celebration is also different from just one day for some tribes to seven days for other tribes. At that time, the men and women, the young and old wearing festival costumes, led by a singer, dance with hand in hand. The young Amis men and women will take singing and dancing as an important thing for them to choose their partners. ¹

The ceremony will be hosted by the priest of the tribe, who is in charge of the sacrificial ritual. Since all the ceremonies of the Amis are closely related to the farming stuffs, the responsibility of the priest is to instruct the activities of plowing, sowing, weeding, and harvesting and so on. It is necessary for a priest to know the calendar, the weather, the history of the tribe, the dancing and how to communicate with the gods. Therefore, the priest is a knowledgeable and wise man. ¹

Before the ceremony, the leader of the tribe will call the members of the “kaput” to discuss the details of the ceremony such as deciding the day of ceremony, collecting the fee for the dinner party and so on. Then he begins to purchase the stuffs which are needed during the celebration. According to the traditional custom, the beef should be the main dish for the big dinner party “malafi”, and the number of cows butchered should be decided by the number of the tribes. The “kaput” of the current “pakalogay” will take the charge of butchering the cows. ¹

According to the traditional custom of the Amis, the day before the ceremony, the tribe which is charge of holding the celebration will send the young men to other tribes to invite important guests to attend. ¹

Attending dinner is a traditional custom for the Amis in Harvest Festival. It is a great opportunity for all the members of the tribe to meet and strengthen their relationship. Before the night of ceremony, the big dinner must be held and all the members of the tribe should attend it, because this is the way to unite the members of the tribe. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Amis harvest festivals”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Ami’s Harvest Festival is recorded in open cultural data. The structured record cited below does not describe the practice, and this entry has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. ²