Kinship and Christianity among the Amis of Taiwan in the Context of Change

Religion and kinship, observed Fenella Connell, are “coextensive, not contradictory” (2005) in certain forms of Christianity. However, the relationship between these two domains remains poorly understood in modernisation narratives where political and economic structures and processes are regarded as key organising forces of “modern” societies. In this paper, we examine how the Amis, an Austronesian-speaking indigenous community in Taiwan, draw on their Catholic faith to reproduce the spiritual and social relationalities that constitute their symbolic family - the core kinship structure organising their society - as they adapt to forces of development taking place on an island striving to modernise. In particular, we demonstrate the continued importance of the paternal age-set system through an examination of the cultural logics Amis men deploy in their efforts to rebuild a village church. We then contrast the continued vitality of the paternal age-set system with the emergence of women’s church groups as a critical development that has enabled the preservation of the Amis family. By illuminating how the Amis deploy their Catholic faith to preserve their traditional kinship structure and the indigenous cosmological framework that supports it, we argue that paying attention to the dynamic engagement between religion and kinship not only sheds light on the processes that constitute the “profound relationality” (Chua 2012) of Christianity. It also illuminates how an indigenous people have found a way to be themselves in Taiwanese modernity.