Abstract

powerful site of symbolic and cultural production that is in itself always culturally represented and understood in particular ways, this article is concerned with how the Bunun, an Austronesian-speaking indigenous people of Taiwan, perceive and imagine the state. I point out that the Bunun use their own idioms of kinship and political leadership to understand and construct their relationship with the state, in order to transform the state from an external and potentially dangerous force into a positive and benevolent provider. In attempting to oblige the state to deliver material and social goods, the Bunun place emphasis on their compliance rather than their resistance to the state. However, I argue that compliance, rather than being passive accommodation, can be a kind of ‘quite effective agency ’ in Ortner’s (1997: 148) terms, and challenge the recent theoretical preoccupation with resistance. K E Y W O R D S ■ the Bunun, the state, kinship, political leadership, election, the symbolism of money In his preface to African Political Systems (1940), anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown proposed that the idea of the state should be eliminated from social analysis. He believed the existence of the state was not a norm, and the notion of the state as an entity having sovereignty and will was a fiction. Therefore, he argued that concepts of government, political organization and political system were all that was needed for political anthropology. graphy