Résumés > Sensory Weaving: Making Cross-ethnic Identity in Taiwan’s Yunnanese Dage Community

Jeudi 6 novembre 2025 - 14h-14h45

Tasaw Hsin-chun LU, Institute of Musicology, National Taiwan Unviersity, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taïwan.

The concept of “making” illuminates the dynamic, actor-oriented processes through which socio-cultural identities and meanings are crafted. It is particularly evidenced in embodied practices like dance that weave sensory, historical, and transcultural threads. This paper explores sense-making and identity-making among dage performers in the Yunnanese immigrant community of Longgang, Taiwan, through cultural cultivation and musicking.

Drawing on Tomie Hahn’s Sensational Knowledge (2007), which positions dance as embodied cultural transmission, the study examines how performers internalize multiethnic sociocultural norms and sensory knowledge through dage, a hybrid music and dance practice rooted in the Thai-Myanmar borderlands. Hahn’s concept of sensory engagement as performative “becoming” informs the analysis of cultivating a “dage body,” where performers embody cultural memory and aesthetic values through sonic interaction with the sanxian’s “Kuang Tan Kuang” soundscape and costume-making. Based on the author’s ethnographic experience as a dage performer since 2019, the study highlights negotiations of sensory attributes—sound, movement, tactility—that interweave historical memories, transcultural identities, and aesthetic ideals into cultural programs and praxis. By blending diverse cultural threads, performers co-create a cross-ethnic identity, navigating ethnic preconceptions to foster social cohesion.

This embodied sense-making, rooted in musicking and material agency, reflects a post-capitalist ethos of collective creativity, contributing to community-building, cultural heritage preservation, and insights into the dynamics of “making” in Taiwanese.