人與植物的社會生命：阿美族菜園裡的原住民傳統生態知識及飲食實踐

The Social Lives of Plants and People: Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Food Practices in Amis Home Gardens

本研究結合人類學物質文化理論與民族植物學的家園植物調查方法，從人與菜園共伴的社會生命史，進行阿美族都蘭部落菜園中植物使用的民族誌敘事分析，以及探討其如何深刻地嵌入在阿美人的當代日常生活之中。透過菜園知識與物質所承載的地方飲食文化記憶和交換的社會性，從而理解菜園中運用的技術與其相關的社會文化過程意義的延伸。野菜的日常性與多產使其容易被視為無足輕重，然而其豐裕性正與人類學交換理論之中所探討的意義相關。此研究也從上述知識理論的比較研究中，進一步界定菜園中的野菜知識屬於臺灣當代原住民的傳統生態知識類型的特性，也是一種實踐與口傳的原住民知識與地方知識，而且，其中更隱含了阿美族人特別擅長使用此生物與文化的物質的樣貌，與其展現的韌性與社會性。本文嘗試銜接野菜的生產技術與物的流通，以回到其產出、交換與消費的脈絡，進而理解其流動過程中，所具有的植物與人之間交互辯證的關係意義。

This article presents ethnographical narratives on the joint social lives of the Amis people and the edible wild plants in home gardens with anthropological and ethnobotanical perspectives. The approach, based on material culture theory and botanical survey, brings us to an overall understanding of the social, cultural, and biological processes which contrasts with former research that only stresses either the classification of the plants or the dimension of food culture. Through long-term participant observation, formal and informal interviews, and interdisciplinary methods, we emphasize the important aspects of corelative local foodways and cultural memory of the edible wild plants in the home gardens as well as the embedded sociality in their exchange. This study was mainly carried out between 2014-2019 with a total of 10 home gardens in the Amis community of ‘Atolan, Taitung. Among them, we select 4 cases for a detailed demonstration of the used species and related techniques. Different choices reflect the informants’ botanical practice and memory of the landscape, which show their preferences and different life processes. We can see the co-relative contextual data in their life histories connected with these plants. The knowledge and exchange of the edible wild plants reveal the co-existence of elements from adaptive transmission passed down from generation to generation and also from modern agriculture, and the stressed value of sharing food and seeds among age group members and relatives is entangled with these phenomena. The everydayness and high productivity make the edible wild plants invisible and difficult to notice. At the same time, this abundance is worth discussing with anthropological exchange theory on affluent society. With the sophisticated techniques of maintaining the gardens with certain amounts of edible wild plants in different seasons, the Amis people in ‘Atolan demonstrate their idea of the good life in our contemporary world. With this practice, they also manage to resist full monetarization and the mass industrialization of gardening by the outside world. In this comparative study on indigenous local traditional ecological knowledge which stresses practice and oral transmission, we gain a deeper understanding of the nature of this particular knowledge and its special characteristics. The case of the edible wild plants of the Amis reflects a kind of contemporary indigenous knowledge in Taiwan that highlights a new perspective concerning the dynamics and practices of a locally-based traditional ecological knowledge system. This new perspective should be considered by researchers so that we can avoid the misinterpretation of this rich indigenous environmental knowledge. In addition, we can make the application of this knowledge possible in some domains of practice such as the development of indigenous areas, official ethnic education, and the activities of cultural transmission of the tribal communities. In this case, we can also see how the Amis people are good at applying their ecological knowledge in manipulating biological and cultural materials for living with resilience and sociality. Here we articulate an understanding of edible wild plants and their co-existence with human beings through the processes of production, exchange, and consumption, and try to clarify the dialectical relationships between these particular plants and the people.