into the Pacifi c as far as the Solomon Islands and the Marianas. Subsequent migrations carried them to Madagascar, Hawaii, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and fi nally Aotearoa (New Zealand) more than eight hundred years ago. The Fowler Museum exhibition explores the cultures of the descendants of these peoples through their visual arts. The arts of all Austronesian peoples have, of course, been evolving for fi ve thousand years since their original development in Taiwan, and in many cases a very long gap separates the date of fi rst settlement from the time for which we have more detailed information about the styles of art being produced. In many places the migrants encountered and mixed with existing populations of very different peoples, such as the Papuan inhabitants of New Guinea. In their new homelands, their cultures also borrowed selectively from foreign sources, such as the Hindu and Buddhist religions that the ancient Javanese adopted from India. Although the ideas explored in the exhibition took root in the prehistoric past, most of the works of art on view were made in the last two hundred years and therefore refl ect a variety of such accumulated infl uences. Viewers may nevertheless discern among them repeated themes that suggest a common heritage linking the cultural “cousins” in the Austronesian family. These themes recur throughout the eight geographic and cultural regions into which the exhibition is divided. THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF TAIWAN These are the Austronesians who stayed at home. Nine of the ten primary subdivisions of the Austronesian language family never left Taiwan—meaning that nearly all of the twelve hundred languages that developed over the course of Austronesian migration left Taiwan as a single language before it began to branch. In Taiwan some twenty groups of diverse indigenous peoples lived in independent villages linked by trade, intermarriage, and shifting alliances. Today, after centuries of immigration 94 by Han Chinese, Taiwan’s indigenous peoples constitute just two percent of the island’s population. In recent decades this tiny minority has engaged in various efforts to gain recognition, land rights, and selfdetermination. Taiwan’s temperate climate required clothing and shelter, and these became the major forms of artistic expression among the indigenous peoples. A magnifi cent pair of architectural panels (fi g. 2) represents the Fowler Museum’s extraordinary collection of rare material from the Paiwan and other groups. The pairing of male and female images is one of the recurring themes in the exhibition, evoking Austronesian concepts of dualism and reciprocity. The panels also depict lineage ancestors—another theme that recurs throughout the exhibition and testifi es to the Austronesian preoccupation with precedence and progeny under the circumstances of a rapidly expanding and hierarchically organized migratory population. To know your ancestors was to know the roots of your authority when settling new lands. Ancestor images also grace a canoe of the Yami peoples (fi g. 1), the inhabitants of Botel Tobago Island off of Taiwan’s southeastern coast. FIG. 4 (below): Ancestor fi gures, adu zatua. North Nias, Indonesia. Collected before 1907. Wood, plant fi ber. W: 68.6 cm. Gift of the Wellcome Trust, Fowler Museum at UCLA, inv. X65.5679. Image © courtesy of the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Photo: Don Cole, 2014. FIG. 5 (right): Memorial fi gure. Bahau, Mahakam River, East Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia. 19th or early 20th century. Wood. H: 112.3 cm. The Jerome L. Joss Collection, Fowler Museum at UCLA, inv. X86.3133. Image © courtesy of the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Photo: Don Cole, 2014. THE PHILIPPINES The Philippines were the fi rst landing point of Austronesian voyagers sailing beyond Taiwan. Today their descendants have diversifi ed to inhabit highly varied local environments throughout the archipelago. Those living in the highlands of northern Luzon are famous for their distinctive arts, including carved wooden fi gures and architectural elements, baskets, and handwoven cloth. To the south, in Mindanao and the Sulu Sea region, the arts came under Islamic infl uence from the sultanate of Brunei after the fourteenth century. A boat-shaped funerary marker from the Bajau peoples of the Sulu Sea (fi g. 3) shows a distinctively Islamic style of carving but at the same time represents much older Austronesian ideas about the souls of the deceased journeying to the afterlife by boat. This idea is a potent one for many Austronesian peoples given their history as maritime migrants, but for none more so than the Bajau, who lived their entire lives afl oat on the sea and rarely came ashore until they were buried in land-bound cemeteries. ART on view
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