Spears or Umbrellas? Dance and Sovereign Sensibility in an Indigenous Taiwanese Community

This article employs the notions of density and scale to discuss how musical performances achieve their communicative effects. Describing a dispute over props used for the kulakul, an ‘amis (Taiwanese Indigenous) dance that functions as sovereign assertion, I show how the choice of umbrellas versus spears organized the dense set of contexts that the dance indexed in intercultural settings. These contexts, in turn, established the scale at which performances functioned, producing (or failing to produce) sovereign sensibility. Reflecting on how the dispute reveals the stakes in a seemingly aesthetic choice, I argue that musical practices, such as dance, afford a means to negotiate competing facets of sovereignty. Finally, the article suggests that attention to scale could be a useful addition to ethnomusicological toolkits.