Visual culture, well-being, and storytelling in Indigenous Taiwan

This article investigates how storytelling operates as a constitutive mechanism of well-being in Indigenous communities in Taiwan. Rather than approaching well-being through biomedical or individualistic frameworks, the study conceptualizes it as a culturally organized and collectively practiced process sustained by narrative, embodiment, and place. Theoretically, the article integrates narrative identity, cultural sustainability, and embodied heritage to advance the notion of storied well-being, whereby care, memory, and identity are coherently structured through storytelling practices embedded in everyday life. Methodologically, the study employs a decolonial, Indigenous-centered qualitative design that combines participant observation, narrative analysis, material culture analysis, and institutional document review. Empirical research was conducted across Indigenous museums, community workshops, cultural health stations, and village settings in Taiwan. Analysis foregrounds Indigenous epistemologies and proceeds through contextual grounding, relational mapping of practices and infrastructures, and interpretation attentive to embodied and place-based forms of knowledge. Primary analytical depth is given to three sites: the Wulai Atayal Museum, the Bunun Cultural Museum, and community workshops in Wanrong Township, each selected because it foregrounds a distinct modality of storied well-being: tactile museum pedagogy, land-based experiential transmission, and community craft practice. The remaining sites provide comparative context. The findings demonstrate that storytelling, enacted through tactile museum practices, craft pedagogy, land-based narratives, ritual activity, and Indigenous media, transforms visual and material culture into psychosocial resources that sustain intergenerational continuity, collective identity, and culturally intelligible forms of care. By theorizing storytelling as the architecture of well-being, the article contributes to interdisciplinary debates on Indigenous heritage, narrative theory, and culturally sustainable approaches to health and resilience in postcolonial contexts.