Abstract
This research focuses on the organic agriculture project implemented in an indigenous Bunun Village in the central mountain area in Taiwan, with an attempt to analyze the factors that determines the rise and fall of the project, and the native’s point of view which locals employ to interpret the notion of organic agriculture. While organic agriculture reached the village as a new knowledge strange to the locals, the distance between transmitting paths of this new knowledge and the local living context determines the attitude people hold toward it. The existed local social network serves as one of the transmitting paths as the new knowledge enters the community. We may tell from the direction of knowledge transmission that kinship still frames the network of interpersonal relations, since the principles to organize the local Presbyterian Church reinforce both the geographical and blood relationships interactively, even with the local clan system being blurred by changes on household pattern. The Presbyterian Church itself as a platform of public affairs as well serves as the primary and faster path to spread new knowledge over the community. The locals furthermore use Christian faith as a tool on the level of morality to recognize, interpret, then to accept the new agriculture knowledge into local worldview. Despite acceptance of organic agriculture on the moral level through Christian faith, the organic agriculture project faces difficulty on the practice level for a gap of knowledge patterns between local peasants holding a practice-first knowledge pattern, and the non-local lecturers holding a discourse-first knowledge pattern. On the other hand, fight over leadership between local and non-local leaders also casts impact on the future of the project. Local people make choice of leaders to follow according to their/his personal capacity shown, which manifests the flexible and pragmatic recognition principle of Bunun leadership.