In line with the global trend of ‘Museumification’ and ‘Disneyification’,
representing Aboriginal peoples and Aboriginal heritage has become a global phenomenon. In this trend, ‘cultural villages’ representing disparate strands of subjects held together by the motif of ‘village’ contain the significance in presenting Aboriginal heritage. From the perspective of sensuous presentation, a more comprehensive approach for cultural representation is to provide visitors with the sensuous complexity and thereby maintain a rich and prolific world. In this sense,
sights, touch, smells, and sounds are all important to comprise visitors’ perceived ‘sensescape’ as a whole. Such comprehensive presentation of various senses is particularly significant for representing Aboriginal architectural heritage because architecture is closely related to ‘smellscape’, ‘soundscape’ and the tactile sensation which is embedded in everyday life and in memory. In the 1980s two forms of cultural village were developed in Taiwan to represent Aboriginal architectural
heritage. One is the Formosan Aboriginal Cultural Village (FACV) established by a private tourist enterprise; the other is the Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Park (TIPCP) developed by governmental department. From the perspective of sensuous presentation, this research finds that in the TIPCP and FACV the visual sense still plays the dominant role, while non-visual senses including touch, smell and sound
appear to be relatively rarely invoked. The absence of the tactile, olfactory and auditory presentation in the TIPCP gave it an atmosphere of ‘forlorn ruins’ without vivid life content. This reflected the phenomenon of ‘Museumification’ through which Taiwan’s Aboriginal architectural heritage was represented as static and frozen. On
the other hand, the neat interior display of the replicated houses and garden in the FACV created a ‘fairyland’ atmosphere. This theme-park style representation reflected the phenomenon of ‘Disneyfication’ and reconstructed synthetic Aboriginal villages by a surrealistic combination of history, myth, reality and fantasy. This research thus concludes that the representation in the two sites was not authentic in terms of visual
and non-visual presentation.