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In this essay, I will describe the traditional social organisation of the Amis peoples of Taiwan which previous ethnographers have portrayed as consisting of a matrilineal clan‐based system conjoined with a residential‐based male age‐set/grade system. Following David Schneider's critique of ‘kinship’ cross‐culturally and the ‘new kinship studies' which his work inspired, I will attempt a reinterpretation of overall Amis social organisation as instead a total kinship‐based system comprised of a paternal/fraternal system which integrates and encompasses the multiplicity of maternal‐focused houses constitutive of village communities. Rather than being a system composed of kinship and non‐kinship parts, I argue that Amis social organisation is comprehensively kinship‐based. Moreover, I shall describe how through paternal/fraternal relations generated by rites of male initiation and rebirth this overall integration of diverse matrifocal units is achieved. In the first section, I will describe the structure of the paternal/fraternal initiatory system. In the following section, I will draw upon the major anthropological theories of initiation including rites of passage and the literature on sacrifice to describe numerous aspects of initiation activities, showing how the classificatory father‐son and elder‐younger‐brother relations between and within the initiation sets are explicitly represented by the concepts and practices of the Amis.

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This paper examines how the Amis, the largest indigenous community in Taiwan, draw on their Catholic faith to understand what it means to be Taiwanese. For over a century, the Amis were treated as marginalised citizens by the Japanese colonial government and the Han-Chinese Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo. Their predicament changed when political priorities shifted from cultural assimilation to multiculturalism after 1987. Successive Taiwanese governments since then have actively sought to incorporate indigenous culture as a core part of Taiwanese identity. Focusing on how the Amis intertwined their adopted Catholic notions and practices with pre-Christian ideas, social structure, and rituals, this paper demonstrates the ways in which the Amis carve out a place for themselves in wider Taiwanese society. It adds to ongoing discussions about the relationship between conversion and cultural transformation in Oceania by arguing that Catholicism empowered the Amis to deepen their sense of belonging to the island republic and, for the first time, assert themselves fully as Taiwanese.