Negotiating borderlands:Bird’s Nest Business, Sound Technology, Heritage Landscape,in Penang, Malaysia

• Main Authors: Yu-An Kuo, 郭育安
• Other Authors: Po-Yi Hung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/paf7db

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 地理環境資源學研究所 === 106 === Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia was inscribed an UNESCO world cultural heritage sites in 2008. However, this honor was belied by various issues, with swiftlet framing being one of the trickiest. Swiftlet are a species of birds that can use their saliva to make nest in humans’ homes. These birds’ nest can be cooked into a soup considered a delicacy and a lucrative business in Chinese food culture. The Chinese Malaysian community in Penang started to farm swiftlets beginning in the 1990s, due to the numerous old houses in Penang being perfect for swiftlets. In 2008, when Georgetown became a cultural heritage site, controversies soon arose over bird farming in this city. Ultimately, in order to improve the city for both locals and tourist alike, as well as to preserve the old homes, swiftlet farming was made illegal. Using 4 months of fieldwork, interviews and local archives, my research use the lens of animal geography to illustrate how sound technology creates and extends the tensions of borderlands. Discussing nature and culture, humans and animals, wild and domestication, these binaries are blurred and usually coexist in borderlands. This work give provides a way to rethink how human-animal borderlands renew the local imagination for world cultural heritage and shape the meaning of heritage construction within daily practices. I attempt to explain that borderlands are not only blurred spaces between humans and animals. Borderlands are leveled and multi-meaning, always supported by regions, knowledgeable conditions and daily practices, and embedding the complementary role of transnational economic production spaces.