中華心理衛生協會

 Cultural care means care should be provided in a way that is sensitive and reflects the cultural background of the care recipients. For some of its proponents, cultural care was a service model for the nursing profession. However, caring involves more than the providers and recipients. Care is socially organized by power relations that reflect the worldviews of the privileged groups while those of the marginalized groups are excluded. For indigenous people, the care tends to reflect the world of their colonizers. Therefore, for authors of this special issue, cultural care is a conceptual device to deconstruct the colonial discourse of long term care by the state, offering an alternative discourse that demands the indigenous worldview to be centered in the daily practices of long term care. To make indigenous culture visible in the analysis, the authors of three articles in this issue used ethnography to present the native point of view of members of Taiwan's indigenous community. What they have in common is their goal of meeting the challenge of incorporating indigenous knowledge and the perspective of the local culture into meaningful care practices to benefit the local people. However, they diverge on two issues. The first one is how indigenous culture is studied and represented. Some studied culture in participants' daily activities, while the others assumed traditions as the essence of culture, such as gaga is the tradition of Atayal culture. The second issue is the power relations that the authors aimed to reveal vary according to the field they chose to focus on.