| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 地理環境資源學研究所 === 105 === Relationship between cash crop plantation and indigenous people is contested within
recent development of alternative food production and consumption. Many studies have suggested that when indigenous people planted foreign commodity crops, it caused social and cultural impacts on the tribe. However, some studies also show that the new cultivation of the foreign economic crops also provided new opportunities for the development of the indigenous people.
In this study, I used tea, which is seldom seen as part of the indigenous people’s traditional culture, to discuss the dynamics among tea, mountain agriculture, and an indigenous group called Atayal in Lishan, Taiwan. I aim to identify how the indigenous people re-position themselves in the changing tea market and tea production by studying their multiple and complex relationship among different groups of tea farmers, tea merchants, tea makers, and domestic and foreign investors.
Drawing primarily upon semi-structured interviews and participant observations with the indigenous tea farmers, domestic and foreign investors, and consumers, this research enquires into the connection between nature and indigeneity of tea industry.
Tea is usually considered as one of the cultural symbols of Han Chinese, and a representative agricultural product in Taiwan. With the development of mountain agriculture, the high mountain tea industry gradually replaced the fruit industry, and became one of the main economic activities of the indigenous people in Taiwan.
My analytic approach is based on political ecologist understanding of indigeneity with the concept of articulation. Through my analysis, the indigenous people have been in struggles over their relationship with the market, the state, recent environmental governance, and their own cultural identity. Therefore, the changing meanings of indigeneity have been embodied and articulated through the dynamic processes of tea industry.
I argue that indigeneity is not simply a matter of ethnicity, but rather a process of the market economy. In addition, indigeneity that emerged across different scales are different from the national imagination. In the social and cultural aspects, the articulation of indigeneity also deepen the identity, while changing the class and social relations in the tribal.
By viewing tea on the economic crop, the boundaries of ethnic groups are formed by the market. The emergence of indigeneity seems to reinforce the ethnic boundaries between the indigenous people and the Han people. Nevertheless, the emergence of indigeneity has been in fact simultaneously existed with contradictories. It shows a process of translocal assemblage, and illustrates the limitations of articulation. Although the ambiguities of indigeneity exist between tea and Indigenous peoples at different scales, cross-border working and the combination of heterogeneous elements make it possible to develop tea industry.
For those indigenous people who practice mountain agriculture for their livelihoods in my study, the process of value creation of the market economy, paradoxically, has also strengthened the indigenous people’s recognition of land in the tea marketing. Through the discussion of indigeneity, this research argues that the binary opposition between the indigenous people and Han people, as well as the political correctness of an essentialized indigenous culture should be re-examined.
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