Becoming indigenous : the making of the politics of nature and indigeneity in two Atayal villages of Taiwan

• Main Author: Hsiao, Huei-Chung
• Published: Lancaster University 2011
• Subjects: 305.89925
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.577676

This study explores the construction of indigeneity in two indigenous villages of Taiwan and how it has been intertwined with environmental politics since the end of the Second World War. Drawing on Stuart Hall's idea of articulation (1996) and Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality (1991), I develop a theoretical framework that regards the construction of indigeneity as a continuous and historically inflected process, and treats environmental politics as a complex dynamics among various 'regimes of ecology', i.e. regimes of government that aim to govern the relations between humans and the environment. The data analysed include government documents, interviews with scholars and governmental officials, and ethnographic data from and archive materials about two indigenous villages, Cinsbu and Hsinkuang. Starting with the Japanese occupation of 1895-1945 and continuing until the early 1990s when the process of political democratisation officially began, the dominant regimes of ecology in Taiwan were exploitative and coercive in nature. One crucial effect of this in Cinsbu and Hsinkuang was the articulation of resistant indigeneity, a product of the villagers' active engagement with these colonial regimes of ecology and the critical ideas and actions that were developed to challenge them. Since the early 1990s, 'neoliberal ecology', a set of regimes of ecology that is more liberating and characterised by more commercialised human-nature relationships, has prevailed. In Cinsbu and Hsinkuang, such a shift from colonial to neoliberal ecology has been manifested mainly through the promotion of tourism and community-based natural resources management by the state, tourism industry, professionals, local indigenous villagers and environmentalists. As a result, a more complex politics of indigeneity and nature, rather than one simply of domination and resistance, has developed, both between the villagers and the state and within the indigenous communities.