Settler Democracy: Indigenous Self-Sufficiency and the Limits of Participation in Taiwan

Abstract

This dissertation examines the rise of seemingly progressive programs of participatory and community-centered technological innovation in Taiwan. In sectors from public health to environmental sustainability, collaborative innovation—on devices from smart watches to precision agriculture technologies—is increasingly being offered up to rectify longstanding inequalities faced by the country’s Indigenous communities. Yet these projects—not because of cunning or corruption, but simply due to their optimistic portrayal of bottom-up collaboration—can mask disagreements about what constitutes human health or environmental well-being in the first place. My dissertation—contributing to medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, critical design studies, and global Indigenous studies—examines two such cases of participation among Amis communities in eastern Taiwan. In public health, government bureaucrats are collaborating with elders to produce new Indigenous-friendly health education apps and smart health systems, in hopes of reducing a 10-year Indigenous life expectancy gap in the country; meanwhile, in agriculture, government researchers have urged Indigenous farmers to collaborate on new agricultural technologies to mitigate climate challenges and bolster crop yields. Through 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation makes two core arguments. First, far from just a tool of community engagement, participation represents a new form of global Indigenous governance that nuances the study of contemporary settler-colonialism. Participation as government policy has produced new ways of evaluating and tabulating the cooperation of Indigenous communities with state power, exceeding the condition of global Indigenous governance that scholars have called “recognition politics.” Second, “self-sufficiency” (zijizizu) is emerging as a controversial ethical value in geopolitically threatened Taiwan. While the Taiwanese government invests in collaborative technology innovation to pursue national self-sufficiency, measured through increased life expectancies and crop yields, Amis communities are advancing alternative notions of long-term, Indigenous self-sufficiency, with holistic notions of human and environmental health at their center. I interrogate how Amis Indigenous communities insist that systemic issues like economic inequalities, lack of health resources, and severed land relations well exceed the scope of inclusive design practices. Contesting design thinking, they tactically seize the resources and civic spaces introduced by policies to steward new institutions that accord with their needs.