Aboriginal Fractions: Enumerating Identity in Taiwan

Abstract

Notions of identity in Taiwan are configured in relation to numbers. I examine the polyvalent capacities of enumerative technologies in both the production of ethnic identities and claims to political representation and justice. By critically historicizing the manner in which Aborigines in Taiwan have been, and continue to be, constructed as objects and subjects of scientific knowledge production through technologies of measuring, I examine the genetic claim made by some Taiwanese to be “fractionally” Aboriginal. Numbers and techniques of measuring are used ostensibly to know the Aborigines, but they are also used to construct a genetically unique Taiwanese identity and to incorporate the Aborigines within projects of democratic governance. Technologies of enumeration thus serve within multiple, and sometimes contradictory, projects of representation and knowledge production.

Key words:

• Aborigines
• democracy
• identity
• numbers
• Taiwan

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful to Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Adia Benton, Crystal Biruk, and Esra Ozkan for their inspiration and criticism, as well as to Lenore Manderson and three anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments. Research and writing were generously supported by fellowships from the Freeman Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Center for Chinese Studies and the Science and Technology Studies Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Notes

KMT here refers to the Kuomintang, currently the ruling one of two major political parties in Taiwan. I use the Wade-Giles Romanization here because this is the conventional usage.

http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2010/04/openish-thread-why-arent-taiwanese-americans-ethnically-chinese, accessed November 29, 2010. Although I use fractions and percentages interchangeably in this article, Stephanie's quotation here suggests an important distinction. Here, the use of a fraction (one-eighth) seems to underscore a genealogical mode, while the use of a percentage (78) suggests a numerical mode, of reckoning kinship and descent.

http://library.jax.org/archives/personal_papers/chai.html, accessed December 22, 2010.

This was in addition to other tests, including IQ, all of which sought to measure and classify in one way or another.

This is not explicitly a genetic study but rather one of enzymatic action. However, it points to an underlying ethno-biological difference, and clearly articulates the assumptions of Aborigines as distinct groups:

• It was found that Taiwanese aborigines, who are belong to the Malayo-Polynesia group, are more susceptible to alcohol abuse than ethnic Han Chinese. In the 1990s a higher prevalence of alcoholism in aborigines was reported (44.2%–55.2%). Viral infections and alcohol consumption play important roles in the development of chronic liver diseases in Taiwanese aborigines. Therefore, ALD is an important issue for aborigines in Taiwan. (Chen et al. 2011:1064).

This construction of otherness in order to understand the whole of humanity is nothing new in scientific and anthropological knowledge production. Indeed, anthropology finds its own history in complicity with colonial administrations, and its early models of a teleological progression of human existence from savage to civilized (i.e. Euro-American) long positioned so-called primitive populations as sites for the modeling of pre-civilized humans. While I believe that the discipline's own crisis, self-critique, and subsequent self-reflexivity now make it uniquely positioned to be especially sensitive to representational and knowledge producing practices and politics, it is not surprising that many indigenous communities continue to view anthropologists and other “experts” with suspicion and resentment. Indeed, Aborigines in Taiwan have begun to resist their generic conscription in both scientific and specific political projects.

Taiwan Constitution. http://English.president.gov.tw/Default.sapx?tabid=1037#10, accessed December 27, 2010.