Sci-Tech Asia Webinar
Nature in Comparative Perspective: Environmental Perceptions among Hong Kong Residents and Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples
Webinar Description
Indigenous peoples and urban residents are often considered to have incompatible worldviews. This presentation examines this assumption by demonstrating data collected during fieldwork in indigenous settlements in Eastern Taiwan and data from the presenter’s earlier fieldwork in Hong Kong. This study focuses on people’s discourses and practices regarding human-non-human relations and finds that interlocutors in both places show many similarities. Upon discovering flexibilities beyond rigid and dualistic labels, this presentation argues that such ethnographic data won’t be aptly understood unless analysed from a perspective transcending the boundary between ethnic groups, geographical areas, and rural-urban dichotomy.
Speaker
Hao-Tzu HO is an assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of Development Studies at the National Chengchi University. She had done research on agricultural activism in Hong Kong, examining how global local food activism is indigenised (a phenomenon she theorises as ‘cosmopolitan locavorism’). She also conducted fieldwork in indigenous settlements in Taiwan. She focused on discourses and practices related to human-nature relationships. Her research interests include environmental anthropology, anthropology of the city, anthropology of emotion/ feeling, and ethnographic methods.
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Sci-Tech Asia Webinar Series
Our Webinar series features scholars from all over the world sharing their on-going research on topics at the intersection between science, technology, and society (STS) in the 21st century. Our virtual seminars are hosted via Zoom and live-streamed via our social media.
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