Sci-Tech Asia Webinar

Nature in Comparative Perspective: Environmental Perceptions among Hong Kong Residents and Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples

Date

Apr 20 2023

Time

TIME ZONE: Lisbon Time
10:00 am – 11:30 am

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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