Guest Lecture, Rosa Enn, PhD candidate, University of Vienna, Austria, Department of
Social and Cultural Anthropology:
The impacts of
modernity on Orchid Island’s Tao people
The people
living on remote islands have to deal with the advantages and disadvantages of their geographical isolation. The
indigenous Tao of Orchid Island (Lanyu) have preserved their cultural
traditions much more effectively than perhaps any of
the indigenous groups on Taiwan, they were not influenced
by mainstream Han Chinese society to the same extent as the other indigenous communities. However, the impact of modernity, such as rising tourism and the
influences from the outside world have had far-reaching consequences for their
traditional lifestyle and social
structures.
The
Tao have had to deal with various forms of
injustice ever since Taiwan’s period of martial law. The remote location of
their homeland from Taiwan became of great interest to the government in the
1970s. The appropriation of land on Orchid Island was to be used to deposit
nuclear waste and that solved the government’s problem of finding a convenient
and appropriate storage site. The Tao were neither informed nor included in the
decision-making processes regarding this undertaking. Since 1982, 100,000 barrels of toxic
waste from Taiwan’s three nuclear power plants were dumped on
Orchid Island for intermediate storage.
The empowerment
movement
succeeded in stopping the delivery of nuclear waste barrels
to Orchid Island in 1996. In addition, the islanders managed to obtain monetary
compensation and social welfare. However,
the Tao strongly depend on these compensation benefits nowadays. Due to having
the dumpsite for more than 30 years and enjoying the respective compensation,
the people had no incentive to develop a self-sufficient and
sustainable economy in order to create income
possibilities and, therefore, the
dependency on monetary compensation remains unsolved.
This anthropological
research deals with governance and environmental justice,
indigenous peoples’ rights and empowerment in terms of social
inclusion and participation in political and environmental decision-making. Furthermore,
it looks at the transformation of ethnicity due to the influence of modernity and how the indigenous peoples
interact with the issue of changing their way of life, as well as the representation of gender in ethnographic
research.
CV
Rosa Enn was born in Salzburg/Austria. She lives in Taipei and Vienna,
where she is enrolled in a PhD program of the University of Vienna at the Institute
of Social Anthropology. Her fields of expertise are indigenous peoples with
regard to their social, cultural, and legal positions within national and
international discourses, human rights, and various forms of governance. In her PhD she
develops methods, together with indigenous peoples, NGOs, governmental, and
international institutions, to implement environmental justice strategies among
indigenous communities in Taiwan who live in remote areas and are exposed to
ecological colonialism. She
has conducted several field researches in Taiwan and Brazil. Beside her studies, she
supports NGOs in Taiwan and Switzerland as a scientific researcher.
