International Cultural Studies Capstone

Spring 2009 Speaker Series

INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL STUDIES CERTIFICATE PROGRAM

CAPSTONE: “People, River, and Place under Watershed Management: Modern Resource Discourses and Indigenous Testimonies”

Da-Wei Kuan
Geography Department, UHM
Advisor: Jon Goss
Geography Department, UHM

Resource management is fundamentally a politics of knowledge. It involves deciding who is knowledgeable, whose knowledge is legitimate, and the ways in which “resources” should be utilized and “problems” should be solved. Using the case of watershed management in Taiwan, I reveal the processes through which the knowledge of indigenous people’s relation to the environment is constructed and indigenous dis/knowledge is represented. I analyze the resource management discourses in Japanese during three periods: the colonial era (1890s~1940s), the era of modernization (1940s~1990s), and the post-modern era (after 1990s). I explore three questions: 1) How is watershed management rationalized in the resource discourses occurred in this era ? 2) How are rivers, indigenous people, placed and their relations represented in the discourses? 3) What are indigenous people’s perspectives on resource management? Using archival research and the 14-month ethnographical study I conducted in Mariqwan Village, an Atayal indigenous community located in the watershed of Shih-Men Reservoir in Taiwan, I argue that many problems of the watershed management regime, such as indigenous land over-utilization and illegal logging have been constructed by the ideological discourses of resource management which exclude or misappropriate indigenous knowledge.

Date: Wednesday, January 28th
Time: 12 pm – 1:20pm
Place: Burns Hall Room 2118

Sponsored by:
The UHM/EWC International Cultural Studies Program
Telephone: 808-944-7593
Fax: 808-944-7070
Office: Burns Hall #2069
Email:culture@hawaii.edu Website: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~culture

Event Sponsor
International Cultural Studies, Manoa Campus

More Information
Program Manager: Patty Harris, 808-944-7593, culture@hawaii.edu, http://www2.hawaii.edu/~culture/

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