“Someone Else's Land is Our Garden!”: Risky Labor in Taipei's Indigenous Food Boom

Abstract

In recent years, Taiwan has seen a surge of interest in the foodways of indigenous Austronesian people. Public and scholarly discourse tends to focus on either indigenous foodways' cultural significance or the healthiness of food items eaten by indigenous people. These two dominant perspectives, however, have obfuscated the issue of labor. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an urban indigenous community in the Taipei region, this article addresses what I call risky labor behind the maintenance of indigenous foodways today, especially in urban contexts where many indigenous people have settled over the last forty years. It discusses two forms of risky labor: (1) the gendered labor of urban indigenous women who acquire food items by encroaching upon state and private properties and (2) the intellectual labor of urban indigenous people who share knowledge about indigenous foodways with nonindigenous Han Chinese urbanites.