| Indigenous peoples in Taiwan are usually associated with the mountain and forest in the popular imagination, and even in discourse. By revealing the importance of the river as a resource and the philosophy of "through-ness" that originates in the intimate human-river relations in the case of Marqwang, a sub-group of Atayal indigenous people, this dissertation challenges this taken-for-granted image. At the same time it challenges the resource management regime that manages nature and people through visualized order and fixed boundaries established over the mountain landscape. This dissertation includes three parts: first, it reviews the process through which the state imposes spatial order on the mountain for the management of water resource in different historical eras, points out the ideological construction of the "problem" of watershed management, and explicates the power relations behind its practices; second, by recording traditional chanting, oral history and contemporary life experiences in Marqwang, this dissertation reveals how the philosophy of flow or "through-ness" informs Marqwang people's understanding of the world and their responses to the circumstances they are facing; third, this dissertation compares the human-river relations from Marqwang people and the states' perspectives, and reveals the multiple spatiality and fluidities of indigenous ecological knowledge. In conclusion, this dissertation suggests a new form of the river-based resource management, based upon the preservation of social relations of reciprocity and "flow" of resources, instead of simply managing the landscape through fixed boundaries and categorical restrictions. |
