EASC Colloquium: Enumerating Ethnicities: The Role of Numbers in Taiwanese Bodies and Body-Politics

Jennifer A. Liu explores how notions of ethnicity in Taiwan are configured in relation to numbers in a talk at Indiana University.

This talk explores how notions of ethnicity in Taiwan are configured in relation to numbers. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Taiwan, it examines the polyvalent capacities of enumerative technologies in both the production of ethnic identities and claims to representative justice. Critically historicizing the manner in which Aborigines in Taiwan have been, and continue to be, constructed as objects and subjects of scientific knowledge production through technologies of measuring, this paper examines the genetic claim made by some Taiwanese to be thirteen percent Aborigine. Numbers and techniques of measuring are used ostensibly to know the Aborigines, but they are also used in the construction of a genetically unique Taiwanese identity made through a measured Aboriginal genetic linkage.

Jennifer A. Liu is the Freeman Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Department of History and the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley—University of California, San Francisco, Joint Program in Medical Anthropology. She has conducted field research in Taiwan and California on stem cell research and bioethics. Her current research focuses on biomedical technologies, biobanks, and ethics, with a specific interest in how biological collections articulate with notions of identity and ethnicity.