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This study explores the construction of indigeneity in two indigenous villages of Taiwan and how it has been intertwined with environmental politics since the end of the Second World War. Drawing on Stuart Hall's idea of articulation (1996) and Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality (1991), I develop a theoretical framework that regards the construction of indigeneity as a continuous and historically inflected process, and treats environmental politics as a complex dynamics among various 'regimes of ecology', i.e. regimes of government that aim to govern the relations between humans and the environment. The data analysed include government documents, interviews with scholars and governmental officials, and ethnographic data from and archive materials about two indigenous villages, Cinsbu and Hsinkuang. Starting with the Japanese occupation of 1895-1945 and continuing until the early 1990s when the process of political democratisation officially began, the dominant regimes of ecology in Taiwan were exploitative and coercive in nature. One crucial effect of this in Cinsbu and Hsinkuang was the articulation of resistant indigeneity, a product of the villagers' active engagement with these colonial regimes of ecology and the critical ideas and actions that were developed to challenge them. Since the early 1990s, 'neoliberal ecology', a set of regimes of ecology that is more liberating and characterised by more commercialised human-nature relationships, has prevailed. In Cinsbu and Hsinkuang, such a shift from colonial to neoliberal ecology has been manifested mainly through the promotion of tourism and community-based natural resources management by the state, tourism industry, professionals, local indigenous villagers and environmentalists. As a result, a more complex politics of indigeneity and nature, rather than one simply of domination and resistance, has developed, both between the villagers and the state and within the indigenous communities.

This thesis provides a genealogical account of ‘Taiwanese’ as a national identity. Genealogy is a way of writing a history of the present that de-familiarises us from what we now take for granted by revealing in detail how things were otherwise. As argued in this thesis, Taiwanese identity, in ontological terms, exists only in discourse. It is a way of talking and doing things relative to what sort of people the Taiwanese are; every word and action contributes to the idea that there is such a thing as ‘Taiwanese-ness’ and helps to substantialise the qualities/features attached to it. This thesis conceptualises Taiwanese identity as having no fixed, essential, or permanent identity; rather, it is formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways people talk and act. This thesis investigates various social practices/events in post-authoritarian Taiwan that incited people to talk about Taiwanese-ness. Certain things, with different positions, forms and organisations, were said and done, while other alternatives disappeared or were omitted and repressed. With various power relations, different discourses mutually intersected, interacted and competed. The social practices/events selected in this thesis include the production of knowledge, the publication of a comic book, an election campaign, and a political demonstration. It is crucially noted that the social practices/events analysed in this thesis are just a few of the numerous events that occur periodically or repeatedly. This thesis, in sum, is an attempt to understand how various social practices/events enable or disable certain ways through which people make sense of their past and their political lives, thereby coming to terms with their belongings, their allegiances, and their situated-ness. Taiwanese-ness is spoken of, not only literally but also symbolically, and it is this process of being ‘spoken of’ that constitutes the Taiwanese-ness – the birth of the ‘Taiwanese’.