Written by Aaron Su.
Photo courtesy of the author.
“Ok, Ms. Pacidal, why don’t you smile a little bit as you whisk the dough?” a care worker (照服員zhaofuyuan) says with a smile at the Meiwan Cultural Health Station as she walks around the room with her camera, snapping pictures of elders’ daily activities. “Wow—this cookie turned out to look like the shape of Taiwan! Let’s take a picture!… Now, everybody, let’s all get together and take a big group photo at the front of the room, with our best smiles, so that we can remember today’s activities. Ready? 3-2-1!”
As an anthropologist researching Indigenous health in Taiwan, I spent much of my time at Cultural Health Stations like these: local public health institutions in Indigenous communities that have exploded in number—from 80 to 440—in just the past decade alone. In Taiwan, Amis/Pangcah communities (like those of Ms. Pacidal) and other Indigenous groups have historically endured a 10-year life expectancy gap, the result of over four centuries of colonial violence, displacement, impoverishment, and domination. Today’s liberal multicultural democracy, while still for the most part administered by Han settlers, has dedicated itself to historical and transitional justice work that includes exploring pathways to Indigenous justice.
Cultural Health Stations (文化健康站wenhua jiankang zhan) embody this commitment to reparative policymaking in the public health sector. Often located in a central gathering point or events centre in an Indigenous community (部落buluo), Cultural Health Stations typically offer cultural programming and health services to Indigenous elders every weekday morning, starting with a health check-up and moving into physical exercises, dances, or cultural activities that attempt to work on Indigenous cultural and physical health. Leaders of these Stations often proclaimed to me, using an adaptation of a Chinese idiom, that these policies and initiatives aimed to deliver “down-to-earth” care (接地氣jiediqi) that was tailored to the specific needs of local Indigenous communities (因族因地制宜yinzu yindizhiyi). Cultural Health Stations exemplify what scholars of Indigenous health have named as attempts to “do good” by settlers—often to rectify life expectancy gaps or other health inequalities while nonetheless preserving the fundamental relations of power at hand.
While much of my writing has been dedicated to analysing the experiences of Amis elders, the viewpoints of health bureaucrats, and even the emerging medical technologies that are used and tested out in these spaces, a persistent part of my daily ethnographic research at Cultural Health Stations involved witnessing, or taking part in, group photos (合照hezhao). I became fascinated not just in health policy, but what role these everyday smiles and photographs played in maintaining the smooth operation of these institutions.
Let us return, for example, to the Meiwan Cultural Health Station care worker. Nearly every day, she would walk around the space with her phone camera out, ready to snap pictures of elders engaging in exercises, weaving baskets, or having conversations. Some photographs, like what foods were made in the kitchen for lunch that day, were intended for the digital portal that Cultural Health Stations must use to report their activities to the Management Committee and the central Council for Indigenous Peoples. Others, like candid shots or silly group pictures, might sooner make their way to LINE or to the Facebook page for the Meiwan Cultural Health Station, to be liked and celebrated by relatives, other care workers, or elders themselves. But regardless of where these photos ended up, there was a compulsory and evidentiary quality to their circulation: either on formal portals or on social media platforms, they attested to the performance indexes and bureaucratic efficiencies of Cultural Health Stations in rectifying the inequalities of Indigenous health in Taiwan.
The result of these everyday acts is thus a massive photographic archive that attests to the everyday successes of Cultural Health Stations. But what about their shortcomings, or any daily tensions that arise in the implementation of Indigenous health policy? I argue that group photos (hezhao) play a key role in depoliticising Indigeneity in Taiwan. They serve as evidentiary technologies to verify and validate the cooperation of Indigenous communities with health initiatives, visually confirming the usefulness of Cultural Health Station activities even if they do not fully represent the wishes of elders or communities at large.
Indigeneity and Photography
Many scholars have discussed how photography has been a crucial technology for the consolidation of social structures like race and economic inequality. In her essay “Looking Pleasant, Feeling White: The Social Politics of the Photographic Smile,” the art historian Tanya Sheehan charts how, given lengthy exposure times and nascent technologies, hard and fearful stares were the norm of early American portrait photography. These gave way to warm grins as the photographic smile was consolidated in the American Civil War and postbellum periods as a marker of race, class, and etiquette. We can glean from Sheehan’s research that our photographic conventions are not neutral, but in fact bear the markers of inequality and social coercion.
In her book The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism, Monica Huerta expands the conversation from photographic practices to the circulation of images, as she explores how the dissemination of photographs mediated debates around slavery, racialisation, and property in the long nineteenth century. Huerta’s book begins by surveying how a popular photograph of light-skinned children who had been enslaved “stoked fears of white enslavement and the terror of slavery’s sexual violence,” while also conversely consolidating imaginings of race and property dominant at the time. From Huerta’s research, we can also bear witness to how photos produce racialised and classed meanings in the ways that they are circulated for the public to consume.
These scholarly theories are useful in understanding how the act of photography, as well as the circulation of everyday photos, is not apolitical but instead has much to do with consolidating and reifying a dominant political order. But while these theories provide a substantive explanation for how whiteness becomes entrenched in the American visual imaginary, there is a comparative lack of theorising that tackles the relationship of photography to global racialisation and Indigeneity.
In this article, I argue that photography plays a crucial role in the consolidation of a liberal multicultural order in Taiwan that obscures dissatisfaction through visual depictions of harmonious Indigenous life. To be clear, Cultural Health Stations and the new Indigenous health policies that they arise from provide many important health resources for rural Indigenous communities, as well as a context to meet community friends and receive a free daily lunch from the state. But my larger book project explores how other negative consequences might be produced in their midst. For example, Cultural Health Stations require elders to attend every morning, Monday to Friday, in order for communities to receive full funding and support from the government. What kinds of sentiments does this punitive pressure generate?
The photographic archive of Cultural Health Stations—saturated as all archives are with relations of power—indeed only depicts Indigenous satisfaction with multicultural health policies, leaving little room for the everyday pressures, demands, and disputes that may be afoot. Not to mention that deeper structural issues—like the land dispossession, economic disparities, and political marginalisation that produce Indigenous health problems in the first place—are often ignored in favour of simpler, inclusive, and celebratory additions to public health infrastructure.
I was certainly complicit in this photographic practice as an ethnographer myself. At Meiwan, I partook in many group photos, which solidified my place as a researcher at the Cultural Health Station. And when photographing daily activities of elders myself, the Station’s care workers often asked elders to pose in familiar setups to the ones that they might use in their official bureaucratic filings—perhaps as a way to not unsettle the atmosphere of the room with candid shots. What kinds of alternative photographic relationships might be possible, on behalf of ethnographers and government bureaucrats, and what other stories about Indigenous health in Taiwan might they reveal?
Toward New Photographic Possibilities
Mr. Masaw (Amis, 82) sits across from me this morning at the Meiwan Cultural Health Station. He’s early to arrive; other community elders are sitting outside around the lawn, taking in the sun and listening to Chinese classics from Teresa Teng on the stereo. As they slowly flock inside for their daily check-ups, Mr. Masaw waves to them before turning back to speak to me. He bears a gentle smile but seems tired today.
“I’m in trouble,” he sighs to me, letting out an unimpassioned laugh.
“Why would that be?” I asked.
“I haven’t been attending recently. And they need me to attend, or else we’ll all be in trouble.”
Cultural Health Stations require at least 80% of an Indigenous community’s (部落buluo) elders to attend at all times in order to continue receiving resources from the Council of Indigenous Peoples. At 60% attendance, Stations face the threat of non-renewal in the years to come. These punitive measures in some ways coerce Indigenous communities into cooperating with multicultural health policies, as their very material existences depend on it.
Mr. Masaw’s exhaustion betrays this alternate side of seemingly benevolent Indigenous health policy in Taiwan.
The only photograph I have from this encounter is one of Mr. Masaw, facing away from the camera, seeming to refuse to play into the veneer of wilful inclusion that Cultural Health Stations advertise. While I do not intend to imply that one photograph or conversation derails the many successes of Indigenous health policy in Taiwan—indeed, the life expectancy gap has slowly been closing due to the multifaceted efforts of communities and the government—I hope that these kinds of more oblique images can lend a different angle to everyday experiences on the ground.
In adopting an alternative kind of photographic practice, we can draw on a different genealogy of theorising—from Roland Barthes to Ariella Azoulay—that posits photography as a contract that nonetheless contains spillovers and runaway meanings from their intended purposes. In so doing, we do not force a conflict but make room for Indigenous elders to communicate meanings other than the universal depictions of harmony taken in the name of Taiwanese bureaucracy. We let photography not just confirm state narratives but give a fuller picture of what it is like to live under contemporary Indigenous policy in Taiwan.
*All people and place names in this article have been pseudonymised for confidentiality.
Aaron Su is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colorado College. His book project, The Demand to Participate, looks at the Taiwanese government’s recent response to longstanding Indigenous inequalities through policies of participatory and community-centred design in health and agriculture. It argues that participation, despite its benevolent veneer, constitutes a novel form of global Indigenous governance that measures and tabulates community cooperation, while nonetheless producing new spaces for resistance and dissent.
Taiwan Insight 