My research bridges religious studies, transcultural multi-sited ethnography, evolutionary anthropology, and international law to rethink networks of human and nonhuman agency and the ethics of multi-species interaction. In particular, my research demonstrates that the separation of church and state isolates alternative notions of ecology from the public sphere, while examining how the Taiwanese Buddhist notion of “equality of life” operates within a global legal framework constructed for human equality. My dissertation and current book project examine these disparate notions of equality through multi-species ethnography in Taiwan, placing these issues in the global politics of international law.

 

Dissertation

 

Using two years of participant-observation and interviews, my dissertation examined animals and religion in Taiwan in a multi-species ethnography of the Life Conservationist Association (LCA), a conservation organization co-founded by the Buddhist nun Shih Chao-hwei in 1992. LCA promotes the Taiwanese Buddhist value of “equality of life,” the idea that all sentient beings including non-human animals are equal, and the related moral precept of “non-killing,” which prohibits killing of any sentient being. In Taiwan, a 2004 high court decision that existing law favoring Christian organizations was unconstitutional opened a question about the definition of “religion,” and it occurred in a context in which Buddhism-inspired organizations like LCA and the alternative ecologies that they represent already wielded considerable political influence. Through examination of the current legal and political landscape of Taiwan, I argue that the politics of religion have restricted the participation of traditions such as Buddhism in public discourse on ecological issues. Then I build from this argument to put Han Chinese teachings such as Buddhism on equal terms with sciences such as conservation biology, as well as traditional knowledge of the Taiwanese indigenous peoples who have largely converted to Christianity. By treating each teaching as a way of apprehending reality (i.e., ontology), I show that by seeking to substitute the “equality of life” for “human equality,” LCA aims to liberate sentient beings from the constraints of liberal humanism, but in doing so, they also propagate Han colonial policies toward indigenous peoples. Simultaneously, as the indigenous people ally with the indigenous rights movement and Christian churches to which they have converted, they rely on the institutions of liberal humanism and Christianity to resist Han colonialism.

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My dissertation consists of seven chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1 shows that the status of non-Abrahamic teachings as “religions” continues to be contingent on the political negotiations of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. Chapter 2 argues that, in Taiwan, a Confucian approach to Chinese teachings has emerged within a state that officially embraces liberalism. Chapter 3 explains how a Christian liberal cosmology leads to human equality, whereas a Taiwanese Buddhist cosmology leads to equality of life. Chapter 4 demonstrates how LCA operated in a system of liberalism by recruiting Christian and secular allies in European traditions to establish its political legitimacy, while superficially disassociating with its Buddhist roots. Chapter 5 describes how Catholic organizations received government sponsorship to create a new compulsory “Life Education” curriculum focused on humans, while LCA’s Life Education curriculum focused on nonhuman life as of yet has failed to receive similar sponsorship. Chapter 6 shows how an emerging form of the traditional law of the Tayal people recognizes an alternative form of equality of life compatible with Christianity. Chapter 7 demonstrates how LCA, Taiwanese Buddhists, and indigenous people all must turn to the liberal institutions by which they were initially oppressed to make a case for the alternative ecologies that they support. The Conclusion argues that equality of life reframes ecological debates from questions of competing human rights to questions of how to protect all life.

 

The significance of my research lies in recognizing multiple intersecting ontologies to examine the post-colonial dynamics of religion and nature in East Asia. A growing body of scholarship demonstrates how the foreign notion of religion reconfigured knowledge in East Asia, and a separate body of scholarship demonstrates how the notion of nature reconfigured knowledge globally through colonial encounters. In my research, I link the concepts of religion and nature as two concepts non-native to East Asia, demonstrating how they are interrelated in a specifically European ontology that underlies the foundations of international law. Then I demonstrate the expression of these concepts in global power structures by contrasting them with alternative ontologies in Taiwan.

 

Publications

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In addition to my monograph project, I have eight papers recently published, accepted for publication, or currently in process. In 2022, I published a preprint in the ICCS Working Paper Series, which is now in the process of revision after initial submission to ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. It presents the chicken as an anti-anthropocentric signal of the proposed geological epoch of the Anthropocene. In 2020, two colleagues and I co-edited a summer special issue of ISLE consisting of papers presented at a 2018 Duke workshop called “Trans-species Listening and Rights of Nature: Legal Persons beyond the Human.” In addition to our co-authored introduction, I contributed an article on how Chao-hwei recodes the Buddhist concepts of “equality of life” and “protecting life” in terms of animal rights and environmental rights. In 2021, I contributed an extended version of my individual paper in the ISLE special issue for the edited collection Chinese Environmental Ethics. In 2019, I published both an original chapter and a translation in an edited collection entitled Chinese Environmental Humanities: Practices of Environing at the Margins. My chapter examines how scientific and traditional Buddhist cosmologies offer different justifications for protecting trees at a Buddhist practice center in Taiwan. My translation is an essay by Chao-hwei on the Buddhist concept of “protecting life.” Currently, I am preparing an invited paper evaluating Chao-hwei’s philosophical engagement with Peter Singer for a proposed anthology on Buddhism and animal ethics edited by Bronwyn Finnigan and Geoffrey Barstow. Recently, my colleagues at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and I have started to plan a special issue on the Buddhist practice of animal release. I will contribute a paper on new government controls on the practice in Taiwan. My current major publication project is to revise my dissertation for release as a book. Columbia University Press has expressed a strong interest in seeing a manuscript when one is ready.

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Research Plans

 

I am also working on a second book project that integrates the ethnographic methods of cultural anthropology and the ethological methods of evolutionary anthropology. This project examines the culture of a multi-species community of humans, dogs, and Formosan macaques. During my two years of field research, I collected data on three separate case studies: Christian indigenous people and hunting, a new no-kill law for animal shelters, and Formosan macaques and orchard feeding. For my dissertation, I chose to include only the case study about indigenous people and hunting. The other two case studies focus more directly on the subjectivity of non-human animals, and provide opportunities for further methodological innovation. Formosan macaques are the primary species responsible for crop losses in orchards, and regulators have increasingly loosened restrictions on killing these animals, which until 2019 were protected under the Wildlife Conservation Act. Dogs are the primary nonhuman species protecting orchards. New laws prohibiting euthanizing Taiwan’s large stray dog population have not only granted this species a right to life, but have also increased their participation in the formal economy, including the protection of orchards from macaques. Together, the no-kill law for animal shelters and policies that allow killing of macaques represent speciesist policies that recognize the rights of one species (dogs) in contrast to the non-rights of another (macaques). The goal of my project is to recognize but also go beyond how human groups such as Buddhists and indigenous people conceptualize the agency of non-human animals in order to represent how dogs and macaques evaluate their own multi-species relationships. Through direct participant-observation of non-human animals as subjects, I evaluate the agencies and power dynamics of these tri-species communities. I am currently evaluating the data I have collected to make plans for a final phase of field work.