Nurturing Pluriversal Futures: Multispecies Entanglements, Ontological Resilience, and Decolonial Engagement in Taiwan
Convener: Shu-Ling Yeh
Co-convener: Hsiao-Chiao Chiu
In a multipolarising world shaped by shifting capitalist expansions and ecological precarity, communities across the Global South are actively forging alternative, pluriversal futures. Aligning with the symposium’s focus on diverse ontologies and more-than-human relationality, this panel positions Taiwan as a critical epistemic site to explore how rural and Indigenous communities navigate geopolitical realignments through multispecies entanglements.
Moving beyond narratives of marginalization, these five papers center “co-nurturing,” ontological resilience, and decolonial engagement as vital practices of world-building. Paper 1 examines milkfish aquaculture, demonstrating how aquatic lifeforms act as “educational actants” that foster sustainable ecological futures. Paper 2 historicizes this multispecies value formation, illustrating how citronella, mountain infrastructures, and Indigenous labor co-produced economic realities amidst global market fluctuations. Addressing the impacts of colonial dispossession on health, Paper 3 analyzes how Paiwan “Soft Food Recipes” bridge intergenerational divides, providing elder care while revitalizing ancestral food sovereignty. Paper 4 utilizes an ontological lens to explore how the Amis community sustains a translocal existence despite out-migration, weaving together Catholic syncretism and the multispecies flows of traditional pig feasts (miinkay). Finally, addressing the political stakes of knowledge production, Paper 5 critically reflects on a Truku trail-making project, demonstrating how anti-extractive anthropological engagement can transform top-down state conservation into a platform for Indigenous self-determination.
Together, these grounded cases illustrate how local actors—human, non-human, and infrastructural—collaborate to resist extractive paradigms. By tracing the flows of fish, cash crops, ancestral foods, sacred pigs, and mountain trails, we argue that these practices of intergenerational care, multispecies adaptation, and decolonial collaboration are creative assertions of pluriversal futures that successfully rework the boundaries of ecology, economy, and kinship.