The Geobodies within a Geobody: The Visual Economy of Race Making and Indigeneity

In the early twentieth century, Japanese official, academic, and commercial publications deployed texts, pictures, and maps to manufacture a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries that have reemerged as reference points for an indigenous renaissance in the twenty-first century. So-called Aborigine Administration began as a quest to wrest resources, impose administrative order, and promote immigration in an erstwhile Qing borderland. By the 1930s, however, its support of the tourism industry, artistic production, and continued scholarly investigations instantiated the ethnicization of difference and institutionalized indigeneity in Taiwan. This concluding chapter hypothesizes that increased intensity of resource extraction in colonial Taiwan intersected with historical trends in reprographic technology and new forms of state making to pluralize the island's populations under the umbrella of a second-order geobody known as the "Aborigine Territory."