Equality of Life: Thinking With Multi-Species Relationships in Taiwan

Abstract

Since its founding in 1993, Taiwan’s Life Conservationist Association (LCA) advocates for laws supporting the “equality of life” as an alternative to “human equality.” According to European Enlightenment liberalism, “human equality” stems from the distinctly human capacity for rationality endowed by a creator, a reflection of a three-part ontology that separates humans from their creator and from the rest of creation. As this dissertation demonstrates, liberal humanism reproduces this three-part ontology as the distinctly separate domains of the religious, the (human) secular, and the natural. In contrast, Shih Chao-hwei, the Taiwanese Buddhist nun who co-founded LCA, asserts the equality of life stems from the capacity of all sentient beings to suffer. She rejects the entire Christian liberal cosmology, denying the existence of any eternal creator and only recognizing a distinction between sentient and insentient beings.Based on a total of two years of multi-species ethnographic field work conducted from 2015 to 2018, this study examines how LCA and its allies promote the equality of life as an alternative to human equality in Taiwan. The study responds to (1) recent post-colonial scholarship that demonstrates how colonial powers used the institutions of religious freedom and the separation of church and state to subjugate non-Christian teachings and (2) recent scholarship in political ecology that demonstrates how concepts of nature and naturalism denied alternative ontologies of life. In response to these critiques, I put Han teachings such as Buddhism on equal terms with sciences such as conservation biology, as well as the traditional knowledge of the indigenous minorities who have largely converted to Christianity.As an ethnographic example of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, I examine how the Tayal people are responding to a conservation law drafted by LCA as part of the colonial policies of the liberal state. The Tayal contend that unlike the Buddhist method of protecting life which prohibits killing, the method of protecting life in their own traditional law called Gaga is expressed through hunting. They resist both liberal policies that denied indigenous people’s full human equality and restrictive hunting policies based on LCA’s Buddhism-inspired equality of life. Yet, the Tayal also ally themselves with Christian churches and the global indigenous rights movement so that their arguments to restore Gaga are expressed in terms of the liberal institutions of human rights. The central argument of the dissertation is that, to resolve political disputes over the equality of life, Buddhists and indigenous peoples are both forced to appeal to and reinforce institutions based on human equality, institutions by which both were suppressed. Rather than accepting liberal narratives that frame questions of ecology in terms of competing human rights, this dissertation invites scholars to recognize liberalism as a product of Christian theology and to consider alternative notions of the ontology of life not simply as religions or forms of traditional ecological knowledge, but as contested but viable legal alternatives to liberalism.