Governing Indigenous Drinking: Jiejiu in Settler-Colonial Taiwan
Abstract
This study explores the disparity between psychiatric interventions and the lived experience of problematic drinking, which is a critical global mental health issue, including in an indigenous area in Northern Taiwan. This strategically situated three-year ethnographic study on a hospital's jiejiu project highlights the dilemma of current health interventions that target indigenous people who drink under settler-colonial conditions. Interventions based on Western psychiatric categories can lose their efficacy due to disparate understandings regarding illness, moral experience, and perceptions of indigenous drinking cultures. The difficulties of such interventions also appear from hesitant self-identification and ambivalence toward a drinking culture shaped by social changes wrought by marginalization and oppression through colonization. Psychiatrization of the human condition and the top-down format of health delivery policy reaffirm colonial power and generate various levels of stigmatization. This study asserts the need to decolonize modern psychiatric knowledge and inquire into the ontology of drinking practices under complicated contexts in the contemporary world.
Publisher
Society for Applied Anthropology
Subject
General Social Sciences,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous),Anthropology