A Paddy Field’s Deep History

Principle Investigator：Yen-Ling Tsai

This project attempts to re-frame our understandings of wet-rice ecology and landscape in rural Taiwan through notions related to “deep time”.  Too often we see landscapes composed mainly of paddy fields as either backward (in need of modernization) or idyllic (awaiting to be protected). While the modernization frame projects a temporality towards the future, the idyllic frame seeks to keep the paddy field landscape still and unchanging. Both temporalities, however, share the common framework of seeing a paddy field as the backdrop of human activities, rather than as an assemblage of agentive forces that are both transforming and transformative at the same time. Inspired by the emergent fields of volume and vertical geography (Philip Steinberg & Kimberley Peters 2015, 2019) and geological anthropology ( Zeynep Oguz 2020, Richard Irvine 2020), my study will first resituates the wet-rice landscape in Northeast Taiwan in the tectonic and the environmental histories of the Lanyang Plain, followed by a re-examination of the multispecies, co-evolutionary history of wet-rice ecology, and how such an ecology has violently displaced and emplaced the Lanyang Plain through processes of settler colonization.