Paper short abstract

The presentation examines Indigenous Taiwan as an internal colonial frontier where warfare, medical education, and anthropology converged to transform Indigenous bodies into resources for imperial knowledge and governance, sustaining unequal belonging, colonial power, and contested memory beyond decolonization.

Paper long abstract

In modern medicine, the dissection of the human body has been regarded as valuable for research and education. The observation, measurement, and comparison of human bones have been considered useful methods for scientifically elucidating questions concerning the human body and humankind. Yet the question of whose bodies became research materials, how they came into researchers’ hands, and what kinds of knowledge were produced from them has not been fully explored.

This paper focuses on the formative period of the Taiwan Government-General Medical School, a predecessor of today’s National Taiwan University College of Medicine, and examines research practices that have received little scholarly attention. It investigates the institutional and social foundations that made possible research on the bodies of Indigenous peoples. Specifically, it attends to the intersections among medical education in colonial Taiwan, physical anthropology in imperial Japan, and colonial warfare against Taiwanese Indigenous peoples.

The research project concerning Taiwanese Indigenous skeletal remains failed to reach a definitive conclusion in its attempt to scientifically demonstrate racial differences within imperial Japan. Nevertheless, Indigenous bodies continued to be put to use as teaching materials for medical education, specimens for physical anthropology, and epistemic resources supporting colonial rule; they also continued to serve national and social expectations surrounding the formation of a Japanese self-image. In this sense, this paper traces a project that persisted as unfinished. By probing deeply into the processes of scholarly practice in imperial Japan, it seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the modern historical experiences of Taiwanese Indigenous peoples.