Tomo Sugimoto

Tomo (Tomonori) Sugimoto is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Environmental Humanities of East Asia. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, Tomo will work on his first book manuscript provisionally entitled, “The Indigenous Right to the Settler Colonial City? Land, Nature, and Housing in Taipei”. Invigorated by the recent rise of indigenous rights discourse in Taiwan, urbanized indigenous Austronesian people (yuanzhumin) have increasingly asserted rights to Taipei’s public lands as sites of foraging, fishing, hunting, and dwelling over the last several decades. The Han settler-dominated state has curtailed such distinct native claims to the city, violently displacing indigenous people from their communities and relocating them into public housing. Based on long-term ethnographic research in indigenous communities built on Taipei’s riverbanks and hillsides as well as their relocation sites, Sugimoto’s book will explore how, in the age of multiculturalism and green urbanism, certain native claims to Taipei’s land, environments, and infrastructure are celebrated, while others are criminalized and regulated. Articles based on this research have been published in journals such as Settler Colonial Studies, Gastronomica: Journal of Critical Food Studies, and City & Society. Prior to finishing his PhD at Stanford University in 2019, Tomo acquired his MA in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego in 2013 and his BA in social science from the University of Tokyo in 2011. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Toyota Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies/the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.