ETHNIC INTERACTIONS IN THE ABORIGINAL RESTAURANTS AS A CONTACT ZONE: SUBJECTIVITY CONSTRUCTIONS IN CULINARY IDENTIFICATION

This paper is concerned with the workplace interactions between aborigines and the predominant Han Chinese in aboriginal restaurants. It applies the concept of a contact zone to explore the workplace as a trans-cultural point at which Taiwanese aborigines meet Han Chinese as employees, partners or employers. The deprivation of aborigines of job opportunities can be traced back to the 1989 legal change that allowed local employers to recruit foreign workers to solve the impending problem of low-cost labor scarcity, which set in motion first the marginalization and then the exclusion of aborigines in Taiwan's labor markets. Its methodology is based on the concept of a contact zone inspired by Mary Louise Pratt. In contract to marital and familial lives, the workplace, as a public domain, provides an opportunity to see how Han or aboriginal employers/employees encounter their counterparts. After conducting several rounds of participatory observation and a series of half-structured interviews, what remains significant is the over-commoditization of ethnicity in tribal cultural economic development. In the discussions of inventing tradition and cultural commoditization, how aboriginal subjectivity is constructed and destructed will be given a special emphasis