Abstract

The paper aims to discuss the role that visual anthropology and subaltern cultural medias play among the considered indigenous peoples in the Chinese speaking world, and particularly in the four cross-Strait territories of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao. This paper suggests a semantic and historic analysis of the terms of indigenous, while retracing the arrival of these western concepts in Greater China as well as the manipulations and translations along history which are subjects of the present research. The western discipline of visual anthropology, together with cultural medias find their equivalences in these Chinese speaking territories, and are used for multiple purposes, which are not always clear. An analysis of their presence and use in these four territories by their respective administrations or by the indigenous themselves may allow us also to have a more precise understanding of the ties that each of these governments maintains with its constitutionally and potentially indigenous peoples. Finally, it will be stressed the fact that the reappropriated western labeling of the indigenous may not necessarily work in the specific theoretical context of the Chinese speaking world while attention should be paid to potentially subaltern groups in individual cases.