Scott Simon

Scott Simon writes about Taiwan, about Indigenous rights, and about human-animal relations.

Scott Simon is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Ottawa, Canada. After having studied East Asian Studies and Germanic Studies at Indiana University, he studied anthropology for his M.A. (1994) and Ph.D. (1998) at McGill University. Since 1996, he has conducted three major research projects in Taiwan: on culture and industrialization in Southern Taiwan, on women’s entrepreneurship in Taipei, and on the development experience of the Sadyaq/Truku people of Hualien and Nantou Counties. As a visiting scholar at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka (2017-2018), he has also done one year of field research on human-bird relations in Japan. He is now Principle Investigator on a much more ambitious project entitled “Austronesian Worlds: Human-Animal Entanglements in the Pacific Anthropocene.” In addition to various journal articles and book chapters, he is author of three books. These are Sweet and Sour: Life-worlds of Taipei Women Entrepreneurs (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Tanners of Taiwan: Life Strategies and National Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2005), and Sadyaq Balae! L’autochtonie formosane dans tous ses états (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2012).