Scott Simon’s provocative ethnography of Indigenous life in Taiwan—a book I anticipated greatly, read breathlessly, and leave with an itchy mix of frustration and admiration—begins with a chat.
Simon is talking with a shopkeeper in Gluban; they are discussing an emergent Indigenous group seeking recognition by the Taiwanese state. The group has chosen to call itself “Seediq” because, across the three different languages of its members, the term is phonetically and denotationally similar, meaning “human.” But the shopkeeper—himself Indigenous—is troubled: Seediq, he explains, is too broad a term for any little group. After all, “human” includes all of humanity.
The shopkeeper’s critique leads Simon to re-imagine his research, turning from conventional anthropological attention to cultural differentiation (the sort that distinguishes groups) towards an interest in Indigenous theorizations of more general truths. In Simon’s words, the conversation “lit a fire in my heart” (xv). From that blaze emerges the book’s central concern: the Indigenous concept of Gaya.
While Gaya is often glossed as “culture,” Simon insists it is weirder and more capacious: a sacred law, a cosmological principle, and an ethical mandate that binds the human and nonhuman worlds. To act reflexively within Gaya is to become “truly human”—hence the book’s title. In Simon’s rendering, Gaya is both a local formulation and a possible universal: a situated ethic that, paradoxically, claims world-spanning relevance.
Simon’s willingness to seek general concepts not from ethnographic data in its conventional sense, but from forms of Indigenous theory discoverable through ethnography, is to me the book’s bravest and richest idea—resonant with anthropology’s ontological turn, but unusually ethically and politically attuned. His approach is notably grounded in ethnography, too.
Indeed, Simon speaks Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Japanese, and has been working in Taiwan for over three decades, producing two earlier books, one on Taiwanese leather tanners (2003) and another on women entrepreneurs (2005). His more recent turn to Indigenous lifeworlds emerges through sustained interpersonal relationships, study of Indigenous languages, and intense engagement with Indigenous scholarship. He has lived with families, learned to hunt, helped with farming, and joined gatherings political and ceremonial. These experiences show a breadth and depth of ethnographic labor, and a commitment to the people whose lives and thought he is trying to understand.
Each subsequent chapter traces Gaya through attention to the social histories of related Indigenous concepts. The initial chapters on Mgaya (headhunting) and Samat (forest animals) are arguably the strongest. Drawing on colonial archives and oral histories, Simon shows how headhunting once enacted Gaya in ritual and ethical terms. Its cessation—through Japanese colonization and Christian conversion—gave rise to hunting as a new medium of ethical action. Yet because hunting is now subject to state restrictions, its continued practice has taken on explicit political valence: an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty in the face of settler governance.
These chapters are powerful. They reposition well-worn anthropological topics—headhunting, animism, ritual violence—by framing them as the expression of a more-than-human ethics. And they show the immense political implications of that reframing.
Yet, as with so much of the book, moments of insight are tempered by unresolved methodological problems. In this case, the intense male-gendering of headhunting and hunting haunts the analysis. As Simon mentions much later (pages 265-8), drawing on work by the Toda/Truku female scholar Kumu Tapas (2004), women’s experience of headhunting could be traumatic: patrilocal marriage meant that husbands’ raids might target wives’ natal communities, placing women in the painful position of receiving the heads of their own kin. But Simon does not integrate these tensions into his broader argument about Gaya. It is a missed opportunity: if Gaya is to be taken as a universal framework, and not simply a cultural one, then its gendered asymmetries deserve serious, sustained analysis.
The following chapters center concepts of Utux (spirit), Lnglungan (heart), and Tminun (weaving)—and the results likewise are mixed. The chapter on heart, which Simon frames through a lens of ethics, is notable for its attention to conflict within Indigenous networks. Here he considers how, as Indigenous communities have become involved in Taiwanese electoral politics, interpersonal relationships with politicians and their allies persistently outweigh “larger” concerns around Indigenous rights and policy. While the connection to Gaya is less clearly articulated, the ethnography here is sharp, and I appreciate Simon’s willingness to engage with inter-group political complexity.
In the next chapter, which uses the female practice of weaving as a metaphor for personal and social acts of memory, Simon seems poised finally to bring a similar complexity to Indigenous gender relations. But, in fact, he devotes only a paragraph to female understandings of weaving before turning to the “larger” issue of memory. And while it is here that Kumu Tapas’s research on female experiences of headhunting appears, I can only repeat more clearly my concerns from before: Why is this work not used to complicate the concept of Gaya itself? Why does Simon turn to it but not build around it? Its presence invites, however, a broader reckoning with gendered dimensions of Indigenous resurgence that remain unexamined in this book.
The conclusion returns to Gaya’s potential as a global ethic, and the epilogue positions Indigenous thought as a counterpoint to Chinese and Taiwanese state ideologies, proposing Gaya as an alternative basis for politics.
Again, all of this matters. And again, the book falters, along now familiar lines. If Gaya is truly a general principle, applicable to one shared world (as the conclusion argues), why does Simon then argue in the epilogue for Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China as alternative realities, which Gaya (framed now as a specifically Indigenous reality) asserts itself against? These persistent contradictions suggest an infelicitous melding of different ontological approaches (very broadly, ontology as metaphysics versus political ontology as the pluralism of worlds) and a deep-rooted unwillingness to engage critically with Gaya as theory.
The issue I am highlighting is a kind of political piety that, in attempting to make space for Indigenous perspectives, risks not taking them seriously enough. And while I have traced this so far in terms of argumentation, it occurs most vividly at the level of ethnographic narrative.
How to put this, exactly? I am reminded of acquaintances who, when recounting family holidays, unleash tales of sunny carriage rides, ocean splashings, board game escapades, and elegantly thrown-together (but always heart-healthy) meals. While I don’t conclude from such stories that the tellers are concealing horrific secrets, I also don’t feel any closer to understanding their holidays, let alone their families.
Simon does not go so far. But his ethnographic descriptions return too often to what he represents as his own journey of ever-increasing felt understanding of Indigenous worlds. The explicit reasoning is a methodology based in phenomenology (pages 7-8, 30), which could be productive if it were used to support different arguments, but feels terribly inadequate here. I mean, come on. If you are going to make general claims about the nature of reality, clearly more is at stake than your own, or any other person’s, felt experience. Let me see you grapple with that.
In sum, I believe—perhaps more than the political ontology literature typically allows—that learning from others is possible. That it requires not just humility and respect, but a willingness to work with the tension that exists in the space of difference between you and others. This struggle is how, as far as I know, we ever do meet anyone, even in the most limited and fragile ways. To elide it is to deny the very process by which ethical relationship-making—including good ethnography—happens. My trouble with Truly Human is not ultimately that its arguments sometimes don’t cohere, but that the lack of coherence emerges from a reluctance to recognize and trace this struggle.
But let me also be clear. Simon’s work raises vital, timely questions—about human connections to a world beyond ourselves, about the very nature of politics, and about Taiwan and China. His fieldwork is extraordinary, and he cares. I am, in short, inspired by the fire in Simon’s heart. I only wish he let it burn a little messier.
Works Cited
Kumu Tapas. 霧社事件的口述歷史 [Oral history of the Wushe Incident]. 2 vols. Taipei 台北: Hanlu 翰蘆圖書出版有限公司, 2004.
Simon, Scott. Sweet and Sour: Life-Worlds of Taipei Women Entrepreneurs. Asian Voices. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.
Simon, Scott. Tanners of Taiwan: Life Strategies and National Culture. Westview Case Studies in Anthropology. Cambridge, MA: Westview, 2005.
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[Review length: 1428 words * Review posted on October 10, 2025]