金寶螺胡撇仔: 一個多物種實驗影像民族誌

Golden Snail O-pe-la (a “hybrid” form of Taiwanese folk opera) is a genre-bending, multispecies enactment of experimental ethnography. First imported to Taiwan from Argentina in 1979, Pamocea canaliculata is now a major pest to rice agriculture in Taiwan and across Asia. Whereas conventional farmers use poison to exterminate snails, a new generation of friendly farmers (youshan xiaonong) in Taiwan's Yilan County are attempting to achieve a symbiotic, multispecies way of life within the paddy. Drawing on a variety of knowledge sources, including personal experience, institutional science, social media, traditional calendars, and local understandings of ghosts and deities, these farmers construct an experimental natural history of organic rice paddies, which self-consciously intersects with the observations and interventions made by other more-than-human paddy denizens.