This seminar will be a hybrid event where the speaker will be presenting in person and the talk will be streamed via zoom. Those who want to attend physically are more than welcome to join us in meeting room 929 at Eilert Sundt’s building.
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Abstract
We inhabit an age of ecological unmaking, wherein industrial processes are undermining conditions of life at a planetary scale. In this lecture, I consider how mourning has become a necessary – indeed, crucial – disposition of our times: one that enables us to create and commemorate connections by recognizing the vulnerability and finitude of non-human others. I do so by drawing on philosophies, practices, and protocols of “multispecies mourning” enacted by Indigenous Marind People in the Indonesian-occupied region of West Papua, where mass deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion are undermining communities’ intimate and ancestral relations to forest landscapes and lifeforms. Specifically, I examine three emergent practices of multispecies mourning on the Papuan capitalist frontier – the weaving of sago bags as a form of collective healing, the creation of songs prompted by encounters with roadkill, and the transplanting of bamboo shoots as part of customary land reclaiming activities. Multispecies mourning, I argue, offers potent avenues for Marind to memorialize the loss of lives and relations prompted by capitalist incursions and attendant environmental crises. At the same time, these multispecies mournings constitute forms of active resistance and creative refusal in the face of extractive capitalism’s ecocidal logic. Bringing together interconnected plants, people, and places, multispecies mourning offers pathways for multispecies solidarities in the midst of capitalist extraction and violence.
Biography
Doctor of Philosophy Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in the Discipline of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Chao is co-lead of the Sydney Environment Institute BioCultural Diversities Research Theme and Executive Committee Member of the Sydney Southeast Asian Centre.
Dr Chao is an environmental anthropologist and environmental humanities scholar interested in the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific, with a particular ethnographic focus on the Indonesian-occupied region of West Papua. Her current research projects are Plants and people, Hunger and culture, Multispecies justice, and Kangaroos and humans.
Dr Chao previously worked for the human rights organization NGO Forest Peoples Programme in the UK and Indonesia, supporting the rights of forest-dwelling Indigenous peoples to their customary lands, resources, and livelihoods. With In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, Chao examines the multispecies entanglements of oil palm plantations in West Papua, Indonesia, showing how Indigenous Marind communities understand and navigate the social, political, and environmental demands of the oil palm plant (Duke University Press, 2022).
Read more: Dr Sophie Chao (sydney.edu.au)