In Land of Famished Beings, Sophie Chao examines how Indigenous Marind communities understand and theorize hunger in lowland West Papua, a place where industrial plantation expansion and settler-colonial violence are radically reconfiguring ecologies, socialities, and identities. Instead of seeing hunger as an individual, biophysical state defined purely in nutritional, quantitative, or human terms, Chao investigates how hunger traverses variably situated humans, animals, plants, institutions, infrastructures, spirits, and sorcerers. When approached through the lens of Indigenous Marind philosophies, practices, and protocols, hunger reveals itself a multiple, more-than-human, and morally imbued modality of being - one whose effects are no less culturally crafted or contested than food and eating. In centering Indigenous feminist theories of hunger, Chao offers new ways of thinking about the relationship between the environment, food, and nourishment in an age of self-consuming capitalist growth. She also considers how Indigenous theories invite anthropologists to reimagine the ethics and politics of ethnographic writing and the responsibilities, hesitations, and compromises that shape anthropological commitments in and beyond the field.
Note on Language, Nomenclature, and Images ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Satiation and Hunger in the Forest 25 2. Hungers That Never Go Away 54 3. Of Roads and Other Hungry Beings 86 4. Making Sense of Hunger 112 5. Writing Hunger 136 Conclusion 165 Coda 175 Notes 177 Bibliography 211 Index 245
Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, and coeditor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice, both also published by Duke University Press.
“In this book, Sophie Chao brilliantly metabolizes the entanglements of hunger, health, colonialism, and capitalism in West Papua. Land of Famished Beings is a must-read for students and scholars of environmental anthropology and multispecies ethnography. Moreover, it is essential reading for anyone passionate about justice in the Pacific, a region hungry for justice.” - Craig Santos Perez, author of Navigating CHamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization
“Sophie Chao gained insight into Marind people’s conceptualizations of hunger by living and working with them and by including them as cothinkers and cotheorists. Arguing that hunger cannot be understood outside of rapacious capitalism, Chao shows how hungry people themselves make this argument, how they debate it, and how they work to counteract it. Evocatively written and expertly argued, Land of Famished Beings, exemplifies how to carry out and write about anthropological fieldwork in the twenty-first century.” - Emily Yates-Doerr, author of Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm
