Palm oil nightmares, empathy dreaming?

A talk on West Papua by Sophie Chao, response from Maria Latumahina

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and activist research in the Indonesian-controlled region of West Papua, Sophie will explore how Indigenous Marind communities experience, conceptualize, and contest the adverse impacts of deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion on their relationships to each other, and to other-than-human dwellers of forest landscapes. Drawing from Indigenous multispecies philosophies, practices, and protocols, Sophie’s talk will reflect on what Marind ways of being and becoming can teach us about living together and making relations across difference in the ruins of capitalist expansion.

Sophie Chao seeks to understand how the Marind people of Papua conceive their relations with what we call nature and the way they perceive imposed oil palm estates, work that has contributed to her Social Anthropology PhD at Macquarie University. Previously she worked for several years at FPP supporting forest peoples threatened by oil palm and sugar plantations in Sumatra, Borneo and Papua. Prior to that her Master’s dissertation at Oxford was on the ‘couvade’ (ritual for men accompanying their wife in child birth) and before that she worked in Tibet. She now teaches at Sydney University. She has dual French and Taiwanese nationality and speaks Chinese, French, Spanish, Tibetan, Bahasa and Indonesia. https://www.morethanhumanworlds.com/

Maria Latumahina now lives in Glasgow but comes from the South of West Papua, where her mother lives. She has been helping community groups in West Papua to organise themselves to change the narrative and transform their development trajectory. The village where her mother was born is one among a very few who remain resistant and keen on setting up alternative survival strategies including by changing policy making processes.

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