New book explores hunger as a more-than-human phenomenon in West Papua

02 Aug New book explores hunger as a more-than-human phenomenon in West Papua

Environmental humanities scholar and anthropologist Dr. Sophie Chao (University of Sydney) has published a monograph with Duke University Press, titled Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger. The book draws on Chao’s ethnographic fieldwork in West Papua and examines how Indigenous Marind communities understand and theorize hunger in the context of mass deforestation and industrial oil palm plantation expansion. 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 to be 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. For more information, visit https://www.dukeupress.edu/land-of-famished-beings.