Congratulations on being awarded the ASAA Early Career Book Prize 2024! Can you tell us a bit about the book? What’s the topic explored, and how did you first become interested in the topic?
In the Shadow of the Palms is an ethnographic account of one Indigenous community’s encounter with oil palm in the Indonesian-controlled region of West Papua, where industrial monocrop plantation expansion has accelerated significantly in the last decade. This is a topic I first became interested when working for the Indigenous rights NGO Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia, at which time I was actively collaborating with Indigenous coalitions in seeking redress and remedy for the violation of their rights to land and livelihood resulting from oil palm developments. The book is anchored in eighteen months of participant-observation and everyday immersion in the lives of local Marind villagers, conducted between 2015 and 2019. It seeks to centre how Indigenous People experience, theorize, and contest the adverse impacts of agribusiness developments on their relations to the more-than-human world—that is to say, to the plants, animals, ecosystems, and landscapes that Marind consider as sentient beings and revered kin. Plantation capitalism and multispecies (in)justice constitute central themes of this work, alongside questions of ecological vulnerability, Indigenous resilience, and planetary health, all of which accrue heightened significance in the broader context of the climate crisis and its anthropogenic drivers at a global scale.
A central argument of the book is that violence in the so-called Anthropocene—or what some scholars, aptly in this context, call the “Plantationocene”—is never human-only, either in its causes or effects. Marind, for instance, understand the introduced plant of oil palm as a driver of biocultural diversity loss, and for this reason they fear and resent its presence. At the same time, they express pity, compassion, and even empathy towards this vegetal being because it, too, is subject to all kinds of technological, agronomic, and biological manipulations as a crop and commodity. This raises broader questions about interspecies relations in an age of ecological unmaking: how, for instance, might pragmatic and political solidarities across human and non-human beings be forged in the midst of plantations as landscapes of empire? How we do think with non-human agency while also attending to the ways in which Indigenous and other marginalized communities have themselves been historically treated as sub-human before the law? What can be learned from Indigenous theories in addressing these questions, and how do we bring these grassroots theories into meaningful conversation with scholarly ideas and concepts?
What was the most challenging aspect of doing this research?
The politically-volatile context of West Papua was a significant challenge for this project. This is a region that researchers and journalists, both Indonesian and foreign, often struggle to access and where freedom of mobility and expression are tightly controlled. It is also a region where sixty plus years of colonization manifest in ongoing militarization, denied human rights, entrenched racial discrimination, and brutal clampdowns in response to Papuan demands for self-determination and autonomy. Together, these factors meant I had to take particular care in ensuring that my research did not exacerbate the vulnerabilities of communities on the ground. This included thinking carefully about what data could and could not be divulged in the book, considering strategically where different stories and experiences from the field could be recounted, and ensuring that all aspects of the project design and implementation were undertaken in direct and iterative consultation with my Marind companions in the field.
Another significant challenge—but also opportunity—presented by this research lay in the representational stakes of the book project. Here I am referring to the challenge of finding a right balance in the book between portraying Marind lifeworlds through the lens of destruction, loss, and violence, but also through the lens of resistance, resilience, and creativity, such that their subjection to oppression is highlighted but also their ongoing struggles for, and pursuits of, justice. This shaped not only the narrative style and structure of the monograph, but also undergirds some of the key questions that it asks of anthropologists specifically, and researchers more generally—namely, what is our role in mediating and disseminating stories about lives lived in the teeth of racial colonial capitalism? How do we navigate the fine line between victimhood and survivance in our scholarly accounts about colonized peoples? In what ways can thinking about this balance collectively, with the communities we learn from, help push against the prevalent framing of Indigenous people as subjects of harm and attend in equal measure to their capacity to aspire, resist, and reimagine the world?
Do you have a favourite anecdote, moment or insight from doing your research?
One of the most memorable moments during my fieldwork occurred during a group expedition to the forest, from which Marind traditionally derive their staple foods through intergenerationally transmitted practices of hunting, fishing, and gathering. During this particular journey, I was in the company of several pregnant women, who taught me that walking the landscape for subsistence purposes is also a way of socializing their children to come into the world of the forest and its diverse non-human dwellers—the plants, animals, soils, waterways, and so forth. These women would regularly pause their foraging activities to press their pregnant wombs against the trunks of sago palms, so that, in their words, their babies would come to “know the skin” of the trees with whom they would soon share their existence and find nourishment from (the sago palm provides Marind with sago flour, their staple starch food). As they rubbed their bellies against the trees, the women would also tell their yet-to-be born children stories about the origins of sago palms in mythical times, the ways in which this species proliferated across the landscape, the diverse non-human organisms it shares the ecosystem with, and the importance of respecting sago palms as ancestors, spirits, and relatives. This experience marked me profoundly as it uncovered how, for Marind, nature and culture do not exist as binaries but rather as thoroughly interconnected realities that are central to children’s development into fully-fledged members of a more-than-human community of life.
What are the hopes for the influence of your work?
In scholarly terms, I hope this work will amplify and contribute to ongoing conversations around decolonizing—or perhaps, decanonizing—academia through meaningful, respectful, and grounded engagements with Indigenous communities as theorists and thinkers in their own right, whose concepts and understandings of environmental change we have much to learn from in addressing the ecological crises affecting landscapes and lifeforms across local and global scales.
In practical terms, I hope the book will draw attention among Indonesian policy-makers, NGOs, and government bodies to the profound and consequential ways that environmental ruptures undermine cultural and social practices, philosophies, and protocols in Indigenous Papuan communities, and the importance of attending to Indigenous perspectives in the design and implementation of any project affecting or potentially affecting their lands, livelihoods, and relationships within and across species lines.
Alongside academic peers and engaged practitioners, I also wrote this book with students in mind, and I hope it can offer a template or sorts for the kind of ethnography that is theoretically incisive but also ethnographically rich and compelling. In particular, I hope the book can help in offering students insights into the kinds of narrative techniques and storytelling approaches that might help us grapple better—or at least differently—with worlds that might appear distant and radically different, but from which vital lessons can be learned about multispecies co-existence, kinship, and community.
What are you working on now?
I’m currently working on four different projects. The first is a second monograph that also draws on my fieldwork in West Papua, but that focuses specifically on the intersections of gender, ecology, and food among Marind communities. Provisionally titled Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger and due to come out with Duke University Press in late 2025, this work considers how idioms and experiences of hunger and nourishment are shifting in the context of growing local food insecurity on the Papuan plantation frontier, the role of women in advocating for Indigenous food sovereignty, and the insights from Indigenous theories we can derive and deploy in reimagining relations of eating and being eaten in more-than-human worlds.
I’m also working on another book project focused on plantation lifeworlds and afterlives, which is currently contracted with Cambridge University Press. This shorter work will revisit the plantation system through the lens of multispecies extraction, extinction, and emergence, and from a trans-cultural, geographic, and historical perspective, spanning plantation ecologies and societies both past and present. In doing so, it hopes to offer a comprehensive overview and analysis of how plantation logics have shaped contemporary world orders across the Global North and South, both within spaces that are recognizable as industrial monocrops, and well beyond these sites.
My other current research projects include a multi-sited ethnography of human-kangaroo relations in Australia and its relationship to multispecies justice, which is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), and a project examining urban landfills as more-than-human ecologies in Timor Leste, which is supported by a Sydney Southeast Asia Center Early Career Researcher Seed Grant.
Image: Supplied
