Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Picking our way through modernity

Picking our way through modernity There is so much to learn from In the Shadow of the Palms—but let me focus here on just a couple of reasons why I find the book so compelling and important. In shining a light on a particular social world, one over‐shadowed by burgeoning oil palms, Sophie Chao reveals the multiplicity and complexity of the relations of Marind people of West Papua with what we would call their environment—though the distinction of self and environment is meaningless in their cosmology. With impressive panache, Chao positions the enchanted life worlds of the Marind against the simplifying, violent plantation regime. But then she shows us the intricate ways in which the lives of the Marind might become entangled in oil palm plantations, enmeshed with that invasive species and avatar of settler colonialism.Chao could have presented us with the facile binary of the Marind versus the plantation; or nature lovers versus the violent culture of the Plantationocene; or local heterogeneity and situatedness versus globalising homogeneity. Instead, she shows us the complexity and messiness of interrelations and meaning‐making on the plantation borderlands. Thus, what might have been a conventional exploration of multispecies relations—the connections and disconnections of sago palms and oil palms, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Australian Journal of Anthropology Wiley

Picking our way through modernity

Download PDF
2 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/wiley/picking-our-way-through-modernity-Vbg8Q96ms0

References (0)

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
Copyright © 2023 Australian Anthropological Society
ISSN
1035-8811
eISSN
1757-6547
DOI
10.1111/taja.12465
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

There is so much to learn from In the Shadow of the Palms—but let me focus here on just a couple of reasons why I find the book so compelling and important. In shining a light on a particular social world, one over‐shadowed by burgeoning oil palms, Sophie Chao reveals the multiplicity and complexity of the relations of Marind people of West Papua with what we would call their environment—though the distinction of self and environment is meaningless in their cosmology. With impressive panache, Chao positions the enchanted life worlds of the Marind against the simplifying, violent plantation regime. But then she shows us the intricate ways in which the lives of the Marind might become entangled in oil palm plantations, enmeshed with that invasive species and avatar of settler colonialism.Chao could have presented us with the facile binary of the Marind versus the plantation; or nature lovers versus the violent culture of the Plantationocene; or local heterogeneity and situatedness versus globalising homogeneity. Instead, she shows us the complexity and messiness of interrelations and meaning‐making on the plantation borderlands. Thus, what might have been a conventional exploration of multispecies relations—the connections and disconnections of sago palms and oil palms,

Journal

The Australian Journal of Anthropology – Wiley

Published: Apr 1, 2023

There are no references for this article.