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 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. 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.

Author

Dr. Sophie Chao is senior lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates ecology, capitalism, health, food, and justice in the Pacific. She is author of In the shadow of the palms: More-than-human becomings in West Papua (2022) and Land of famished beings: West Papuan theories of hunger (2025) and co-editor of The promise of multispecies justice (2022) and Beyond bios: The life of matter and the matter of life (2026), all published by Duke University Press.

Discussants

Dr. Hatib A. Kadir is an environmental humanities researcher specializing in ecological crises in peripheral regions. Over the past seven years, he has conducted research in coastal areas of the Eastern Indonesian archipelago, spanning from Maluku to West Papua. His work delves into the intersections of the Anthropocene, human and non-human interactions, and ecological disruptions caused by resource exploitation, infrastructure projects, political policies, human activities, settler colonialism, and invasive species.

Wensislaus Fatubun is a PhD student at the University of Canterbury with a focus on media and Pacific studies. Since 2003, he has been working as a video maker and photographer, journalist and human rights defender with Indigenous communities in West Papua, Kalimantan, Flores Islands, and North Sulawesi. From 2008 until 2012, he worked as a program manager for the Jakarta-based Catholic Church group Justice Peace Integrity and Creation (JPIC MSC). In 2011, he founded the Papuan Voices, and in 2013, he founded the Dayak Voices.

Moderator

Dr. Wengki Ariando is an activist-researcher who primarily conducts research in participatory action research settings. His main research interests include coastal and small island development, political ecology, marine conservation, climate change adaptation, and indigenous resource governance, with a particular focus on Sea Nomadic Communities in Insular Southeast Asia.

Format, date, time & venue

This book talk is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Thursday 6 November from 11.00 AM – 12.30 PM (CET). 

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Book cover The land of famished beings: West Papuan theories of hunger

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