Sophie Chao: Pluralizing justice amidst the expansion of palm oil projects (ep360)
“Lies, deceit, and dupery are also very much part of the story. Often, these promises are made in the early stages of oil palm development, but they do not end up materializing in practice.”
In this episode, we welcome Dr. Sophie Chao, a Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific.
Dr. Chao is the author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press, 2022) and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press, 2022).
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Come The Rain by Maggie Clifford
Episode-inspired artwork by Fabian Lavater
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Sophie Chao: I want to start by acknowledging that I'm speaking to you today from the unceded lands of the Gadigal people here in Australia. I want to pay my respects to Gadigal elders, past, present, and emergent, and also to Gadigal can both human, animal, vegetable, and elemental.
My interest in the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific very much stemmed from my prior career in the human rights sector when I was conducting extensive investigations into human rights abuses in the Southeast Asian palm oil sector, with a particular focus on Indonesia, which is the world's top palm oil producer. It was in the course of those advocacy efforts and endeavors, often in coalition with Indigenous communities, that I became aware of the indissoluble connection between human and more-than-human lives and futures in Indigenous cosmologies. That then became the focus of much of my subsequent research as an environmental anthropologist.
The questions of sovereignty and self-determination have also been really central to this research agenda. Again, inspired by my engaged work with Indigenous human and land rights activists, but also through my interdisciplinary engagement with scholarship that is trying to push against this idea of human exceptionalism by instead trying to situate humans through their many and diverse relationships to plants, to animals, to animals, to landscapes, and to ecosystems.
So, it was really that cross-pollination of different disciplinary perspectives, combined with my fieldwork experience among various Pacific societies that brought me to the center of my research on these questions of more-than-human relations and more-than-human sociality.
Kamea Chayne: Your new book, Shadow of the Palms: More Than Human Becomings in West Papua, looks at multi-species entanglements of oil and palm plantations in the region, showing how Indigenous Marind communities understand and navigate the social, political, and environmental demands of the oil palm plants. A lot of people who are attuned to environmental concerns are aware of the broad issues with palm oil plantations being key drivers, for example, of biodiversity loss and habitat loss, particularly in many rainforest ecosystems in Southeast Asia and beyond…
But I would love it if you could take us specifically to the frontier of palm oil plantation expansion in West Papua that you looked at. When did the tensions here begin, and what has that historical context led to the Marind peoples’ ongoing struggles of land defense today?
Sophie Chao: I've had the immense privilege to learn from and to think with one particular Indigenous community on the Papuan plantation frontier, a people who self-identify as the Marind peoples.
These are communities that are primarily dependent on the forest for their daily subsistence, as through practices of hunting, fishing, and gathering. Since 2008, these people have seen huge areas of their customary lands and forests targeted for conversion to monocrop oil palm plantations, both by national and international corporations.
That timing in 2008 is significant in two respects. First, it was a time when the Indonesian government was very much trying to promote regional economic development projects in West Papua. But it also coincided with the food, fuel, and financial crisis which led to a whole spate of large-scale land acquisitions or land grabs across the Global South, primarily for the purposes of agro-industrial developments.
There's a longer historical context to these more recent extractive projects.
West Papua is a region that has been under settler-colonial rule by Indonesia since the 1960s. It's a part of the world where Indigenous people's rights to sovereignty and self-determination continue to be denied. Where struggles for Indigenous survival and continuance are very much underway.
So, the arrival of these monocrops in many ways constitutes the latest manifestation in a much longer-standing history of settler-colonial occupation, now perpetuated [under] the guise of [these] large-scale, privately-owned plantations.
Kamea Chayne: This power dynamic of the economic and political and military corporate forces intruding upon the Indigenous livelihoods of the Marind people certainly is not unique.
You share that the oil palm developments in this region are clear examples of what anthropologists would call the disposessory dynamics of agribusiness expansion, which is a “process premised on and perpetuating structural violence in the form of land alienation, growing poverty, intergenerational displacement, and precarious rural livelihoods.”
Specifically, what are the developmental promises often made to the local and Indigenous peoples about the oil palm projects? What are some of the lies you've seen play out, as well as myths of such “civilizing projects for modernity?”
Sophie Chao: I borrowed the term “disposessory dynamics” from a fellow anthropologist, Tania Li, who's done extensive research in the palm oil sector in Indonesia to really refer to, as you describe, that attritive, displacing, and dislocating and disempowering effect of the economic, military, and corporate trifecta on many Indigenous peoples and places in Indonesia, and well beyond, across the tropics.
The kinds of development promises that tend to accompany these projects in Marauke and in West Papua more generally include economic benefits—salaries and employment stability in the form of labor on the plantations. They include also educational opportunities for workers themselves and for their children in the form of scholarships and access to schools in urban areas. They also often come tethered with this idea that integrating within a formal cash-crop economy will enhance the social mobility of rural Papuans and their integration within the modern nation-state of Indonesia.
As you can probably tell, there are some really strong civilization-esque rhetorics and assumptions underlying many of these promises, ones that also accrue heightened significance in West Papua, which is a Melanesian world region, and where dynamics of racism and racial discrimination are very much also part of this story of settler colonization. Papuans often tend to be represented as primitive, backward, forest-dependent peoples who can be “uplifted” from their backwardness through development projects like oil palm developments.
Lies, deceit, and dupery are also very much part of the story. Often, these promises are made in the early stages of oil palm development, but they do not end up materializing in practice.
There's a lot of opacity surrounding land surrender contracts that communities sign when they give away their lands for development. Often, the legal implications of these contracts across generational lines are unclear or unspecified, or they're simply not explained to communities who might be signing documents that they cannot themselves read or write.
One of the biggest issues has been that of consent rights. Often, these projects are framed by governments and corporate actors as a fait accompli. Communities might be consulted in the process, but it is not their consent that is sought. In other words, communities do not have space to say no to the project. It's more about getting them to say yes. That makes for a really uneven playing field from the very outset.
It's also in violation of numerous international human rights laws that do recognize the right of Indigenous peoples to give or to withhold their free, prior, or informed consent to any development that will affect their lands, their futures, their cultures, and their livelihoods.
Kamea Chayne: Certainly, there are the outright broken promises that were made. At the same time, I guess part of the challenge is that there's this promise of advancement, which has equated to making more and more people dependent on the more reductive cash economy, on working jobs in order to make a living. I think this is a challenge because for a lot of people who exist within “the modern world,” I really question that label and category as well, but for many people who only know and have existed in these systems, it can be hard to even consider what life could be like outside of the cash economy and why more jobs would not be a good thing.
It's just a difficult subject to unravel without going deeper to look at the deeper questions of what society could even look like beyond what so many people only know right now, living inside of the dominant cash economic system.
Sophie Chao: Just going back to the point about modernity and the modern world…. My stance alongside that of other Indigenous and critical race scholars has been that:
We all inhabit the same temporality and time—we just have very different ideas of what progress and advancement might look like.
These ideas of advancement through economic gain, material benefits, and so forth, are very much constructs that are being brought in by corporate and government actors and are very much at odds with the ways in which many Indigenous peoples themselves understand what a good life is and what a meaningful future might be, both for themselves and for the more-than-human forests that they have always historically, traditionally become with through relations of care and nurture and reciprocity and so forth and kinship. It's really important to problematize how we understand what a meaningful future means and how that can differ depending on one's cultural and spiritual framework.
But one of the biggest impacts of this push towards dependence on cash economies is that it in many ways disempowers Indigenous Marind peoples who have traditionally engaged in subsistence activities, who are very much attuned to the seasonality and the rhythms of their natural environment, and who are finding themselves very much caught in these pessimistic relations with corporate and state actors, which take away a lot of their freedoms and autonomy to make their own decisions about what their economic futures might be or might look like.
Kamea Chayne: Certainly a lot to hold front and center here.
What's critical to note is that it's really not just those with pretty clear ill intentions prioritizing extraction and profit over the well-being of local communities. It's not just these moneyed interests who have caused structural violence and systemic harm to the Marind people and their land base. It's also sometimes those with good intentions, but who may be imposing certain worldviews of separation not shared by, in this case, the Marind people, who have a more relational worldview in terms of how they view their forest community.
I'm alluding here to non-local conservationists who have tried to do good but may have ended up even aggravating some of the people's struggles for sovereignty and maintaining kinship with the forest. I wonder if you could speak more to how conservationism has affected the Marind people's lifeways and what this might tell us about the colonization of thought and knowledge, beyond purely having good intentions?
Sophie Chao: It's really interesting that you bring up conservation because so many of the people and so many of my companions in West Papua talk about conservationism and capitalism as what they call two sides of the same coin, for precisely the reason you've invoked. Often, both attempt to further, in many ways, the exclusion or dispossession of Indigenous peoples of the environments that they have always lived within—in this instance, rainforests and mangroves and swamps and marshes…
Conservationism in Papua takes two forms. One is government-led conservation initiatives, and the other is corporate-led conservation initiatives—here I’m thinking of corporations that are members of commodity certification standards, like the Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil or RSPRO, which is a standard that is seeking to raise the bar on corporate, social, and environmental safeguards in the palm oil sector. That often entails offsetting deforestation for oil palm production by setting aside conservation areas within these privatized concessions. But again, the problem here is that...
So many of these conservation practices are still very much anchored in a nature-culture divide.
The idea that nature as wildness is something to be preserved and safeguarded from human intervention, whereas culture is this realm of human activity and human meaning-making, human profit-making. That is a very, very alien concept to Marind and to Indigenous peoples the world over… this idea that nature and culture and the human and the nonhuman exist as two separate bounded realms.
On the contrary, plants, animals, and humans come into being through their relations, through their interactions, across space, and across time. They share stories and, to borrow Marind’s own terms, rights. Their existence is enabled through these ongoing interactions over time, and across generations.
Conservation can certainly constitute a form of violence.
Even, as you say, [though] it's often driven by good intentions. The forests, wildlife, and biodiversity are also increasingly threatened by plantation expansion, and that's why I think an anthropological perspective that explores the ways in which human communities who are most directly and deeply affected by these developments really, really matters.
Because their perspectives of what nature counts, and how nature should be preserved and sustained and nourished, are absolutely central to the story; because both human and non-human worlds are joined at the hip, and their shared futures are also very much part of a broader community of life.
Kamea Chayne: To take this even further to this point about good intentions often not going far enough, it's been really important for you to oppose the colonization of knowledge, which you name as the dominant approach still in research playing out when, for example, knowledge is taken as something “produced by and for the Global North, based on lives lived in the Global South.”
Sometimes when stories and research methodologies have become so normalized, it can be hard to see that there are alternative narratives and alternate ways to understand particular issues, or that the dominant approaches may even have caused harm.
I want to ask you why it's been critical for you to center the Marind people's own complex theories of change rather than otherwise, using an outsider lens to analyze and explain and tell their stories. So, in other words, why does that specific angle matter, and what might we miss out on otherwise?
Sophie Chao: One of the key Indigenous scholars that I've been thinking with about these questions of colonizing knowledge and decolonizing the canon is a Maori scholar called Makere Stewart-Harawira, who's written some really insightful and provocative pieces on what she calls knowledge capitalism.
Here she's referring to the ways in which academics and the academic institution in many ways perpetuate or replicate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their ways of knowing and being through the very praxis of our research and attentive methodologies.
I come from anthropology. I'm trained as an anthropologist. A discipline that, of course, has historically been reproduced, or been used to reproduce, this extractive logic of taking information from one part of the world to elaborate theories that then only really have traction or act as cultural capital in the Global North, in and for the Global North. So why did it matter to push [back] against that?
First of all, I think certainly in terms of social science and humanities, the climate of the social sciences and humanities is very much one of trying to decolonize these dominant ways of doing and conceptualizing research.
In large part, that call has stemmed from Indigenous scholars and critical race scholars themselves who are calling out against that theory versus ethnography divide, and hierarchy.
It also matters to center Indigenous peoples’ own theories of change and philosophies, because those theories and philosophies exist.
Marind have their own incredibly complex ways of critiquing, of conceptualizing the radical transformations that are happening in their life-world, much the same way that there are alternative canons of scholarship in Indigenous studies and critical race studies that are not central to the limelight yet, but that do exist. The very fact they're recognizing that existence in itself is already important, because unfortunately, it's not the way that students tend to be trained.
It's not scholarship that students tend to be exposed to within the university system. It's important to highlight these other ways of knowing, of critiquing, and of reflecting on social and environmental trends.
Kamea Chayne: As you strive to center the Marind people's own cosmologies and how they conceptualize justice and interpret the struggles that they've been facing, you share: “Very early on, I was struck by how Upper Bian Marind conceptualized the arrival of oil palm. The stories I heard in the field were not about global markets, corporate interests, or food security. Nor did they primarily revolve around the issue of rights—land, human, or Indigenous.”
What did you learn from centering them around people's own narratives and relationality and worldviews of what they've been experiencing? What do you mean when you say it invites a pluralization of justice itself as a situated practice and cultural construct?
Sophie Chao: That part of the book is really trying to take the reader through my own intellectual and personal rethinking of what it means to be in the world and what oil palm developments mean for Indigenous peoples on the ground. One of the biggest lessons I learned was that...
The arrival of oil palm on Marind lands and territories wasn't simply an environmental issue. It was one that was radically reconfiguring a whole range of different facets of their lifeworld.
It was reconfiguring their sense of place. It was transforming their sense of time and temporality. It was also having all kinds of dire impacts on their bodies and their relationships with plants and animals in the forest. The arrival of agribusiness was even transforming the way people dreamed. People were being haunted by these nightmares, of being possessed by the oil palm in their sleep—they would witness their own deaths on the plantation or become lost in plantations in the middle of the night. All the anxieties and disfiguration happening in the waking world were being amplified, and continuing even in the world of their sleep.
This really brought to light to me the fact that the destruction of the environment and the arrival of oil palm was nothing less than an existential crisis, one that was leaving no single sphere or species of life untouched, and that was affecting women themselves, as much as their plant and animal kin in the forest kingdom they considered to be sentient, objective, and meaningful agents and world makers and persons.
Why does that invite a pluralization of justice? For me, what I was trying to convey there is that Marind experiences and discourses about the transformations happening in their worlds point to the fact that they don't think about justice purely in human anthropocentric or individual terms, as is the case in a lot of dominant Western legal paradigms.
Instead, they think about plants, animals, and landscapes, too, as rightful subjects of justice. Beings that merit dignity, that have rights, that deserve nurture and care. That's in a pluralistic, non-anthropocentric way of thinking about justice, which makes space for a whole range of more-than-human beings with whom we unevenly share the world and who also merit respect, and who are also part of relations of reciprocity and reverence within Indigenous life worlds.
Kamea Chayne: In terms of the key takeaways here, I wonder how the fields of conservation and environmentalism and movements for justice, especially from the Global North, can learn from a more expansive view of justice and these invitations to shift how we even relate to the more-than-human world. I'm curious to think about what deeper differences we might be able to make by, again, going beyond just the intentions of wanting to create a healthier and more just world.
Sophie Chao: It's an indomitably complicated question, I think, not least because as an anthropologist, I've always tried to think about practices and notions such as justice as situated—and by “situated”, I'm borrowing the term from the feminist theorist Donna Harraway, a term that Donna uses to refer to the fact that all concepts and practices are grounded in particular places and particular times of particular contexts.
Perhaps one should not try to generalize or render abstract ideas like justice, even as we're trying to pursue our global struggles to overcome entrenched and emerging forms of injustice...
We need to stay with the trouble of the granularity, of the specificity of local lifeworlds.
What I think we can learn from Indigenous ways of thinking about what one might call multispecies justice again, is that the subject of justice need not be an individual. Again, even the idea of the human as an individual is belied by the fact that we are already composed of millions of other organisms in our gut and on our skin, evolutionarily speaking. So, this is a fiction of the individual at play here.
We need to push against that. We need to think through relations. We need to also think about the plants and the animals that we share the world with, including beings that we might not like, that we might not cherish, but that still constitute subjects of justice who have their own worlds and whose worlds count. A big part of that comes with the need to acknowledge vulnerability and violence as multispecies processes. By that, I specifically mean trying to move beyond notions of human exceptionalism or the superiority of the human species over other categories of being.
Instead, think through our shared vulnerabilities, that are, of course, heightened in the context of this planetary unmaking that is the Anthropocene, unattended forms of climate change, and so forth. Vulnerabilities are increasingly shared across species lines, and in the process, there's really an invitation here to rethink the kinds of violence that we have naturalized when it comes to so-called natural resources.
To stop thinking in terms of property and ownership, to stop thinking about plants and animals as resources, and instead think about them as persons, as potential kin, as subjects and agents, as world makers. That's a really big paradigmatic and conceptual shift for those of us who do live in worlds governed by a nature-cultural divide. It requires us to radically rethink who we are and how we sit within a far broader spectrum of life.
I think that's the challenge, and that is the invitation of the Anthropocene.
Kamea Chayne: Pretty profound to consider the changes that we could manifest in the world, beginning with digging deeper to questioning the worldviews that we hold about our place in the world and how we relate to the land and water and other more-than-human beings that share the earth with us.
Some of the threads from this conversation reminded me of my interview with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, in which he named the violence of inclusion and what might get lost in the process of being included within something you similarly have shared: “Rather than incorporating Indigenous knowledge(s) and practices into existing institutional architectures, I think that we should be seeking to restructure these architectures in the first place. An additive approach will not do.”
Again, with good intentions, people often conceptualize justice or the path to a more just world as involving just having more people having a seat at the table. But I think this challenges whether the agendas, rulebook, power dynamic, and relationality already established at the table ought to also be dismantled and questioned.
To ground what might otherwise feel a little abstract, I'd be interested in hearing your thought process on going beyond the politics of inclusion to restructuring the architectures altogether. What feels most top of mind for you to share right now on this topic, as we keep dreaming about our possibilities and our paths toward collective healing?
Sophie Chao: Your invocation there of this idea of the violence of inclusion makes me think of the work of Mark Rifkin, who I understand is also featured on this podcast series and who makes very similar arguments in relation to time.
This idea that the incorporation of Indigenous peoples within a modern Western notion of time and temporality also constitutes a form of violence through inclusion, even as it's trying to push against the framing of Indigenous peoples as premodern or stone-age communities. There's a really interesting resonance there between the work of Akomolafe and Rifkin, I think.
This idea of expanding justice alone as something that is insufficient is absolutely core to a lot of the conversations that I have with Indigenous communities in the field and also with Indigenous scholars who very much call instead for a transformative approach to justice. That really brings into question some of the most fundamental assumptions and premises and paradigms that undergird this very notion of justice.
Here I'm thinking in particular of the work of the Native American scholars, Eve Tuck and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who have had some very strong words to say about justice, of this very idea of justice as already inherently colonial in itself, relying on this construct of the nation-state and perpetually deferred.
What can we do to work towards that transformational praxis or philosophizing of justice? We need to bring Indigenous voices to the table, not just in an additive sense, but in a centralizing sense.
By that, I mean making Indigenous ways of being and knowing and thinking the core of our approaches, including the methodologies that we use in researching and understanding questions of justice and injustice, methodologies that might include oral storytelling, walking the forest, engaging, in particular, in rituals that might include singing, listening to rivers, learning to talk to mountains and really transforming the very way we understand understanding and learning.
The second thing I'd say in working towards this transformation is to stop thinking through entities or things or categories and...
To start thinking through relations or relationalities—the ways in which all things or categories are always already coming into being through their relationship to other things and other beings, whether they be human or other-than-human, past, present, or emergent.
That relational thinking, that relational ethos is at the heart of many Indigenous epistemologies. I think it would help us push against the human exceptionalism and the anthropocentrism that continues to constitute a fundamental premise or assumption of much of the dominant Western canon or ways of thinking about human and more-than-human worlds.
Kamea Chayne: As we're thinking about the expansion of palm oil plantations, all of this is in large part driven by the increase in the global market and demand for palm oil for various consumer goods and food products, even though, of course, a lot of this is being driven by a lot of the big food corporations attempting to look for cheaper mass-produced ingredients in order to create the products that they want to put out there. The pressures that the local communities in these particular regions face though are very much tethered to that global pressure.
So how can our listeners, wherever they are, understand their place and role and relationship with this very local and Indigenous struggle and where beyond setting with the deeper worldview shifts that we might need to make? Where could alleviating this pressure come from?
Sophie Chao: These local dynamics and processes that I describe in the book are very much embedded within a broader global political economy, one that is driven by a growing demand for palm oil not as a source of food, but also as a source of renewable fuel.
Palm oil is, in many ways, really good to think with in terms of examining the ways that we all, as consumers, are connected in more or less conscious ways with seemingly out-of-the-way places and seemingly out-of-the-way ecologies and environments.
First of all, because of the fact that palm oil is such a ubiquitous commodity in our everyday life, it's in many of our foods, it's in our cosmetics, it's in our toiletries, it's really ubiquitous. It shapeshifts across a whole range of different commodities that are part of our everyday life. In some ways, it can be really hard for those of us who are trying to practice more sustainable consumerism to exclude palm oil from our everyday consumer lives because it's rarely labeled as palm oil on many of the products that we purchase. Often, palm oil simply goes is labeled as vegetable oil, or it goes under some 250 different compound names. So, you might think you're doing the right thing, but then if you dig a little deeper into the ingredient lists, there's a high chance that palm oil is going to be there in one form or another. Consumers actually have a very limited capacity to do the right thing and make the right choice.
That's where I think legal and institutional regulatory systems need to be in place so that there's a better way of identifying what the products we consume contain. But there is a range of different initiatives that are happening now to try to raise the bar on the palm oil sector’s social and environmental impacts. One of them is the Sustainable Roundtable Table panel that I mentioned earlier, or the RSPO, which puts companies through a whole range of different audits to ensure that they're complying with the standards, principles, and criteria.
Other people would argue that one should boycott the palm oil sector entirely. I'm torn on this one.
There are millions of impoverished smallholders across the tropics who are now very much dependent on the palm oil sector to make a living. Boycotting the sector is going to have the most dire impact on those communities on the ground.
Whether boycotting is a solution or not is something that I have an answer to. What I think does need to happen is a rethinking of the way in which these developments are happening on the ground, including practices of consent. But I think palm oil is a really great invitation for all of us to think about the ways in which matter and commodities connect us to forms of violence and dispossession and injustice in other parts of the world. We are all unwittingly complicit in many of these forms of extraction and dispossession.
There are things we can do to push against that. We can get involved in environmental justice movements. We can try to make the right decisions or responsible decisions when we purchase commodities that might be labeled as sustainable or not. We might also inform ourselves about the ways in which Indigenous peoples are experiencing these transformations. To not just understand palm oil through its biodiversity impacts, but also through its human and social impacts. So, awareness-raising, making responsible choices as a consumer, and thinking about the way we're connected to these places through our everyday life are good starting points in addressing this wicked problem that is the palm oil sector.
Kamea Chayne: I really appreciate you naming that you are torn on this and feel conflicted about it because it is complex and it's important to recognize that oftentimes certain solutions posed as the silver bullet might cause detrimental impacts, at least in the short term, to some groups of people. That is always important to consider. Change is never going to be easy. So, it's important to sit with these difficult questions.
Lastly, as we're coming to a close for our main conversation, what are some of the most meaningful lessons you've personally, personally learned from engaging with the Marind people through deep listening and spending time with them? What are some of your calls to deeper inquiry or action for our listeners?
Sophie Chao: The biggest lesson that Marind taught me through a long and arduous apprenticeship during my fieldwork was to really start to engage my body as a tool or a medium for apprehending and appreciating everything else that is always already going on beyond the human world.
This was something that I was not attuned to when I first visited the field. It was something that my friend and skilled me in this art of “passionate immersion,” to borrow a single term, or this art of attentiveness through listening, observing, tasting, really bringing the body into the story, and asking questions of the world over and over again through one's senses.
That's a lesson that has very much stayed with me well beyond the realm of scholarly practice in my own everyday life, simply that of slowing down and paying attention to what's going on and moving beyond body-mind hierarchies and divides and rethinking the body itself as probably one of the best ways in which we can come to reset and reposition ourselves within more than human worlds and matters.
The Marind also taught me to be much more critical about my position, to be reflexive about the ways in which I myself am positioned within these structural systems of violence and extraction, including as an academic and as an anthropologist.
It's good to lose sleep over questions of position.
It's good to constantly question where you are and how you are, and question cultural differences, as part of fostering an ethos of respect and humility.
I would encourage readers to your body as a way of engaging with the world. I would invite you to be curious about the more-than-human world, which is often a backdrop to what we consider to be the more interesting activities of the human species. There's a lot going on there. If we slow down and if we notice, if we pay attention, if we pause in our productive everyday life, we'll start to become aware of other lives, of other meanings, of other interactions, of other meaning, making practices that are also part of this multi-species environment that we inhabit.
Read outside the canon, read scholarship by Indigenous academics, read scholarship from critical race studies, and read scholarship from queer scholars. Because when we start to read beyond the canon, we discover that there are many other canons, and also we start to work towards coalitional thinking, one that cross-pollinates different ways of knowing towards a practice of reckoning, recognition, and repair that works across space and time.
Expand your horizons by engaging with these diverse bodies of scholarship, all of which are really, really important in decolonizing the way we are, the way we think in conversation, and the respectful dialogue with others.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Sophie Chao: One of the most impactful publications that I read this last year is a book by one of my close friends and mentors, Christine Winter, who was a Maori political theorist from Ottawa, New Zealand. Her book is called Subjects of Intergenerational Justice, Indigenous Philosophy, The Environment, and Relationships. It came out last year with Routledge, and it's an absolutely beautiful work that challenges mainstream Western environmental justice theories by bringing into the mix Indigenous philosophies and their potential to solve global environmental problems.
The reason why this book has been so impactful for me is because of its generosity. What do I mean by that? Well, it's a book that doesn't just critique and challenge Western ways of knowing. It's a book that makes a really compelling argument that all members of societies, settler and non-state, can in fact benefit from embracing aspects of Indigenous philosophies and values. In doing so, we might actually help to enrich an impoverished way of seeing the world through this fictive divide between human and non-human and individual from its constitutive relations. So, it's a book that offers us an incredibly expansive way of thinking with more-than-human worlds. It's a book that offers a rich way of situating oneself in relation to others, human and non-human. It's a wonderful book in terms of the way it humbles and honors the processes of living and dying across generations and species.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Sophie Chao: Here I'm going to invoke a mantra that the Marind themselves frequently share with me during my time in the field, which was that of stop writing, start walking, stop talking, and start listening.
This is an injunction I received over and over again and took a long time to actually put into practice. What that is inviting us to do, whether it's inviting us to move away from the laptop, move away from the pen a notebook, and start again using one's body, walking to encounter plants and animals and landscapes. It's also inviting us to stop talking and instead open our ears to the sounds and stories and voices of the more-than-human world. I've always loved that mantra, and it's one I try to enact in my everyday life, as challenging as that can be, in the productionist, progressivist world we inhabit, in much of the Global North.
It's a wonderful invitation to just slow down and pause and pay attention, and to start to activate our senses in tuning and immersing in this incredibly rich and diverse world that we've been gifted.
Kamea Chayne: What are some of your biggest sources of inspiration right now?
Sophie Chao: The Marind peoples of West Papua, whom I've had the privilege to think with and learn from in the last decade.
The ways that their complex philosophies and practices and protocols that they trusted me with continue to shape the way I think and the way I engage with the world... They have been absolutely transformative for me, both as a scholar and as a human fleshly being inhabiting this wounded world.
Another big source of inspiration has been so many of my colleagues and companions and thinkers in the space of Indigenous studies, including Christine Winter, whose book I just mentioned, but also scholars like Robin Wall Kimmerer, Craig Santos Perez… all of whom are scholars working in an interdisciplinary vein and also drawing from their own situated life stories to offer us incredibly rich, complex, creative, critical and capacious ways of being in the world and rethinking our relations to plants, animals, oceans, and elements even. I have a huge debt and I want to acknowledge and recognize the gifts that these scholars’ thinking have brought to my intellectual and personal life.
Thirdly, I'd say one of my biggest sources of inspiration is happening right now outside of my window, in the form of dozens of bustling lorikeets who have been singing and storing for the last hour that we've been in conversation. The lorikeets of the Australian bush. Its customs, its kangaroos, its cassowaries. Its incredibly diverse and unique wildlife continues to be a source of inspiration. When I myself go and stop thinking and start walking in the company of these incredibly diverse and wonderful ecosystems.
Kamea Chayne: Sophie, thank you so much for joining me here today. It's been an honor to be in conversation with you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Sophie Chao: Don't give in to the paralyzing politics of despair. It can be really [easy] to lose hope given contemporary conditions. It can be really easy to sink into a sense of hopelessness and futility where nothing can be done to overcome some of these seemingly unsurmountable environmental, social and racial struggles and injustices that do plague much of the world we inhabit. Don't sink into that. Find allies, find companions in your struggles, and look for beauty in the world. It is a beautiful world.
It's a world worth protecting.
We can do so best in conversation and allyship with others. Others are there, so don't give up hope. Look for the beauty. Keep walking, keep attuning. Use your bodies and recall that this world is a gift. We can protect it and cherish it and make for better shared futures together.
