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This talk explores the cultural, political, and affective significance of mourning among the Indigenous Marind communities of rural Merauke West Papua, whose intimate and ancestral relations to native plants, animals, and ecosystems are increasingly threatened by mass deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion. The paper examines three emergent practices of ‘multispecies mourning’ on the Papuan oil palm frontier – the weaving of sago bags as a form of collective healing, the creation of songs prompted by encounters with roadkill, and the transplanting of bamboo shoots as part of customary land reclaiming activities. I argue that multispecies mourning offers potent avenues for Marind to memorialize the radical loss of lives and relations prompted by capitalist landscape transformations. At the same time, multispecies mournings constitute forms of active resistance and creative refusal in the face of extractive capitalism’s ecocidal logic. Bringing together plants, people, and places, their dispersed sentience and materiality offer hopeful pathways for multispecies solidarities, in and against the rubble of agro-industrialism and its necropolitical undergirdings.

Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Sophie is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice. She previously worked for the Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia, supporting the rights of forest-dwelling Indigenous peoples to their lands, resources, and livelihoods. For more information, visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.

Zoom Link:
https://bit.ly/3XEVLe2
Meeting ID: 812 1179 0732
Password: 968025