Members of the La Trobe University Anthropology program are thrilled to announce that the 2022 Joel Kahn Lecture will be delivered at 10 am AEST on Thursday 27 October by Dr. Sophie Chao, Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at University of Sydney.
Please see below for an abstract of the lecture and bio. Also please be sure to complete registration for the event as Zoom details will only be provided to registered participants.
ABSTRACT
"Plantation Modernities and Beyond-Human Imaginaries: Insights from the West Papuan Oil Palm Frontier," Dr. Sophie Chao, University of Sydney
Recent years have seen a resurgence of anthropological interest in the topic of the plantation – an industrial formation and enduring logic that has been instrumental to the rise of colonial racial capitalism and the construction of modern nations and natures. In this talk, Dr Chao will draw on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the West Papuan oil palm frontier to examine how Indigenous Marind communities experience, conceptualize, and contest the impacts of plantation modernities on their more-than-human lifeworlds. Chao will situate Marind experiences against West Papua’s regional history of settler-colonial incursion and the plantation’s global history of racializing violence and capitalist extraction. In particular, Chao will demonstrate how Marind philosophies of multispecies co-becoming constitute a form of grassroots, epistemic resistance to the simplifying, hierarchizing, and disciplining logic of plantation regimes past and present. Chao will assess the implications of counter-plantation thinking for Indigenous communities inhabiting resource frontiers, for an anthropology beyond the human, and for all of us invested in oil palm’s lifeway as everyday consumers and planetary dwellers. In doing so, Chao will demonstrate the ongoing salience of Joel Kahn’s anthropological legacy in three interrelated respects: first, the need for critical, comparative analyses of modernity as a sociocultural construct; second, an attention to the continued ability of ordinary people to transgress state-sanctioned identities; and third, an appreciation of the implication of anthropology itself in the culture of modernity and its exclusionary dynamics.
BIO
Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in the Discipline of 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 (Duke University Press, 2022), which received the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award in 2021. She is also co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press, 2022). Sophie’s forthcoming monograph, Hunger: An Indigenous Theory, will be published by Hau Books (Chicago University Press) in April 2023. Sophie previously worked for the human rights organization Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia, supporting the rights of forest-dwelling Indigenous peoples to their lands, resources, and livelihoods. For more information, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.
