10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5417
application/pdf
2239-625X
5417
2
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urn:nbn:it:unica-28919
Silvia Pergetti
Anuac
Sophie Chao, In the shadow of the palms: More-than-human becomings in West Papua, Durham, Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 336
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
11
Book reviews
2022-12-01
2022-12-01
2022-12-23
2022-12-23
261-264
1
Silvia Pergetti
2022/12/01
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5417
261
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
2239-625X
2
264
urn:nbn:it:unica-28919
Sophie Chao, In the shadow of the palms: More-than-human becomings in West Papua, Durham, Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 336
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                                         2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 261-264




                                                                            Recensioni

Sophie Chao | In the shadow of the palms: More-than-human becomings in West
Papua, Durham, Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 336.




    Sophie Chao’s In the shadow of the palms is a brave, compelling piece of eth-
nographic work, cleverly structured and delightful in its elegant yet accessible
prose, offering a new, powerful take on the longstanding issue of agribusiness
expansion in Indonesia.
    Centrally, the book is an exploration of the many, unsettling ways in which
the lifeworld of the Upper Bian Marind people is becoming – in the words
of Chao’s “companions” – abu-abu. The Upper Bian Marind are an Indige-
nous Papuan group residing along the Bian River, in Indonesia’s West Papua
province. Over the past centuries, a range of exogenous forces have worked to
undermine their lifeworld – from the Dutch occupation of New Guinea and re-
lated missionisation, to the incorporation of West Papua into Indonesia. Most
recently, the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) scheme has
opened Marind customary lands up for grabs by domestic and international
corporations. Vast areas of forest have been felled or burned to make space for
oil palm plantations. Most literally, abu-abu – meaning “grey” – refers to the
sky turning hazy and dark from the smoke raised by forest burning. Figurative-
ly, abu-abu has come to encapsulate the mood of uncertainty surrounding the
possibility of life for the Marind, and for the nonhuman lifeforms with which
they share skin.
    The book, then, tells a bitter story – “written from a place of grief and loss”.
Although the author does not deploy dispossession as the primary lens for the
analysis of her material, this is a story of how the Marind are increasingly be-
coming dispossessed not only of their land, but, most importantly, of their way
of life. Indeed, dispossession here is not chiefly material, but follows the logics
and mechanisms that Amitav Ghosh (borrowing from science fiction writing)



This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Silvia Pergetti
2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 261-264.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5417
262                                             Sophie Chao | In the shadow of the palms

has described as “terraforming” (The nutmeg’s curse: Parables for a planet in
Crisis, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2021). Through terraforming, the
settler eradicates the more-than-human webs that give nourishment and sus-
tenance to Indigenous people – both physically and culturally.
   In an astute theoretical move, in this account the settler is the nonhuman,
i.e., the oil palm. Leading to her main argument, Chao “demands that we take
seriously the possibility of plants […] as immoral subjects”. Indeed, the oil
palm “kills” and “eats”, and drives out, and dries up, destroying everything in
its wake. In contrast to the native sago palm – which provides the Marind with
their staple starch food as well the ability to socially reproduce – oil palm does
not want to make (s)kin, either with them or with other species. In this sense,
Chao offers a sobering counterpoint to the default celebration of “entangle-
ments” in posthuman anthropology as inherently benign and life-giving. On
the contrary, In the shadow of the palms alerts us to the politics of exclusion
in which plants may themselves partake, e.g., in relation to communities po-
sitioned as subhuman under colonial and technoscientific regimes. Through
Chao’s work, “violence reveals itself as a multispecies act”.
   At the same time, the book also seeks to pluralise talks of plants. The palms
in whose shadow the Marind endure, are plural not only in that oil palm plan-
tations are encroaching on sago groves; most notably, they are plural because
the Marind themselves refuse to deny oil palm the chance of becoming other-
wise. Indeed, Chao’s companions, while resenting the plant’s voraciousness,
also pity it for its enslavement and segregation in the plantation. The Upper
Bian Marind ultimately regret not “knowing” the oil palm – i.e., not being able
to relate to it in generative ways. Chao’s politically engaged anthropology,
then, avoids superimposing (Western) theory atop ethnography; instead, it
strives to do justice to the conflicted yet creative ways in which the Marind
engage with the settler plant. Chao’s account, thus, is not of the ontology of
Marind, but “of Marind as ontologists of their own changing worlds”.
   The book is cleverly structured into four sections, each consisting of two
chapters standing in contrapuntal relation to one another. The first chapter
explores how the movement of humans and nonhumans across the landscape
– central to the process of becoming rooted in the Upper Bian (and generally
in Melanesia, see Catherine Allerton, Potent landscapes: Place and mobility in
Eastern Indonesia, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2013) – is curtailed
by roads purportedly built to facilitate people’s mobility. The second chapter
focuses on the maps’ fixedness through which the state and corporates see the



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Sophie Chao | In the shadow of the palms                                           263

forest and contrasts the fluidity with which the forest is rendered in the con-
text of participatory mapping exercises conducted by the Marind. The third
chapter – about how the forest provides the space for the Upper Bian Marind
to be socialised as humans (anim) through the sharing of skin and wetness
with human and nonhuman others – relates to the fourth one, which explores
the straying into the village of cassowaries and other forest beings, following
their dispossession by the oil palm. The fifth chapter describes more-than-
human sociality in the sago groves; knowing sago and its many, human and
nonhuman stories, figures centrally in the process of making (s)kin with this
plant. The sixth chapter, on the other hand, describes the lack of sociality
characterising the plantation. The question – what does the oil palm want?
– stands in contrapuntal relation to that which the sago palm gives. If sago
nourishes, oil palm eats; if sago shares space, oil palm takes it; if sago sings,
oil palm silences. The last two chapters are also in relation to each other. The
first explores a changing sense of time among the Marind and hopelessness
as resistance, while the second takes dreams to be both the latest frontier of
dispossession and violence, as well as the site of hopeful possibilities.
   The rhythm of points and counterpoints is in line with Chao’s project of
letting the Marind tell their own stories; in a world that is becoming abu-abu,
stories are not straightforward. As people struggle to make sense of their own
changing worlds, multiple and even conflicting interpretations are offered
– counterpoints to counterpoints. For example, in the second chapter, the
fixedness of government maps is questioned by Chao’s companions, in that
inconsistencies are often found in these maps – is the state purposedly trying
to confuse them? Or is the state itself confused? At the same time, participa-
tory mapping exercises – while truer to the way the Marind see the world – do
not seem to work as an activist tool: if they want to be seen by the state, the
Marind too may have to see like the state. In specific abu-abu ways, then, the
ambiguous effects of oil palm developments generate ambivalence and inner
conflict. The abu-abu, in other words, is as inside as it is outside – an all-per-
vasive greyness that enfolds the lifeworld of the Upper Bian Marind. In the
refusal to dissipate this greyness into black-and-white narratives of good vs.
bad – i.e., indigenous people vs. the oil palm – lies the beauty of Chao’s work.
   All in all, In the shadow of the palms is an urgent and nuanced piece of eth-
nographic work, enriching previous anthropological accounts of agribusiness
expansion in Indonesia with an original focus on the nonhuman. It also offers
a compelling resource for the study of climate change, which – as Kathryn Yu-



                                     2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 261-264
264                                             Sophie Chao | In the shadow of the palms

soff reminds us (A billion black Anthropocenes or none, Minneapolis, University
of Minnesota Press, 2018) – lies in historical continuity with the racializing
geo-logic of the plantation.

                                                                      Silvia Pergetti
                                                            University of Edinburgh
                                                         silvia.pergetti@gmail.com




2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 261-264
