Land of Famished Beings

In <i>Land of Famished Beings</i> 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.