https://englishkyoto-seas.org/<Book Review>
Tania Murray LiSophie Chao. In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human-Becomings
in West Papua. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, August 2024, pp. 395-398.

How to Cite: Li, Tania Murray. Review of In the Shadow of the Palms:
More-Than-Human-Becomings in West Papua by Sophie Chao. Southeast AsianStudies, Vol. 13, No. 2, August 2024, pp. 395-398. DOI: 10.20495/seas.13.2_395.
Link to this book review:https://englishkyoto-seas.org/2024/08/vol-13-no-2-book-reviews-tania-murray-li/

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Book Reviews395

1987 essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.”Thanks to Fukuoka Madoka and her collaborators, the many Ramayanas of Southeast Asia havenow been made more accessible not just to scholars and specialists but also to a general audienceof all readers who want to learn more about one of the world’s greatest epic traditions.
Laura Gibbs
University of Oklahoma (retired); LauraGibbs.net

In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human-Becomings in West Papua
Sophie Chao
Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
Nausea. Anger. Grief. With these three words, Sophie Chao introduces the reader to the feelings
that overwhelm her whenever she drives through the vast, monotonous fields of monocrop oilpalm that blanket Marind lands in West Papua. Two years after I first read Chao’s book, I am still
viscerally affected by her powerful portrayals of Marind communities and the devastation towhich they have been subjected. They make me shudder.
Nausea. Chao’s poetic and poignant style of writing enables the reader to feel revulsion at
the destruction of Marind lifeworlds, which comprise human and more-than-human kin, mostespecially the generous, nurturing sago palm. Marind people are also nauseous: they retch withthe fumes of agricultural chemicals and choking smoke from corporate forest clearing. They
recoiled when Chao offered to show them drone footage of the surrounding plantations: the sightof tens of thousands of hectares of decimated forest was too distressing. Anger. Chao explores
the corporate greed and the false promises of development and jobs that government officials rollout to justify the ruin that plantations cause. Marind people are angry, but they must be careful
about expressing anger in a context of repression and retribution. Grief. Chao clarifies that what
has been lost is gone forever. Marind people know there is no way to reconstitute their multispecies
lifeworlds or the memories, stories, and dreams that anchored them to particular landscapes andevents. They survive, but they are not healthy: shorn of access to sago palms and the plants andanimals that sustained them, they eat white rice and instant noodles, if they can afford them.
Cassowaries that belong in the forest wander into hamlets confused and lost, unsure where they
are supposed to be. Dreams are nightmares that bring no rest. Skin dries up and loses its shine.
Rivers cease to flow. Everything is out of kilter.
Together with Pujo Semedi, I have studied West Kalimantan’s oil palm plantation zone andthe particular form of domination to which customary communities are subjected when their landis occupied by corporations (Li and Semedi 2021). The violence we witnessed in West Kalimantan

396Book Reviews

was mainly “infrastructural”: once community forests and farms have been flattened by bulldozers
and a plantation is installed, the violence is built into the landscape and there is little further needfor guns and guards. Yet in West Papua, as Chao explains, arrests, beatings, and mysterious disappearances are ongoing; the military and police are directly and continuously involved in surveillanceand patrols; plantation roads are guarded by men with guns; and activists and researchers are
exposed to attack. For Marind people, crossing a plantation to get to remnant patches of sago
forest is a dangerous venture. Everything is company property. Like the lost cassowary, Marindpeople struggle to figure out where they are supposed to be in a hostile landscape that has noplace for them.
Tragically, the desolate world Chao describes is the future: almost all the land in Sumatra andKalimantan that is suited for oil palm has already been licensed to oil palm corporations—22 million
hectares thus far, a third of Indonesia’s farmland. Now the corporations are fixated on Papua as
the new frontier. Much of the land in Papua is peatland and swamp forest, quite unsuited for oilpalm, but corporations owned by multinationals and Indonesian tycoons are taking it anyway—more
than 3 million hectares thus far—backed by government officials who are paid for issuing plantation
licenses (Varkkey 2012; Transformasi untuk Keadilan Indonesia [TuK] 2018; Chain Reaction
Research 2019). Hence, money will still flow, contractors will contract, forests will be felled, androads will be built even if not a single palm is planted.
In the government’s eyes, as Chao shows, Marind people are primitives and their dependence
on the forests is evidence of their backwardness. Their success in sustaining themselves forcountless generations with knowledge and skill count for nothing since they do not produce formarkets and furnish no profits for middlemen or payoffs to government officials. According toIndonesia’s land law, Marind people have no legal right to their customary land—they are meresquatters on the state-claimed forest. Hence, from a government perspective, taking over theirlands and forests has no cost—and as for the people, they are, in the words of the anthropologist
Clifford Geertz, “like mosquitos,” a nuisance to be flicked out of the way (Geertz 1963, 110).
Corporations and their government allies make no provisions for how Marind people andother customary landholders will sustain themselves once their land and forest is gone. The
prospect of plantation jobs is hollow since most jobs go to migrants, and many Marind hesitate towork for corporations that have wreaked such devastation. But sustaining themselves in the oldway is increasingly difficult: plantation corporations do not just occupy some of the land, they occupy
all of it; and when multiple plantations are located side by side, they leave no space for customary
landholders to survive. Rather, plantations “creep right up to the edge of the villages, encroachingon sago groves, hunting zones, sacred graveyards, and ceremonial sites” (p. 20). Marind people
cannot move away to avoid oil palms; they are forced to live in their shadow.
As the map in Fig. 1 shows, in the district of Merauke, where Chao focused her research, oilpalm plantation concessions (white lines), industrial timber plantation concessions (white dashes),

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Fig. 1 Merauke District, West Papua
Source: Nusantara Atlas (2022)

and logging concessions (dotted lines) have taken control over huge areas, excluding previous land
users and land uses in the name of corporate-led development.
Chao brings to her writing two sensibilities: that of an activist researching the dispossessory
dynamics of oil palm expansion across the Southeast Asian region (Colchester and Chao 2011),
and that of an anthropologist steeped in contemporary theorizing around multispecies being andcritiques of the residual coloniality of anthropology. This book demonstrates both sensibilities,
but its tone is set by the second: it is the words, practices, and analyses of Chao’s Marind interlocutors and their entanglement with multispecies kin, living and dead, that direct the narrative.
The author explains how she designed her fieldwork in collaboration with her Marind hosts,
respecting their decisions about what she should write about and how they wanted their lives
and struggles to be represented. The book is based on 18 months of fieldwork, much of it spent
with Marind families in the sago groves. It was during these ventures that Chao learned how
Marind people live, work, play, recall histories and adventures, and map out their worlds throughstories and relationships. The subject matter could easily lend itself to exoticism, but there is notrace of it in Chao’s careful prose. Nor does Chao succumb to the temptation to end the bookwith a redemptive twist—as if Marind peoples’ survivance somehow outweighs the devastationand the reader can relax. Chao notes that she is still haunted by everything she experienced, andI am still haunted by her writing. It is an exceptional book on all counts—theoretically astute,ethnographically rigorous, and above all profoundly moving.

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Book Reviews

Tania Murray Li
University of Toronto
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3360-8146
References
Chain Reaction Research. 2019. 28 Percent of Indonesia’s Palm Oil Landbank Is Stranded. ChainReaction Research - Sustainability Risk Analysis. https://chainreactionresearch.com/report/28percent-of-indonesias-palm-oil-landbank-is-stranded/, accessed April 22, 2024.
Colchester, Marcus and Chao, Sophie, eds. 2011. Oil Palm Expansion in South East Asia: Trends andImplications for Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples. Moreton-in-Marsh: Forest Peoples
Programme and Sawit Watch.
Geertz, Clifford. 1963. Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Li, Tania Murray and Semedi, Pujo. 2021. Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil
Palm Zone. Durham: Duke University Press.
Nusantara Atlas. 2022. Atlas of Deforestation and Industrial Plantations in Indonesia. Nusantara Atlas.
https://map.nusantara-atlas.org/?s=c3bd3baead6b67739d0a1a3e882e7d87, accessed April 22, 2024.
Transformasi untuk Keadilan Indonesia(TuK). 2018. Tycoons in the Indonesian Palm Oil. TuK Indonesia.
https://www.tuk.or.id/2019/03/tycoon-in-the-indonesian-palm-oil/?lang=en, accessed April 22,2024.
Varkkey, Helena. 2012. Patronage Politics as a Driver of Economic Regionalisation: The Indonesian
Oil Palm Sector and Transboundary Haze. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 53(3): 314–329. https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1467-8373.2012.01493.x.

Public Health in Asia during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Global Health
Governance, Migrant Labour, and International Health Crises
Anoma P. van der Veere, Florian Schneider, and Catherine Yuk-ping Lo, eds.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022.
Global Health and South Asia in a Time of Crisis: A Short Review
Introduction
Even though the Covid-19 pandemic may soon be behind us, researchers will be occupied foryears trying to better understand its causes and how to handle the complex issues it brought up(Ali et al. 2024). Choosing the right actions required to address public health concerns in an effective
manner while preserving confidence in public authority will be one of the challenges facing
policymakers going forward (Aslam and Gunaratna 2022). In that regard Public Health in Asia during
the COVID-19 Pandemic is relevant and provides some guidance, though it leaves certain significant
holes unfilled. The chapters in this edited volume provide an extensive study of the worldwide