Land of Famished Beings

Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, and coeditor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice, both also published by Duke University Press.

Note on Language, Nomenclature, and Images ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Satiation and Hunger in the Forest 25 2. Hungers That Never Go Away 54 3. Of Roads and Other Hungry Beings 86 4. Making Sense of Hunger 112 5. Writing Hunger 136 Conclusion 165 Coda 175 Notes 177 Bibliography 211 Index 245

"In this book, Sophie Chao brilliantly metabolizes the entanglements of hunger, health, colonialism, and capitalism in West Papua. Land of Famished Beings is a must-read for students and scholars of environmental anthropology and multispecies ethnography. Moreover, it is essential reading for anyone passionate about justice in the Pacific, a region hungry for justice." - Craig Santos Perez, author of Navigating CHamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization "Sophie Chao gained insight into Marind people's conceptualizations of hunger by living and working with them and by including them as cothinkers and cotheorists. Arguing that hunger cannot be understood outside of rapacious capitalism, Chao shows how hungry people themselves make this argument, how they debate it, and how they work to counteract it. Evocatively written and expertly argued, Land of Famished Beings, exemplifies how to carry out and write about anthropological fieldwork in the twenty-first century." - Emily Yates-Doerr, author of Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm