Anthropologists are Talking – About Contemporary Plantations. Technologies, Violence, and Vulnerability Across Geographies and Genealogies

ABSTRACT

On the surface, plantations are vast settled spaces in which neatly aligned rows of crops and disciplined workers produce profits for corporations. Yet despite their seemingly orderly, regimented, and enduring form, many aspects of plantation life are unsettled, dynamic, and fragile. In this conversation, we discuss the practices and meanings of plantation settlements and unsettlements in Melanesia, highland South America, and Indonesia. In doing so, we explore the intrinsic coloniality and racial character of contemporary plantations and the possibilities of anthropology in this domain. We call for a critical, comparative agenda exploring ‘the plantation multiple’ as an enduring yet contingent socio-ecological, spatio-temporal, and racial-capitalist formation, enacted through contextually situated sets of practices, ideologies, and epistemologies. Such an agenda centers attention to mutually constitutive colonial and capitalist logics, relationships of force and failure, violence and care, and the multispecies nature of plantation-driven simplification, proliferation, and resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Plantation violence
• political technologies
• vulnerability

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The ethnographic focus of Chao’s work is on the Indonesian-occupied region of West Papua. While Indonesian rule has significantly and violently reconfigured lives and landscapes in this territory, the chosen positioning of the region here seeks to recognize the distinctive cultural, ethnic, historical, ecological, and spiritual ties that West Papuans sustain with other communities of life across Melanesia. These ties often operate in contradistinction to the regional complexes of Indonesia and Southeast Asia (see Chao 2021c: 281; 2022a, 240).