Multispecies mourning: grieving as resistance on the West Papuan plantation frontier

ABSTRACT

This article explores the cultural, political, and affective significance of mourning among the Indigenous Marind communities of rural Merauke West Papua, whose intimate and ancestral relations to native plants, animals, and ecosystems are increasingly threatened by mass deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion. Cross-pollinating Indigenous more-than-human philosophies with environmental humanities scholarship, I examine three emergent practices of ‘multispecies mourning’ on the Papuan oil palm frontier – the weaving of sago bags as a form of collective healing, the creation of songs prompted by encounters with roadkill, and the transplanting of bamboo shoots as part of customary land reclaiming activities. Multispecies mourning offers potent avenues for Marind to memorialize the radical loss of lives and relations prompted by capitalist landscape transformations. At the same time, multispecies mournings constitute forms of active resistance and creative refusal in the face of extractive capitalism’s ecocidal logic. Bringing together plants, people, and places, their dispersed sentience and materiality offer hopeful pathways for multispecies solidarities, in and against the rubble of agro-industrialism and its necropolitical undergirdings.

KEYWORDS:

• Mourning
• grief
• multispecies
• resistance
• Marind
• West Papua

Acknowledgements

I thank the Marind communities of Khalaoyam, Mirav, and Bayau for their hospitality, generosity, and patience throughout my fieldwork in the Upper Bian. I also thank the Secretariat for Peace and Justice in Merauke and PUSAKA for facilitating my research in West Papua. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Conference (June 2021), Australian Anthropological Society Annual Conference (November 2021), and New York University Department of Anthropology Seminar Series (November 2021). I thank the participants of these events for their insightful comments, particularly Marie Alohalani Brown, Cristina Bacchilega, Rebecca H. Hogue, Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Olivia A. Quintanilla, Craig Santos Perez, Faye Ginsburg, Amy Zhang, and Elayne Oliphant. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Pseudonyms have been used for all persons and places, except for major districts, and provinces. Terms in Marind – the native language of Upper Bian Marind – are underlined and terms in Indonesian and logat Papua – the Papuan creole of Indonesian – are italicized.

2 I undertook eighteen months of fieldwork in the Upper Bian villages of Khalaoyam, Mirav, and Bayau as a doctoral candidate between August – December 2015, March – July 2016, and August – November 2017, and as a human rights advocate between March – June 2013.

3 The multispecies mournings examined in this article are practiced by Marind men and women alike, with the exception of weaving, which is traditionally carried out by women. However, it is important to note that is primarily Marind women, like my friend Myriam, who have initiated these every day, micro-political modes of mourning and resistance. Taking place in hidden patches of forest and grove, at the side of empty roads and highways, and on the outskirts of monocrops, these micro-political practices complement the male-dominated, public-facing, sometimes violent, modes of protest and advocacy that Marind engage in as part of their struggle to curb oil palm expansion, and that Marind women tend not to participate it for the safety of themselves and their children.

4 The term noken is used across Indonesian West Papua to refer to traditional handwoven bags. In Papua New Guinea, traditional handwoven bags are called bilum. Marind refer to these items alternately as noken or nokenmahyan.

5 Together with the concept of ‘skin’ (igid), ‘wetness’ (dubadub) is a central marker of an individual’s social, moral, and ecological standing within Marind society. Skin is qualitatively evaluated – a good skin is one that is shiny and smooth. Wetness, on the other hand, is quantitatively assessed through its degree of abundance. Both features are inter-related – a body becomes glossy when it produces fluids in great quantities. People improve their skin and enhance their wetness by participating in physical activities and exchanges through which their moral and social relations to each other and to forest organisms become signified in their flesh and fleshly transformations (Chao 2022).

6 Karen Barad’s (2017) notion of ‘re-membering’ speaks to the deeply embodied, practice-based ways in which multispecies mourning reaffirms more-than-human lifeways and deathways in rural Merauke. The labour of ‘re-membering’ goes beyond ‘remembering’ – understood as a mental or cognitive process – in that it entails a literal recomposition of the matter, meanings, and temporalities binding the human and other-than-human members of multispecies worlds. As a ‘work of mourning’, it testifies to the endurance and resilience of peoples and places as they strive to do justice to the erasures and obliterations generated by colonialist and capitalist violence (Barad 2017, p. 58, 76).

7 On the political valences of other weedy parasite species in the West Papuan oil palm sector, see Chao (2021e).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research under a Post-PhD Research Grant [Gr. 9942], Engaged Anthropology Grant [Gr. EAG-136], and Dissertation Fieldwork Grant [Gr. 9196]. Additional funding was received from University of Sydney under the Faculty Research Support Scheme (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) and the Postdoctoral Startup Research Allowance (Charles Perkins Centre) and from Macquarie University under the Fieldwork Research Grant (Department of Anthropology). The research presented in this article was approved by the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee, Reference Number 5201500051 on March 31, 2015. No financial interest or benefit has arisen from the direct applications of this research.

Notes on contributors

Sophie Chao

Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research explores the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Sophie is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press, 2022). For more information, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.