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Sophie Chao, 2022, In the Shadows of the Palm: More-than-Human Becomings in West 

Papua. Durham: Duke University Press, 336 pp. ISBN  978-1478018247. 

 

In the Shadows of the Palm explores how the Marind people in West Papua - colonised by the 

Indonesian state - experience, conceptualise and contest the social and environmental 

transformations provoked by deforestation from oil palm expansion. This is a pressing 

subject in the current moment of global planetary environmental crises as commercial oil 

palm is the second largest industry driving global warming: dramatically reducing 

biodiversity and damaging the habitats of multiple species. Through powerful vignettes and 

magic-like dream narration from long-term, immersive ethnographic fieldwork, Sophie Chao 

masterfully captures how these transformations reconfigure the relations of Marind to each 

other, to other species and to their environment.  

 

In a sense, this is a book about political ecology as the Marind seek redress for the violation 

of their land rights, their nearby environment being exploited, and themselves subjected to 

dispossession as the Indonesian state and settler corporations accumulate profits through the 

expansion of oil palm and the enclosure of common lands, forests and waters. In the book, 

Chao broadens the scope of dispossession by drawing on the strengths of ethnography and 

current efforts to decolonise multispecies studies. Chao suggests that by taking seriously the 

oil palm as an agent capable of violence, not just an object of human exploitation or a passive 

instrument of capitalist gain, allows us to conceptualise violence as a multispecies act where 

humans are not always the perpetrators and nonhumans not always the victims. This 

argument comes from Chao’s efforts to theorise ethnography and ethnographising theory by 

attending to how her Marind companions blame oil palm itself rather than human actors only: 

state, settlers, soldiers, corporations and oil palm are ‘introduced and invasive’ (pp. 5-7).  

 

Chapter 1 on Pressure Points starts with a political ecology background on land-rights 

struggle and state-led development through capitalist extraction of nature in Upper Bian. The 

state and corporate nodes of control over roads, military garrisons and plantations enable 



certain kinds of movement but interrupt the flow of organisms that enliven the forest – they 

impose borders so that Marind people can no longer travel freely to meet their relatives in 

Papua New Guinea. This chapter has a dramatic vignette where one of the checkpoint 

soldiers was conducting an ID-check of travellers and demanded formal papers. Darius, 

Chao’s Marind companion, cut his arm and wrote his name with blood, saying “Here is my 

identity, my blood. The blood of my land you stand on. The land you stole from my amai 

[plant and animal kin of Marind clans], the sago and dog” (p. 36).  

 

In Chapter 2, Chao explores the tension between state-led mapping of the forest and Marind’s 

own conceptualisation of living maps where “there are no straight lines in nature” (p. 53). 

Upper Bian communities have limited access to the official maps that stop their access to 

sacred sago groves. The chapter shows how maps not only bolster dispossession as they 

exclude places of cultural and spiritual significance and reduce political visibility, but also 

that they are ‘dead maps’ different from live maps illustrating animal movement and specific 

sounds as ways of understanding time and space to navigate the forests. Since oil palm 

plantations are silent, devoid of life, Marind are unable to navigate inside of them.  

 

Chapter 3 “Skin and Wetness” is based on Chao’s immersive everyday living together with 

Marind who still maintain their kinship relations with the sago grove and the other-than-

human beings that dwell inside it. It describes how Marind become anim [human] by having 

‘good skin’ and cultivating wetness (sweat, tears, blood, saliva-sharing) through physical and 

collective activities in the forest. Skin and the flow of wetness are emic concepts that are in 

dialogue with symbiotic becomings, or multispecies “skinship” [kinship via skin], through 

the flows of shared liquids and life across species lines (p. 83). Unhealthy looking skin and 

dry bodies reflect an imbalance that results in blockage of human and more-than-human 

social relations, Chao argues. Based on recent discussions on the materiality of pollution as 

well as that microbial becomings and the porosity of bodies, I wonder whether affect and 

oxytocin, as well as sharing of microbiomes, may also play a part in sustaining such shared 

personhoods. Another fascinating aspect of this chapter is the phenomenon of skin changing 

into the form of a different animal. The gripping story of Okto describes how he changed into 

the skin of a cassowary bird so much so over the years that his physical appearance and 

behaviour resembled that of a cassowary and provides insight into how being human is 

something that must be sustained, or it can be lost.  

 



Chapter 4 on the ‘Plastic Cassowary’ focuses on how wild animals that due to habitat loss 

caused by oil palm plantations become ‘domesticates’ that lack both wetness and animal skin 

and are neither food nor pets. The chapter delves into the similarities between domesticates 

and ‘settlers’ who are Muslim Indonesian, as they eat ‘settler foods’ like rice, instant noodles 

and cookies – while Marind sustain themselves from sago palm. These settler foods are seen 

to be plastic and defy the logic of decay and regrowth. Humans and domesticates that eat 

plastic foods no longer participate in life-sustaining exchanges of bodily flesh and fluids 

(wetness and skin) of the forest. In this worldview, settlers (pendatang), plantations, products 

and pets are all plastic – and they also “invade and multiply” (p. 107).  

 

This chapter also illustrates a key tension of the book: who are “the Marind”? One of Chao’s 

companions stated: “There are few native Marind left in Merauka. All of us are becoming 

pendatang [settlers]” (p. 106). Marind children do not speak the language, refuse to eat sago 

and eat noodles and rice, while young Marind men and women use urban cosmetics and 

whitening products to conceal their Papuan traits of curly hair and dark skin. Other Marind 

sell their land or seek employment on the plantations and are seen to trade Marind identity for 

an Indonesian one. This shows how diverse the interests, lifestyles and worldviews are of ‘the 

Marind’ and how things are rapidly shifting.  

 

Chapter 5 ‘Sago encounters’ is an evocative description of the intimate enmeshment of 

Marind life with the sago palm and its agency to share space with others, to produce 

themselves as environments for others to flourish in and from through multispecies 

assemblages – for Marind the sago palm is kin, and eating sago is affirming their connection 

to other Papuan people. One of Chao’s companions stated: “True Marind are Marind who eat, 

encounter, and know Sago.” Given the way Marind are becoming plastic, one then wonders, 

who is Marind and who is not? What kind of politics of purity may this give rise, especially 

when both settlers and domesticates are seen as alien and invasive?  

 

In Chapter 6, Chao argues that unlike sago palm, oil palm refuses multispecies relations. Here 

she develops the idea of a contrapuntal relationship between two vegetal beings: oil palm 

with its violence and asymmetry vs. sago palm and its harmony and complementarity. This 

raises the question of whether the oil palm is necessarily always bad, or if it has become a 

‘monster’ due to disrupted multispecies relations as it is being forced into a plantation (c.f. 



Tsing et al. 2017). Perhaps it is the mode of planting that is the problem, rather than the oil 

palm itself? 

 

Chapter 7 describes how Chao’s interlocutors perceive oil palm to stop time and their 

resistance to the development narratives of new oil palm projects, while Chapter 8 ‘Eaten by 

Oil Palm,’ focuses on how the arrival of oil palm has resulted in an increased frequency of 

dreams of being eaten alive. It wraps up the intense and vivid interludes of such dreams 

throughout the book. By paying attention to dreams of being eaten by palm, Chao sheds light 

on socio-psychological trauma and dispossession in the wake of settler colonial plantation 

expansion. Marind are not only being deprived of land and money – but they are being 

deprived of their sovereignty, culture, identity, and a Marind life world. Here, Chao points 

out how oil palm plantation and settler (plastic) life sows fissures from within: those that do 

not dream, are traitors. Collective dream sharing thus becomes a way of foresting a collective 

narration to form new solidarities.  

 

Overall, this is a brilliant book - beautifully written - based on rigorous and sensitive 

ethnography and sharp theoretical analysis that seamlessly blends ethnography with theory. 

Chao’s respect and admiration for her interlocutors shines through the text and brings to life 

Marind skinship with sago and more-than-human becomings -and how this is under threat by 

the oil palm as an actor of multispecies violence. In the Shadows of the Palm is an important 

contribution to environmental anthropology and will be of interest to those interested in 

extractive agriculture, posthumanism, indigenous studies and settler colonialism, 

decolonising anthropology, political ecology and development studies – both within and 

beyond Southeast Asia and Papuan Oceania.  

 

Camelia Dewan is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, 

University of Oslo on the research project Life Cycle of Container Ships: Ethnographic 

Explorations of Maritime Working Worlds funded by the Research Council of Norway. She 

holds an intercollegiate Ph.D. in Social Anthropology and Environment from the University 

of London (2017, SOAS and Birkbeck College) for which she obtained the RAI Sutasoma 

Award. Dewan is the author of Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development 

and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh (2021, University of Washington Press). 

 

 



Works cited: 

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, eds. 2017. Arts 
of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© 2023 Camelia Dewan 

 

 


