Anthropologist Sophie Chao’s newly published book offers an unsettling reimagining of hunger—not as a purely nutritional condition, but as a relational and political state. Based on immersive ethnographic fieldwork with Indigenous Marind communities in West Papua, the book explores how hunger is experienced and theorised in the context of mass deforestation and the expansion of industrial oil palm plantations.

The book is a continuation of Sophie’s long-term work with the Marind people. Sophie’s Iain McCalman Lecture in 2024 explored practices of multispecies mourning amongst the Marind in this same context of destruction. This publication enters into another conversation with Marind subjectivity around metabolic justice and how food systems and landscapes are fraught with inequality: who is fed and who is hungry?

In West Papua, the plantation economy feeds global markets and consumers in the West, while undermining Indigenous food sovereignty and ecological integrity. Reflecting on this, Chao says “capitalism is a cannibalistic machine to feed a finite few at the detriment of people who know the land best.” She explores with the Marind how hunger is not confined to the human body, instead traversing humans, animals, plants, spirits, sorcerers, institutions, and infrastructures—entities bound together in reciprocal relations of feeding and being fed. Chao’s work challenges dominant biomedical and developmental framings, revealing how hunger is entangled with ecological devastation, colonial legacies, and extractive capitalism.

Importantly, Chao does not position herself outside these dynamics. She reflects deeply on her own role as a researcher, describing herself as a “hesitant anthropologist” who has been working with the Marind -and exploring her relationship with this community- for many years. She acknowledges the ethical tensions of conducting fieldwork in precarious places, including the ways her presence exacerbated food insecurity among the Marind—unable to provide for herself, she became another body to feed. This stance adds a critical layer to the book, inviting readers to consider their own entanglement in ‘consuming’ stories that perhaps should not be told.

As one of SEI’s core researchers in the Environmental justices and Biodiversity, conservation, and culture themes, Sophie progresses our explorations around what it means to have a sustainable, diverse, and culturally meaningful food system. Importantly, her work involves us in the ways we do justice through storytelling, the way we story worlds, and who we story them with.

Sophie will launch her new book at Gleebooks on Friday 10 October, in discussion with other experts including SEI member Hannah Della Bosca. Register now!