Description:

Eating and being eaten: The meanings of hunger among Marind, West Papua

In this talk, Dr Chao will draw on her recently published book, Land of Famished Beings: West
Papuan Theories of Hunger (Duke University Press, 2025) to examine how Indigenous Marind
communities experience, conceptualize, and critique the condition of hunger in lowland West Papua
—a place where industrial plantation expansion and settler-colonial violence are radically
reconfiguring food-based ecologies, socialities, and identities. Instead of seeing hunger as an
individual, biophysical state defined purely in nutritional, quantitative, or human terms, Dr Chao will uncover how hunger traverses variably situated humans, animals, plants, institutions, infrastructures, spirits, and sorcerers. When approached through the lens of Indigenous Marind philosophies, practices, and protocols, hunger reveals itself to be a multiple, more-than-human, and morally imbued modality of being—one whose effects are no less culturally crafted or contested than food and eating. In centering Indigenous theories of hunger, the talk invites us to rethink the relationship between the environment, food, and nourishment in an age of self-consuming capitalist growth.

Dr. Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research
investigates ecology, capitalism, health, food, and justice in the Pacific. She is author of In the
Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (2022) and Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (2025) and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (2022) and Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life (2026), all published by Duke University Press. Chao is of Sino-French heritage and lives on unceded Gadigal lands in Sydney, Australia. For more information, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.