Paper short abstract:

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork among indigenous communities adversely affected by monocrop oil palm developments in West Papua, this paper examines the methodological, ethical, and epistemological challenges of reconciling multispecies and ontological perspectives on the more-than-world.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores how indigenous Marind communities in the Indonesian-controlled region of West Papua conceptualize the radical socio-environmental transformations wrought by large-scale deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion on their customary lands and forests. Within the 'ecology of selves' (Kohn 2013) of the Marind lifeworld, oil palm constitutes a particular kind of person, endowed with particular agencies and affects. Its unwillingness to participate in symbiotic socialities with other species jeopardizes the wellbeing of the lifeforms populating a dynamic multispecies cosmology - including humans. Drawing from ontological theories and the multispecies approach (particularly the "plant turn"), I explore how assumptions of human exceptionalism eschewed by posthumanist currents come under question in the context of a vegetal being that is exceptional in its own particular and destructive ways. Arguing for greater attention to other-than-human species that are 'unloving' rather than 'unloved,' I attend to the methodological, epistemic, and ethical frictions that arise when one strives to take seriously the perspective of plants on the one hand, and the perspective of situated humans with regards to plants on the other. I offer the notion of 'dispersed ontologies' as a means of appreciating the relationality of multispecies worldings while also attending to violence, asymmetries, and rupture within such worldings.