Sophie Chao

The University of Sydney, Anthropology, Faculty Member

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I am an environmental anthropologist and multispecies ethnographer interested in the intersections of capitalism, ecology, Indigeneity, health, and justice in the Pacific. For more information, see www.morethanhumanworlds.com

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Lethbridge College

University College London

Michael T Heneise

University of Tromsø

Andreas Nordin

University of Gothenburg

Kathrin Eitel

University of Zurich, Switzerland

Kathryn Poethig

California State University, Monterey Bay

Evelina Gambino

University of Cambridge

Rachel E Smith

University of Aberdeen

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Papers by Sophie Chao

Dreams

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2024

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licens... more

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People, plants, plantations: Responses and reflections

Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2024

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Chao, Krupa and Li Anthropologists are Talking About Contemporary Plantations

Ethnos, 2024

On the surface, plantations are vast settled spaces in which neatly aligned rows of crops and dis... more On the surface, plantations are vast settled spaces in which neatly aligned rows of crops and disciplined workers produce profits for corporations. Yet despite their seemingly orderly, regimented, and enduring form, many aspects of plantation life are unsettled, dynamic, and fragile. In this conversation, we discuss the practices and meanings of plantation settlements and unsettlements in Melanesia, highland South America, and Indonesia. In doing so, we explore the intrinsic coloniality and racial character of contemporary plantations and the possibilities of anthropology in this domain. We call for a critical, comparative agenda exploring 'the plantation multiple' as an enduring yet contingent socio-ecological, spatio-temporal, and racial-capitalist formation, enacted through contextually situated sets of practices, ideologies, and epistemologies. Such an agenda centers attention to mutually constitutive colonial and capitalist logics, relationships of force and failure, violence and care, and the multispecies nature of plantation-driven simplification, proliferation, and resistance.

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Spaces and Subjects of Rupture

Antipode, 2024

Papua, was drawing patterns in the dirt. 1 His body swayed back and forth as he traced rows of st... more Papua, was drawing patterns in the dirt. 1 His body swayed back and forth as he traced rows of straight, crisscrossing lines. The child stared up vacantly when his mother and father, Eliana and Kristianus, tried to converse with him, only to return his gaze and fingers to the soil. Marius had been like this since he had strayed into a nearby oil palm plantation while gathering tubers with his brothers, just under two moons ago. After a week-long collective search, the villagers had found him at the concession outskirts, stripped naked, walking aimlessly, mumbling incoherently. No one knew what had happened to Marius because he would not speak and his eyes were empty. His body was limp and his mood lethargic. His sleep was crippled by bad dreams, punctured by screams, sobs, and spasms. Marius' waking hours were spent drawing lines in the dust-endless rows of lines. "Before the plantations," Eliana explained, "Marind never got lost on the land. The forests, groves, and swamps were our guides. We knew them better than the wrinkles on our foreheads or the birthmarks on our thighs. But since oil palm arrived and destroyed the land, much has been lost. Our forests. Our bodies. Our children. This world feels strange and mad, full of silence and screams and straight lines. Everywhere becomes nowhere. We feel lost. We get lost. We lose ourselves."

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Intervention Symposium-"Plantation Methodologies: Questioning Scale, Space, and Subjecthood" Edited by Alyssa Paredes, Sophie Chao, and Andrés León Araya 1

Antipode, 2024

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Multiespecie, Más-que-humano, No-humano, Otro-que-humano: Reinventando los lenguajes de lo animado en la era de destrucción planetaria

Tekopora

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Decoloniality and Tropicality: Part Two

by Sophie Chao and R. Benedito Ferrão

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 2023

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics publishes new research from arts, humanitie... more eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics publishes new research from arts, humanities, social sciences and allied fields on the variety and interrelatedness of nature, culture, and society in the tropics. Published by James Cook University, a leading research institution on critical issues facing the Tropics. Free open access, Scopus Scimago Q1.

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Spent Earth

Critical Times, 2023

This is an open access arti cle dis trib uted under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC B... more

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The Plantationocene as analytical concept: a forum for dialogue and reflection

The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2023

This forum for dialogue and reflection invites empirical and theoretical inquiries that criticall... more This forum for dialogue and reflection invites empirical and theoretical inquiries that critically interrogate plantations in their myriad forms through the conceptual analytic of the Plantationocene. In doing so, we understand, and invite attention to, the Plantationocene, both as a key for interpreting histories of local to global development and for understanding the role of plantationlogics today. Not all contributors need agree that the Plantationocene is a useful concept. Rather, we envision the forum as providing opportunity for constructive debate and for highlighting the role of plantations across historical and contemporary sites, scales, and subjects.

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Multispecies violence, ontological murk, epistemic resistance: Insights from the West Papuan plantation frontier-A response

The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2023

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the settler-colonized region of Merauke,... more Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the settler-colonized region of Merauke, West Papua, In the Shadow of the Palms examines how Indigenous Marind communities experience, conceptualize, and contest the adverse impacts of industrial oil palm expansion on their intimate and ancestral relations to the landscape and its diverse human and other-than-human lifeforms. Grounding its analysis in Indigenous Marind philosophies, practices, and protocols of multispecies relationality, the work engages with broader questions surrounding the necrobiopolitics of the plantation as a fraught contact zone, where introduced cash crops like oil palm come to embody and perpetuate the extractive and disciplining violence of "colonial racial capitalism" (Koshy et al., 2022). As Warwick Anderson (2023) suggests, the Indigenous theories of life at the periphery of industrial monocrops presented in this work complicate seemingly facile binaries of all kinds-forest and plantation, human and non-human, near-kin and colonizer, among many others. This complexity surfaces most clearly in relation to the ontology of oil palm itself-a plant and person whom Marind resent as a threatening assailant of their multispecies lifeworld, but whom many also pity as a tragic victim to anthropogenic, institutional, and biotechnological manipulations that reduce it from lively organism to lethal capital. In reframing violence as a multispecies act, Marind thus push us to consider capitalism's "biological allies" (Crosby, 2003) not just as destructive intruders but also, in Jakelin Troy's (2023) terms, as "confusing, destructive insiders." In rural Merauke, the presence and proliferation of these beings at once undermines and enlivens Indigenous communities' speculations surrounding the form and possibility of multispecies justice (Chao et al., 2022) within plantations as landscapes that have and continue to be tethered to colonial imaginaries of modernity, development, and progress (Figure 1). Grappling with the animacy of plants and animals, as Sally Babidge et al. (2023) note, raises challenging questions surrounding who gets to speak with, for, about, and against the more-than-human world in all its diversity, complexity, and situatedness. It points to the limits of the textual medium in conveying the richly sensory, affective, and kinesthetic dimensions of more-than-human relations. 1 Marind theories of change on the plantation frontier further prod us to expand the scope and subjects of an "anthropology of life" (Kohn, 2013) beyond

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Introduction: Multispecies Justice

Cultural Politics, 2023

Co-authored with Danielle Celermajer

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The Colonial Roots of the Kangaroo Controversy

Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History , 2023

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Health, harm, and habitus: Techniques of the body in COVID-19

Thesis Eleven, 2023

This article revisits French sociologist Marcel Mauss' notion of 'techniques of the body' to anal... more This article revisits French sociologist Marcel Mauss' notion of 'techniques of the body' to analyze the emergence of corporeal and behavioral norms instituted to prevent the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Centering its analysis on the early stages of COVID's global spread, the article examines a range of everyday, micro-practices that reveal how the pandemic changed our awareness, uses, and assessments of our own and others' bodies. In a context where to not touch was to care, people often struggled to find a balance between maintaining social civility and sustaining collective health. Failure to adapt the body to pandemic conditions, or instances of COVID faux-pas, resulted in discomfort, embarrassment, or annoyance on the part of those who perceived this behavior as irresponsible, dangerous, and selfish. Changing bodily practices thus became subject to judgment in ways that sometimes obscured the uneven distribution of risk and protection afforded to differently privileged or vulnerable human communities as they grappled with the uncertain phenomenologies of pandemic living and dying. COVID-19 corporealities, both fleshly and virtual, thus reveal the conjoined articulation of the social, biological, cultural, moral, and psychological in our bodily movements, expressions, and assessments. In contrast to Mauss' theorization, many techniques of the body in the Covidscape were experienced as new, contextual, shifting, and improvised. They spoke to necessity and challenge of articulating a different relationship to the world and to others, enacted in the minute and mundane practices of everyday life, through which macro-level processes and forces are embodied and evaluated.

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Decolonizing the Tropics: Part One

etropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics , 2023

This special issue is a collection of papers that addresses and enacts the theme of decolonizing ... more This special issue is a collection of papers that addresses and enacts the theme of decolonizing the tropics. Each article provides a sense of how we can untangle ourselves from entrenched colonial epistemologies and ontologies through detailed articulations of research practice. Drawing together humanities and social sciences, the papers collectively address questions of whose voices are heard or silenced, what positions we write from, how we are allowed to articulate our ideas, and through which mediums we present our research. In doing so, the contributions foreground the critical importance of these and other questions in any move towards decolonizing the tropics.

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In the shadow of the palms

Antennae, 2023

In the shadow of the palms Centered on Sophie Chao's new book, In the Shadow of the Palms: More-T... more In the shadow of the palms Centered on Sophie Chao's new book, In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, this conversation between the author and Antennae Editor Giovanni Aloi considers the empirical and intellectual context and contributions of the work, its ethical and conceptual insights into the moral subjectivity of plants as actors and resources, and the forms of radical imagination, hope, care, and justice offered by Indigenous philosophies, practices, and protocols of interspecies relationality in the midst of plantationocenic disruption and planetary unraveling.

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Multispecies, More-Than-Human, Non-Human, Other-Than-Human: Reimagining idioms of animacy in an age of planetary unmaking

by Sophie Chao and Catherine Price

Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 2023

Life on Earth is sustained by interconnected more-than-human entanglements. In the era of the Ant... more Life on Earth is sustained by interconnected more-than-human entanglements. In the era of the Anthropocene, many of these webs are unravelling due to climate change, biodiversity loss, toxicity and pollution, natural resource extraction, and water and soil depletion. In order to help address these challenges, The Anthropocene and More-Than-Human Writing Workshop Series, funded by the British Academy, brought together early career researchers from different disciplines to share ideas and knowledges. As part of The Anthropocene and More-Than-Human World Writing Workshop Series, Sophie Chao, presented her collaborative research project, The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Following this presentation, Catherine Price and Sophie Chao took the opportunity to discuss the terms multispecies, non-human, and more-than-human, amongst others. These terms are increasingly appearing in interdisciplinary scholarship in the space of multispecies studies, posthumanism, the environmental humanities and others. The epistemological assumptions and ethical stakes involved in using these terms are also considered. The conversation illustrates that in trying to define terms such as multispecies or the more-than-human, complexities are not explained away. Instead, these terms reveal how incredibly-and generatively-messy beyond-human worlds really are. The terms discussed are also fundamental to understanding and addressing the Anthropocene as an epoch of planetary unmaking.

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Plantation

Environmental Humanities, 2022

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Bouncing back? Kangaroohuman resistance in contemporary Australia

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2022

This article explores how human and animal agencies shape the socio-ecological lifeworlds of kang... more This article explores how human and animal agencies shape the socio-ecological lifeworlds of kangaroos as cultural icons, native wildlife, problematic pests, and commercial meat in contemporary Australia. Kangaroos' resistance to Western, colonial ways of knowing and ordering the world fundamentally challenged the classificatory logic and foundations of early natural science. Kangaroos' biological and behavioral resistance to domestication and farmingthe traditional loci of animal exploitationspeaks to their inherent wildness, at the same time as it reveals their complicated dependence on ecosystems adapted for introduced livestock. Meanwhile, kangaroos' resistance to government-endorsed population control programs, and the contested logic of (over)abundance that justifies kangaroo culling, both challenges and legitimates human calculations of who and what "counts" as worth conserving or killing. In tandem, the sensorial and symbolic valences of kangaroo flesh, compounded with the growing voices of animal welfare movements, generate visceral and political resistance to kangaroo meat as an unpalatable foodstuff. The article further centers the polysemic valences of kangaroos as a form of resistance to symbolic unity and coherence. Existing as many things at once, kangaroos eschew classification and treatment as any one thing. Instead, their ontology multiplies across the many epistemologies vying to determine kangaroos' actual being and future becoming. The article concludes by assessing the opportunities and challenges of centering resistance and its diverse epistemic, vitalist, symbolic, and carnal manifestations to understand animal lifeways and deathways amidst entrenched capitalist and colonial regimes, whose reproduction depends on the production of the non-human as "killable."

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Un)Worlding the Plantationocene: Extraction, Extinction, Emergence

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 2022

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Eating and Being Eaten: The Meanings of Hunger among Marind

Medical Anthropology, 2021

In this article, I explore how Marind communities in West Papua experience and interpret hunger. ... more In this article, I explore how Marind communities in West Papua experience and interpret hunger. Drawing from Indigenous discourse and practice, I examine how agro-industrial expansion and commodified foodways provoke multiple, conflicting hungers among Marind-for sago, "plastic" foods, money, and human flesh. In tandem, Marind themselves are subjected to the insatiable appetite of various invasive entities-corporations, the government, roads, cities, and oil palm. I argue that hunger constitutes a symbolically charged, culturally constructed, and morally laden experiential mode through which Marind characterize and contest capitalist modernity and its more-than-human dynamics of eating and being eaten.

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Dreams

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2024

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licens... more

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People, plants, plantations: Responses and reflections

Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2024

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Chao, Krupa and Li Anthropologists are Talking About Contemporary Plantations

Ethnos, 2024

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Spaces and Subjects of Rupture

Antipode, 2024

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Intervention Symposium-"Plantation Methodologies: Questioning Scale, Space, and Subjecthood" Edited by Alyssa Paredes, Sophie Chao, and Andrés León Araya 1

Antipode, 2024

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Multiespecie, Más-que-humano, No-humano, Otro-que-humano: Reinventando los lenguajes de lo animado en la era de destrucción planetaria

Tekopora

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Decoloniality and Tropicality: Part Two

by Sophie Chao and R. Benedito Ferrão

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 2023

Download

Spent Earth

Critical Times, 2023

This is an open access arti cle dis trib uted under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC B... more

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The Plantationocene as analytical concept: a forum for dialogue and reflection

The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2023

Download

Multispecies violence, ontological murk, epistemic resistance: Insights from the West Papuan plantation frontier-A response

The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2023

Download

Introduction: Multispecies Justice

Cultural Politics, 2023

Co-authored with Danielle Celermajer

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The Colonial Roots of the Kangaroo Controversy

Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History , 2023

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Health, harm, and habitus: Techniques of the body in COVID-19

Thesis Eleven, 2023

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Decolonizing the Tropics: Part One

etropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics , 2023

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In the shadow of the palms

Antennae, 2023

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Multispecies, More-Than-Human, Non-Human, Other-Than-Human: Reimagining idioms of animacy in an age of planetary unmaking

by Sophie Chao and Catherine Price

Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 2023

Download

Plantation

Environmental Humanities, 2022

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Bouncing back? Kangaroohuman resistance in contemporary Australia

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2022

Download

Un)Worlding the Plantationocene: Extraction, Extinction, Emergence

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 2022

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Eating and Being Eaten: The Meanings of Hunger among Marind

Medical Anthropology, 2021

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Gardens of Gold - Book Review

Oceania, 2021

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Elusive Caimans and the Anthropologist as Devil

Anthropology Now, 2016

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From Stone Age to Real Time - Book Review

The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2016

Clarification is needed; maybe in the anthropologist's next work? To conclude, the book can be hi... more Clarification is needed; maybe in the anthropologist's next work? To conclude, the book can be highly recommended for the reasons quoted above. Solid, updated references, along with engaging illustrations and a very useful index (authors, localities and keywords) facilitate easy reading of the 215 pages found here, all of which are well written. Furthermore, an eloquent style makes the book accessible, not only for interested academics, but for a general audience unaware of the dynamics that exist in the GMS. It is certainly a must-read for development professionals if they want to broaden their vision of what development means and what it does for and to people; people who, after all, simply follow what the projects invite them to do.

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Palma Africana - Book Review

American Anthropologist, 2019

This ethnography of "getting by" in the Republika Srpska offers a range of perspectives on the co... more This ethnography of "getting by" in the Republika Srpska offers a range of perspectives on the contemporary Western Balkans. Brković engages with a wide set of literature on sociality and modes of citizen interaction with institutions and political structures. The book marks a refreshing break with the rigid demarcations of "gatekeeping concepts"whereby anthropologists of Southeast Europe and, in particular, the former Yugoslav space are expected to contribute to literatures on ethnonationalism, collective violence, the politicization of history and memory, and trauma and reconciliation. In addition to acknowledging this expectation, Brković also refers to negative reactions to her decision to pursue research in Republika Srpska as opposed to the more populous Federation. This is hardly surprising, given professional anthropology's tendency to align with victims rather than perpetrators of state violence. Republika Srpska owes its existence to the military successes of Bosnian Serb forces, who enjoyed the backing of the Yugoslav National Army and its successor structures throughout the period from 1992 to 1995. Brković acknowledges that the town where she focused her fieldwork, Bijeljina, was the site of Serbian paramilitary massacres of Muslims in 1992. Reflecting the author's primary engagement with British social anthropological traditions, Managing Ambiguity foregrounds social personhood, showing how "individuals" are in fact networked, connected, obligated, and interpellative selves-in-suspension. The particular field of action that the author explores is the domain of care for others, tracing the ways families needing special medical or other therapeutic care beyond the capacity of local providers mobilize financial support. Successful families appeal to any and all possible resources in this effort, and Brković shows the key role of relationship-building through Ratka, an influence

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The Road: Uprising in West Papua - Book Review

Australian Foreign Affairs, 2020

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Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds - Book Review

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2020

Drawing from over forty years of empirical and theoretical work in science and technology studies... more Drawing from over forty years of empirical and theoretical work in science and technology studies (STS), feminist studies, ethical theory, and environmental humanities, María Puig de la Bellacasa's Matters of Care offers a speculative exploration of the significance of care for thinking, knowing, and living in more than human worlds (p. 1). Puig de la Bellacasa demonstrates that expanding the scope of worlds beyond the human both extends and challenges notions of care that have all too often been tethered to idealizing, moralizing, gendered, hegemonic, and anthropocentric values, practices, and institutions. She highlights the centrality of care-both given and received-to human and other beings, while also attending critically to care's ambivalent and situated meaning, enactment, and consequences. Far from an innocent venture, care reveals itself decidedly non-innocent, non-symmetrical, and multilateral (p. 221). These premises motivate Puig de la Bellacasa to approach care both as a modality and object of speculation, which in turn shapes the book's central argument that "an ethical reorganization of human-nonhuman relations is vital, but what this means in terms of caring obligations that could enact nonexploitative forms of togetherness cannot be imagined once for all" (p. 24). The book is structured as five chapters divided into two parts. Part I engages with Book Review

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Why Multispecies Ethnography Matters for Human Rights and the Climate

Earth Cries, 2021

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Decoloniality and Tropicality: Part Two

by R. Benedito Ferrão and Sophie Chao

eTropic, 2023

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Decolonizing the Tropics: Part One

by R. Benedito Ferrão, Sophie Chao, and Hannah Regis

eTropic, 2023

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