At the 2024 Iain McCalman lecture, Dr Sophie Chao considered how mourning has become a necessary disposition of our times: one that enables us to create and commemorate connections by recognising the vulnerability and finitude of non-human others. Dr Chao drew on philosophies, practices, and protocols of “multispecies mourning” enacted by Indigenous Marind People in the Indonesian-occupied region of West Papua, where mass deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion are undermining communities’ intimate and ancestral relations to forest landscapes and lifeforms. Learn more about the event here.
Timestamps
04:43 - Oil palm plantations in West Papua
14:05 - Noken weaving as a form of mourning
21:23 - Singing for lost kin
31:00 Planting to blur the line between suffering and surviving
Speaker
Dr Sophie Chao, Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow and Lecturer in the Discipline of Anthropology at the University of Sydney
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