Review: Land of Famished Beings

Sophie Chao. Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger. Duke University Press. 2025. ISBN: 9781478032038. 272 pp.

Terese V, Gagnon (UNC-Chapell Hill)

Here, Sophie Chao returns readers to the occupied territory of West Papua’s Upper Bian. Following her prior In the Shadow of the Palms, Chao invites readers to witness the tensions wrought by oil palm’s incursion from a new perspective: that of women storying hunger. Taking her companions’ theorizations of hunger as the central focus, Chao works collaboratively with Marind women to open up hunger as situated, multiple, and internally contested. Simultaneously, she reflects on the non-innocence of ethnography—including the consumption of others’ hungers through the very reading of this book. 

The Introduction frames Marind women’s attempts to make sense of “a world of new and different hungers” (2). It opens with the hunger song of a Marind woman, Ana: one of several such songs throughout the book. Of the book’s four central questions laid out in the Introduction, the one that strikes me as the most urgent and broadly relevant asks: “How do Indigenous theories of hunger offer new ways of thinking about the relationship between the environment, food, and nourishment in an age of self-consuming capitalist growth?” (3) Indeed, the book insists on addressing theories of hungerspecifically instead of terms such as food insecurity and malnutrition. This is because such biomedical terms, the author explains, map over the diffuse experiences of hunger. For Marind, hungers are not only situated in individual bodies. Rather, they ripple out and multiply across more-than-human communities (5).

The subject of this book is explained in connection to the author’s career pivot from human rights advocate to ethnographer. It is a product of a shift towards more sustained, quotidian involvement in the lives of Marind, especially women (14). Thinking carefully about form, Chao calls attention to how theory comes to matter not only as something written but also as something storied and sung. This points to an asymmetry in how knowledge become legible and legitimized through the primacy of text and the circulation of the written word. Meanwhile, theories that are oral and embodied are routinely discounted. While the hunger songs are included here as text, I love that as songs their work as vehicles of theory is emphasized. I wonder if there might be spaces where these songs could be shared in their musical dimensions, such as in recordings on a companion website or even in live performances. I think there is tremendous scope for anthropologists and their interlocutors to collaborate more with people and institutions in the visual and performance arts to realize research outputs that are experienced through the body, in shared physical spaces.

Chapter 1 transports us to the sago grove where singing commences again. This time, though, it is not a hunger song. The song performed in rhythm with the communal work of cooking sago is a testament to nourishment through connections. As a few verses attest: “Here, freedom is found, here knowledge is found/ From the ancestors who guide us/ And the forest world that grows us” (26). The chapter explores the significance of forest foods for Marind, even as forest foodways are rapidly declining due to deforestation from oil palm. For the Marind women involved in this project and for Chao, storying satiation is essential to understanding the accounts of hunger in the following chapters and to avoid a deficit-centered approach. 

Like in In the Shadow of the Palms, the importance of sharing skin and wetness with the forest as reciprocal nourishment is highlighted. Also emphasized is how excursions in the forest create lively moments of ramai, punctuated by moments of stillness, damai. As such, when forest is lost to oil palm it is not only animal and plant species as sources of food that go but also relationships and ways of being. 

Chapter 2 opens with a discouraging scene. Residents of Khalaoyam village await the return of a fishing expedition only to have it arrive empty-handed. The river where they were fishing had turned grey with effluents from a palm oil-processing mill. When the company turned to hunting in the forest their game was scared off by bulldozers. In this vein, the chapter explores “new and different hungers” Marind are subject to following the arrival of oil palm (56). These new hungers are situated in relationship to prior “new hungers” stemming from Dutch colonization: namely the plume trade and forced sedenterization. Such hungers were transformed and continued under Indonesian colonization. Bringing this history up to the present is the Indonesian state-sponsored initiative MIFE, which in 2010 sought to transform Marind territory into a “rice barn” (62) for Indonesia and the world. 

In the name of national food security, MIFE oversaw hundreds of thousands of hectares taken from Marind through duplicitous dealings. In return, Marind men are offered strenuous, precarious jobs in the plantations. Marind are given industrial foods such as bags of broken rice and instant noodles. These “plastic” foods fail to satiate but add insult to injury. Snack wrappers litter schoolyards. Women are admonished at clinics when their children are found to be malnourished despite their having access to these “modern” foods. Internal strife grows as people try to scratch out a living either in cooperation with or opposition to oil palm. 

Hunger has always existed for Marind. Yet, as Chao observes, prior hungers were fixed in duration, shared, and made meaningful through cosmology. The hungers accompanying oil palm are presented as different and indefinite. They cannot be quelled with the industrial foods offered as supposed payment for the theft of lands. Reading this chapter, I wondered how new these “new hungers” are if they have been a feature of life in one form or another since Dutch colonization. How is this tension made sense of within living memory for Marind?

Chapter 3 documents the lives taken by roads and other hungry beings. Here human and non-human animals are “eaten by the road” (87). Pigs, snakes, and others become roadkill when hit by trucks from the plantations on newly built roads. Marind people also become seriously injured or die in crashes. Hungry roads eat lives in less obvious and less grieveable ways too. Roads lure Marind away to cities where they lose connection with their home communities and “the forest ecology and forest foodways” (89). 

Just as they carry community members away, roads also bring new people: namely men associated with oil palm and the government. Frequenting roads is seen to deplete the kinship and cultural ties of Marind men. Meanwhile, foreigners arriving via roads are characterized by Marind women as people with out-of-control hungers for money and human flesh. These voracious hungers are not contained within foreign “others” but ripple out and transform Marind. Some women wonder about what kinds of ancestors Marind men and women will become.

Chapter 4 tells the story of a couple, Veronika and Matthais who had been unable to have children. When they finally give birth to Oskar, the child suffers from rickets and other serious effects of malnutrition. A visit to the clinic prompts a debate between the child’s parents about the causes of hunger. Veronika observes that there are many explanations for the hunger spreading across Marind lands. She states, “everyone knows what hunger feels and looks like—but no one agrees on why it exists and why it won’t go away” (114). This debate over hunger’s causes is the subject of the chapter. 

Like Veronika, some women believe their communities are being punished by ancestral spirits, dema, angered by the sale of ancestral lands. Others wonder if the oil palm corporations are the new dema. Some, following their Catholic faith, see hunger as a form of redemptive sacrifice. Still others reject this later view and blame capitalism and the unchecked hunger of the powerful that consumes Marind and people like them around the world but is never sated. 

Chapter 5 interrogates how to story violence and death, persistence and life. Chao writes about the death of a child, Mina, from hunger. In so doing, she also writes the dilemmas of writing hunger. After the child dies, a relative hands Chao her notebook and pen and instructs her to “Write it. Write it all” (139). Immediately, a different relative tells Chao not to write about their deaths, insisting, “You must tell the stories of our lives” (139). This charged conversation highlights the limits of writing ethically about violence.

The companion who urged Chao to write seems to have the final word stating, “We have fed you as best we can. Now, you tell the stories as best you can. This is your responsibility” (139). This statement resonates deeply with my own experiences doing fieldwork in a context where food was in insufficient supply. Due to its stakes and personal relevance, I find this chapter to be both the most necessary and most challenging of the book. Chao poses important questions about the non-innocence of ethnography and of writing hunger. I am left wanting more in explicitness regarding how she came to the conclusions she did for herself. Hearing more details about this decision-making process and its outcomes would be instructive for me and other ethnographers working in related contexts.

Similarly, a practice of hesitant anthropology is proposed but its contours remain blurry. I found myself nodding vehemently with calls to disrupt smooth narratives and question the structures and pace of the academy, which constrain what is possible in our work. Given changing realities of academic production, I wonder how a practice of hesitant anthropology in 2026 builds upon prior modes of post-modern and reflexive ethnographic writing. In short, I found the subject matter and vulnerability of this chapter vitally important and only wished for more detail.

Tucked modestly within the chapter is a crescendo in scope of the book’s theoretical implications. On pg. 147, Marind women speculate about a world in which the hungers of some have grown insatiable on a global and even inter-planetary scale. In such a world, they explain, some like them must go hungry so that others can eat well. Yet, even those who eat up the forests and bodies of Marind are seemingly unsated.

A Marind woman named Olivia asks:

Are these people never full?… Are they never satisfied? They say Papuans are the ones who are hungry and malnourished—but in fact, they are the ones who are always hungry for more…So, I wonder—is hunger a sign of progress, or poverty? Is becoming hungry the same as becoming modern? (147). 

Olivia insists that “These are all questions we need to ask ourselves” (147). Herein lies the work we are called to do as a consequence of consuming the stories in this book.

The Conclusion and Coda extend this question “that we all need to ask ourselves”. The Coda is a hunger song hauntingly composed by Mina, the child whose death is recounted in Chapter 4, and to whom the book is dedicated. It seems to pointedly asks us, as global consumers of oil palm and readers of this book: 

“When you eat my forests, can you feel my hunger?” (176) 

If the central message of this book is that hungers are not individual but shared—that they ripple through relationships—then perhaps reading and being troubled by these stories is indeed a step towards feeling Mina’s hunger. 

Land of Famished Beings would be a meaningful addition to courses on medical, food, and environmental anthropology as well as those on global political economy. It will be of great interest to those working on forest-industrial frontiers in Asia and the Pacific and beyond, as well as those working on issues of food sovereignty. This book will hold special relevance for anyone working collaboratively with colonized and occupied communities and with those living under conditions of food apartheid.