Sophie Chao, "Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger" (Duke UP, 2025)

In Land of Famished Beings : West Papuan Theories of Hunger (Duke UP, 2025), Sophie Chao examines how Indigenous Marind communities understand and theorize hunger in lowland West Papua, a place where industrial plantation expansion and settler-colonial violence are radically reconfiguring ecologies, socialities, and identities. Instead of seeing hunger as an individual, biophysical state defined…