Nature in Culture: Multi-Sensory Mapping with the Marind People

Sophie Chao has worked with the Marind people of Indonesian West Papua for over a decade. With them, she has watched as the Indonesian government and large agribusinesses have entered traditional Marind territories and converted them to Palm Oil plantations.Here she shares with us her experience of what was to be a two-day mapping expedition – which grew to a three-week encounter with Marind song, lands, vegetation, bird and animal life and a map of coexistence rather than a map of topography, or ownership, or territory. It became a multi-sensory map, a map of shifting flexible demarcations. This multi-sensory world view is demonstrated too in the Marind response to and empathy for the Oil Palms – a ‘greedy’ plant that is cast adrift from its African kin and transplanted, replacing the native flora of West Papua.Timestamps00:30 Introduction – Christine Winter05:20 Maps: Tools of Domination10:40 On a Journey with the Marind People in Re-mapping the Land16:30 Communicating a Map of Entangled Relationships and Coexistence22:15 Marind Activism and its Challenges30:15 What Would the World Look Like If Power Dynamics Were Reversed?33:55 Marind’s Emotive Response to Oil Palm InvasionSpeakersDr Sophie Chao, University of SydneyDr Christine Winter, Postdoctoral Fellow, Sydney Environment InstituteFind out more about The Re-(E)mergence of Nature in Culture Series: https://bit.ly/2LHl9xf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.