The 2024 Iain McCalman Lecture: Multispecies mourning - grief and resistance in an age of ecological undoing

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.Timestamps04:43 - Oil palm plantations in West Papua14:05 - Noken weaving as a form of mourning21:23 - Singing for lost kin31:00 Planting to blur the line between suffering and surviving SpeakerDr Sophie Chao, Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow and Lecturer in the Discipline of Anthropology at the University of Sydney Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.