This article explores how indigenous Marind of West Papua conceptualize the radical socio-environmental transformations wrought by large-scale deforestation and oil palm expansion on their customary lands and forests. Within the ecology of the Marind lifeworld, oil palm constitutes a particular kind of person, endowed with particular agencies and affects. Its unwillingness to participate in symbiotic socialities with other species jeopardizes the well-being of the life forms populating a dynamic multispecies cosmology, including humans. Drawing from ontological theories and the multispecies approach, I show how people in a remote place engage with adverse environmental transformations enacted by an other-than-human actor. Assumptions of human exceptionalism come under question in the context of a vegetal being that is exceptional in its own particular and destructive ways. Arguing for greater attention to other-than-human species that are unloving rather than unloved, I explore the epistemological frictions that arise from combining the anthropology of ontology with multispecies ethnography. I also attend to the implications of these theoretical positions in the real world of advocacy for those struggling in and against growing social and ecological precariousness.

中文翻译：

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在棕榈的阴影下：西巴布亚马林德的分散本体

本文探讨了西巴布亚的土著马林德（Marind）如何将大规模砍伐森林和油棕在其惯常土地和森林上扩张所造成的剧烈的社会环境转变概念化。在马林德生活世界的生态系统中，油棕树构成一种特殊的人，具有特殊的机构和影响力。它不愿与其他物种参与共生社会，这危及了包括人类在内的充满活力的多物种宇宙学的生命形式的福祉。通过本体论和多物种方法，我展示了偏远地区的人们如何与非人类行为者所造成的不利环境变化进行互动。在以其自身的特殊和破坏性方式是例外的植物存在的背景下，人类例外论的假设受到质疑。为了使人们更多地关注不喜欢而不是不喜欢的非人类物种，我探索了将本体论人类学与多物种民族志相结合而产生的认识论摩擦。我还关注了在倡导现实世界中这些理论立场对于那些正在努力和反对日益增长的社会和生态危机的人们的影响。