'There's No Place for Us to Run to Now': Mind and Ecology on an Oil Palm Frontier

Anthro Talks Seminars Autumn 2024

Speaker: Alice Rudge, SOAS

This archival and ethnographic paper explores the affective registers of ecological destruction on an oil palm frontier, as experienced and theorised by Batek people in Malaysia. It does so through attention to Batek discourses on what it feels like to be newly forced to ‘stay in one place’, whereby projects of ‘development’ encourage Batek to give up forest movement and collection in favour of sedentary residency and salaried jobs. At the same time, the paper explores the historical, political, and intellectual underpinnings of the development projects that wreak destruction on Batek forests and lifeways – demonstrating that the epistemologies that pervade contemporary academic writing on ecological distress were borne of the same intellectual structures and struggles that also produced – concretely – Batek people’s contemporary dispossession and enclosure. In so doing, it prompts an urgent question: how to theorise ecological distress beyond the language of the natural and unnatural, the secure and the precarious, the whole and the broken? And how, in turn, should anthropology story such worlds of change?