Children of the palms: growing plants and growing people in a Papuan Plantationocene

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores how ecological change transforms children and child‐rearing among Indigenous Marind in West Papua. Marind children become ‘anim' (persons) by immersing themselves within the ecology of sago palms and their suckers, or ‘sago children’. Conversely, deforestation and oil palm expansion – the defining traits of the place, period, and production mode I term ‘Papuan Plantationocene’ – subvert the mutual maturation of humans and sago by confining children to the oppressive environment of the village and preventing them from supporting sago's growth through sago transplanting and felling. Meanwhile, oil palm itself is alternately characterized by Marind as a vulnerable child subjected to totalizing human control and as a figure of hope for future Marind generations. The article provides a deeper and broader consideration of ‘childhood’ beyond the human in understanding how monocrop capitalist production reconfigures the form and possibility of multispecies social reproduction for people and plants.