Wayne Huang: "'The Forest of Prophet Adam': Sumatra’s oil palm frontier and its elsewhere"

“The Forest of Prophet Adam”: Sumatra’s Oil Palm Frontier and its Elsewhere

Abstract

What connects Kerinci Seblat National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site known for its rainforest biodiversity, to the vast monocrop oil palm plantations of lowland Sumatra? This presentation examines how oil palm has emerged in recent years as a popular investment strategy among Muslim farmers of the Kerinci highlands, many of whom have become successful smallholders more than 300 kilometers downstream from their ancestral territory. The growing anthropological literature on oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia (where over 85% of the world’s palm oil is produced) offers rich accounts of dispossession and multispecies violence amid capitalist expansion. Contributing to this discussion while extending its focus beyond the plantation zone, my talk traces how the “pristine” upland and the “devastated” lowland are brought into relation through the intimate history of a single Kerinci household. By foregrounding the Elsewhere, understood…