DR Alice Rudge ar80@soas.ac.uk
Lecturer in Anthropology
Oil palm plantations often produce figurations of heroism and villainy attributed to human and nonhuman actors. Yet these categories may mask the subtleties of local experiences. Indigenous Batek people in Malaysia highly value the autonomy of both plants and people, but with forests disappearing, many who turn to labor on plantations find themselves struggling for autonomy. At the same time, they do not extend autonomous personhood to the oil palms with which they labor. This article explores the degrees of personhood attributed to botanical persons and the entangled human and botanical autonomies thus produced. It demonstrates the ambivalences of multispecies relationships in plantation frontier contexts and argues that by attending more closely to Batek theories and enactments of autonomy, categories of heroism and villainy are destabilized. This might offer alternative modalities for grasping the ambivalent nature of life on the edges of a plantation.
Rudge, A. (2024). Beyond Heroes and Villains: Persisting With Autonomy on a Plantation Frontier. Environmental Humanities, 16(3), 766-783. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-11327412
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Feb 1, 2024 |
Publication Date | Nov 26, 2024 |
Deposit Date | Nov 27, 2024 |
Publicly Available Date | Nov 27, 2024 |
Journal | Environmental Humanities |
Electronic ISSN | 2201-1919 |
Publisher | Duke University Press |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 16 |
Issue | 3 |
Pages | 766-783 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-11327412 |
Keywords | plantation, autonomy, Malaysia, Batek, refusal |
Publisher URL | https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/16/3/766/392330/Beyond-Heroes-and-VillainsPersisting-with-Autonomy |
766rudge.pdf
(431 Kb)
PDF
Licence
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Sounds like” redemption? On the musicality of species and the species of musicality
(2025)
Journal Article
'Sounds like' Redemption?
(2025)
Journal Article
Teaching Ecological Distress: Introduction
(2025)
Digital Artefact
Teaching Ecological Distress
(2025)
Other
The logic of carbon substitution: from fossilised life to “cell factories”
(2024)
Journal Article
About SOAS Research Online
Administrator e-mail: outputs@soas.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search