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Updated: Nov 7, 2025

Studying Food Reward and Motivation in Humans
Published on: March 19, 2014
Eating and Being Eaten: The Meanings of Hunger among Marind
1Department of History, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Abstract:
In this article, I explore how Marind communities in West Papua experience and interpret hunger. Drawing from Indigenous discourse and practice, I examine how agro-industrial expansion and commodified foodways provoke multiple, conflicting hungers among Marind - for sago, "plastic" foods, money, and human flesh. In tandem, Marind themselves are subjected to the insatiable appetite of various invasive entities - corporations, the government, roads, cities, and oil palm. I argue that hunger constitutes a symbolically charged, culturally constructed, and morally laden experiential mode through which Marind characterize and contest capitalist modernity and its more-than-human dynamics of eating and being eaten.
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