Beyond Heroes and Villains: Persisting With Autonomy on a Plantation Frontier

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.