ENCOUNTERING NATURE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

This research project investigates environmental change in the middle Sepik region of Papua New Guinea through the lens of political ontology. Local accounts of irregular water levels, rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and ecological transformations—most notably those resulting from the introduction of non-native fish species into Lake Chambri—form the empirical starting point of the study. Rather than treating nature as a domain separate from humans, the project approaches it as a relational field in which humans, powerful spirit beings, and material processes are intimately entangled. Drawing on the notion of a “world of many worlds,” the study highlights how ontologies are politically constituted through unequal relations of power. The project analyzes how naturalist ontology, embedded in scientific knowledge, development interventions, and global political-economic structures, has reshaped the Sepik region, particularly through fish-stocking programs that have altered local ecologies and transformed subsistence livelihoods into market-dependent economies. At the same time, Christian ontology and the politics of missionization have profoundly reconfigured local lifeworlds, merging with Nyaura ontologies and providing dominant frameworks for interpreting environmental change, often articulated in apocalyptic terms. In local usage, “nature” does not correspond to a secular Euro-Western concept but refers to ancestral spirit beings and their material and immaterial manifestations, which are increasingly perceived as beyond human control. Conceptualizing “nature” in the Sepik as an outcome of ontological “friction” between local and global worlds, the project demonstrates how heterogeneous and unequal encounters generate new cultural, ecological, and power configurations. Particular attention is given to ontological politics at the local level, where negotiations unfold along lines of difference such as gender, age, descent group affiliation, and religious denomination, producing competing understandings of environmental change. In doing so, the project contributes to a nuanced understanding of the pluriverse by showing how ontological politics operate both between and within societies, and how global ontological orders are actively appropriated, negotiated, and reworked within local contexts.