Sarah Jayne Webb

SARAH WEBB, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, received a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2020 to aid research and writing on ‘Adding Sustainability? The Politics of Value Creation in the Rainforest Markets of the Philippine Archipelago.’ This project focused on development of a book manuscript, Honey Reforms: Lives Made with a Philippine Forest Wonder . The book brings into conversation two pressing issues of anthropological inquiry: the potency of substances like honey in imagining sustainable ways of living and the historically based marginalization that certain peoples have experienced through the valuation of forests, at a time when resource scarcity as become a regular feature of daily life for many. Honey sourced from Palawan Island’s renowned forests has become a forest wonder ‘ a product that can be value-added in order to save the rainforest by providing indigenous Tagbanua honey hunters with sustainable livelihoods. The substance of Palawan honey is promoted as having healing properties, but in addition to a capacity to transform consumers’ bodies, the sale of Palawan honey is also promised to produce significance economic and environmental transformations for the peoples, livelihoods and rainforests of Palawan Island. Honey reforms explores how the materiality and specificity of substances help us to understand what it means to sell sustainable living across ethnic and class relations. What do people buy when they buy Palawan honey, and for whom does this matter?