Tania Li

University of Toronto | U of T · Department of Anthropology

Tania Murray Li is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research concerns land, labour, class, capitalism, development, resources and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia. In this volume Li takes the reader back to her high school memories, describing how the author’s personal encounters with global inequality in...

This essay draws on insights from ethnographic and historical research in Indonesia to challenge a stubborn dualism that presents farmers as subsistence-oriented and risk-averse, in contrast to plantation corporations which are assumed to maximize productivity and profit. Drawing on this dualism, and setting aside centuries of enthusiastic farmer e...

First “meeting” with APAD. On the occasion of the 11th APAD colloquium in 2013 in Montpellier, you led a keynote on the theme “Anthropological commitments with development”. Several APAD members, generally working in a “Franco-African” space, were discovering you and your work at the time, since your research fields are located in Asia and your wor...

In Plantation Life Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi examine the structure and governance of Indonesia's contemporary oil palm plantations in Indonesia, which supply 50 percent of the world's palm oil. They attend to the exploitative nature of plantation life, wherein villagers' well-being is sacrificed in the name of economic development. While plan...

Twentieth century land reform centred on landlords, tillers, and a revolutionary or reform-producing state. The twenty-first century version involves a wider array of actors and diverse agendas including good governance and the mitigation of climate change. Commons, co-ops and corporations figure large in the twenty-first assemblage where they enab...

Drawing from the articles in the special issue, I review the goals of the movement to protect customary land rights, and assess the reasons why 25 years on, the trajectory of dispossessory development remains unchecked. Legal advocacy has opened pathways for customary land rights to be recognized in theory, but in practice, the number of communitie...

The introduction establishes the main concerns of the book, locating the challenge of thinking critically as a fundamentally collaborative and dialogic process. It develops an argument about dialogic perspectives as central to the social sciences. It introduces the voices inIntroducing the voices in conversation in the book and discusses some of th...

The conversation begins from a collaborative puzzle, exploring our different journeys towards collaborative working. It then considers how we see concepts being made to work in practice, before turning to issues of conservative dominance in contemporary politics. The chapter ends by discussing the emerging global crisis of work and livelihood.

Against the suggestion that we are living in ‘post-political’ times, I argue that the capacity for critical politics is permanent and broadly distributed, as it emerges from the contradictions embedded in our everyday lives. Yet collective mobilisation to change prevailing power formations is not common. Ethnographers are well positioned to explain...

Key messages • Social equity is crucial to sustainable development: equity means ensuring that everyone has the resources they need to secure their well-being now and in the future. • Oil palm is a profitable crop, but the costs and benefits of its expansion are distributed unevenly according to gender, age, class and community of origin. • Differe...

This programmatic article proposes an approach to global political-economic inquiry in the wake of the failure of long-established transition narratives, notably the narrative centred on a universal trajectory from farm-based and “traditional” livelihoods into the “proper jobs” of a modern industrial society. The prevalence and persistence of “info...

Plantations are back. Colonial-style large scale corporate monoculture of industrial crops on concession land is again expanding in the global south. The biggest expansion is in Indonesia, where oil palm already cover 11 million hectares, and 10-20 million more hectares are planned, most of it in plantation style. The land dimensions of renewed pla...

La ruée vers les terres que le monde connaît actuellement a redirigé l’attention sur la terre, ses usages et sa valeur. Mais la terre est un étrange objet. Alors qu’elle est souvent traitée comme une chose et parfois comme une marchandise, la terre n’est pas comme un tapis : on ne peut pas la rouler et l’emporter avec soi où l’on veut. Pour créer d...

Building on Didier Fassin’s astute and timely paper, I propose to reflect on the practice of critique by considering its beginnings, its mediations, and the ends to which it is deployed. I also consider the role of ethnographers in advancing critical practices.

This contribution examines the intergenerational effects of oil palm expansion in Indonesia at two scales. First, I use a broad brush and selected examples from different parts of Indonesia to highlight the long-term, intergenerational dynamics of displacement from the land, and the linked problem of displacement from opportunities to find decent w...

Although often associated with colonial times, tropical plantations growing industrial crops such as rubber, sugar, and oil palm are once again expanding. They employ hundreds of thousands of workers, who still use remarkably basic tools. Flagging colonial continuities, labor activists campaign against the reemergence of unfree labor and “modern fo...

In contemporary Indonesia as in many other parts of the global south, policy plays a limited role in guiding the practice of rural development. What proliferates, instead, is the project: a time bound intervention with a fixed goal and budget, framed within a technical matrix which renders some problems amenable to intervention, while leaving other...

Transnational farmland investments in much of the Global South are risky for all parties involved: agribusiness firms and their financial backers; host-country governments; and the people on the spot. This essay focuses on political risk, which encompasses policy shifts, legal disputes and push-back from affected populations. It draws on the analyt...

A central figure in the food sovereignty movement is the ‘middle peasant’, a cautious figure who balances food with cash-crop production, guided by a strong aversion to ecological and market risk. Drawing on long-term field research in highland Sulawesi, Indonesia, this article explains why farmers switched from food to mono-crop cacao production,...

Expert knowledge about society and human nature is essential to governing human conduct. It figures in the formulation of the liberal and neoliberal rationalities of government that Foucault analyzed in his later work. It also figures in particular assemblages in which a governmental rationality is brought to bear on the definition of problems and...

The so-called global land rush has drawn new attention to land, its uses and value. But land is a strange object. Although it is often treated as a thing and sometimes as a commodity, it is not like a mat: you cannot roll it up and take it away. To turn it to productive use requires regimes of exclusion that distinguish legitimate from illegitimate...

Many scholars have debated Geertz's characterization of Java as a site of social and economic involution, in which impoverished peasants worked ever harder to achieve static results. Fewer have taken up his characterization of Indonesia's Outer Islands as a zone of extremes: islands of dynamic export production, often dominated by indigenous smallh...

Growth can be dangerous – especially when it displaces current forms of livelihood, and fails to provide viable alternatives. The old transition narratives – farm to factory, country to city, tradition to modernity – are still promulgated by development planners and they continue to have popular appeal but they are misleading. Tania Murray Li's edi...

I sostenitori dell'agricoltura industriale su larga scala, la Banca Mondiale in modo particolare, ritengono che essa ridurrŕ la povertŕ e fornirŕ occupazione. Sostengono anche che una efficienza piů intensa č una componente necessaria della "transizione agraria", che si segnala atraverso il movimento dei lavoratori dall'azienda agricola all'impresa...

A biopolitics of the population, when it succeeds in securing life and wellbeing, is surely worth having. It has become urgent in rural Asia, where a new round of enclosures has dispossessed large numbers of people from access to land as a way to sustain their own lives, and neoliberal policies have curtailed programs that once helped to sustain ru...

There is no abstract for this paper.

Placing labor at the center of the global ‘land-grab’ debate helps sharpen critical insights at two scales. At the scale of agricultural enterprises, a labor perspective highlights the jobs generated, and the rewards received, by people who work in and around large farms. This approach guides my critical reading of the report prepared by a World Ba...

Focusing mainly on Asia, this article tracks a link between the collective, inalienable land-tenure regimes currently associated with indigeneity and attempts to prevent piecemeal dispossession of small-scale farmers through land sale and debt. Collective landholding is sometimes imposed by local groups on their own members as they act to defend th...

  A biopolitics of the population, when it succeeds in securing life and wellbeing, is surely worth having. It has become urgent in rural Asia, where a new round of enclosures has dispossessed large numbers of people from access to land as a way to sustain their own lives, and neoliberal policies have curtailed programs that once helped to sustain...

World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development recommends that rural smallholders unable to compete in higher value production should exit agriculture. For the old and new landless, the way forward is wage labour in agriculture, in rural off farm work, or in urban areas. Disjunctively, the Report also proposes ‘farm-financed social welf...

Summaries Drawing upon research in the Southeast Asian uplands, especially Sulawesi, this article argues that excessive attention to managerial goals, such as the design of improved institutions, has occluded understandings of agrarian processes that radically reconfigure communities and the relations between people and land. Managerial interventio...

In this essay I briefly explore three themes I find important for an engaged anthropology of development. First, social reproduction: Anthropologists have a long track record of examining processes of social reproduction—how it is that particular patterns of inequality are actively sustained through practices and relations at multiple scales (Smith...

This article argues that divergent images of community result not from inadequate knowledge or confusion of purpose, but from the location of discourse and action in the context of specific struggles and dilemmas. It supports the view that ‘struggles over resources’ are also ‘struggles over meaning’. It demonstrates the ways in which contests over...

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Governmental interventions that set out to improve the world are assembled from diverse elements - discourses, institutions, forms of expertise and social groups whose deficiencies need to be corrected, among others. In this article I advance an analytic that focuses on practices of assemblage - the on-going labour of bringing disparate elements to...

Estudio que analiza desde los presupuestos de la etnografía y la socioeconomía, la identidad cultural, los programas de inversión de ayuda internacional y las políticas económicas que se han implementado en Indonesia con el fin de mejorar las condiciones de vida de sus pobladores y sus espacios territoriales.

In this article, I propose five ways to move beyond the analytical scheme of James Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998). I question the spatial optic that posits an “up there,” all-seeing state operating as a preformed repository of power, spread progressively outward to “nonstate” spaces beyond its reach. I highlight the role of parties beyond “the...

To analyse resource conflict, this article proposes a conceptual framework which operates at two levels: a conceptualisation of power in terms of sovereignty, governmentality and politics; and a repertoire of terms (projects, practices, processes, positions) that enable the empirical examination of particular sites of struggle. The framework is app...

In the period since former president Suharto was deposed (1998) and the New Order regime weakened its grip, Indonesia has generated more than a million internal refugees fleeing communal violence or its threat. The term ethnic cleansing is increasingly being used to describe the violent reclaiming of territory and expulsion of "outsiders". Examinin...

Research and policy concerning the Southeast Asian uplands have generally focused on issues of cultural diversity, conservation and community resource management. This article argues for a reorientation of analysis to highlight the increasingly uneven access to land, labour and capital stemming from processes of agrarian differentiation in upland s...

In the struggle to secure resource rights for rural populations who gain their livelihoods from state-claimed lands, advocacy agendas highlight community interest in, and capacity for, sustainable resource management. In the uplands of Southeast Asia, the strategic simplifications of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) advocacy are...

Depuis que l’ex-president Suharto a ete renverse (1998) et que le regime d’Ordre nouveau a desserre son etreinte, l’Indonesie compte plus d’un million de refugies internes qui fuient la violence intercommunautaire ou sa menace. L’expression « purification ethnique » est de plus en plus utilisee pour decrire les recuperations violentes de territoire...

Drawing upon research in the Southeast Asian uplands, especially Sulawesi, this article argues that excessive attention to managerial goals, such as the design of improved institutions, has occluded understandings of agrarian processes that radically reconfigure communities and the relations between people and land. Managerial interventions play a...

Tania Murray Li's essay examines the relations between hill people and coastal people in Sulawesi in Central Sumatra. Her article demonstrates the ways in which the identities of the hill people are historically constructed in relation to the identities of coastal elites. Her paper traces the complex role that outside authority has had in the forma...

It was the official line of Suharto's regime that Indonesia is a nation which has no indigenous people, or that all Indonesians are equally indigenous. 1 The internationally recognized category “indigenous and tribal peoples” (as defined in International Labour Organization convention 169) has no direct equivalent in Indonesia's legal system, nor a...

accomplishment of rule owes as much to the understandings and practices worked out in the contingent and compromised space of cultural intimacy as it does to the imposition of development schemes and related forms of disciplinary power.3 My study is grounded ethnographically in an analysis of Indonesia's official program for the resettlement of iso...

In this article I apply the conceptual repertoire developed by feminist scholars in Africa to examine concepts of personhood, property, and the conjugal contract in Southeast Asia. I suggest that as theory travels, it offers fresh insight in the new context in which it is deployed and is itself enriched. Studies of urban Singapore and upland Sulawe...

Addressing the issues of gender and development in the 1990s seems to us to require a return to major debates about the nature of political and economic power, the role of gender and the character of development. These debates have seen significant advances in the last ten years. A thorough grounding in this new (and old) thinking is needed before...

Preface acknowledgments tables Introduction PART I CULTURE, ECONOMY, AND THE HOUSEHOLD: Conceptual framework: Householding and Malay kinship: Householding Kinship, commodification, and the gift Household membership and consumption rights: Household membership Consumption rights Householding: Husband and wife: The obligations of maintenance and hous...