Synopses & Reviews
Drawing on two decades of ethnographic research in Sulawesi, Indonesia, Tania Murray Li offers an intimate account of the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders who privatized their common land to plant a boom crop, cacao. Spurred by the hope of ending their poverty and isolation, some prospered, while others lost their land and struggled to sustain their families. Yet the winners and losers in this transition were not strangersandmdash;they were kin and neighbors. Liand#39;s richly peopled account takes the reader into the highlandersand#39; world, exploring the dilemmas they faced as sharp inequalities emerged among them.
The book challenges complacent, modernization narratives promoted by development agencies that assume inefficient farmers who lose out in the shift to high-value export crops can find jobs elsewhere. Decades of uneven and often jobless growth in Indonesia meant that for newly landless highlanders, landand#39;s end was a dead end. The book also has implications for social movement activists, who seldom attend to instances where enclosure is initiated by farmers rather than coerced by the state or agribusiness corporations. Liand#39;s attention to the historical, cultural, and ecological dimensions of this conjuncture demonstrates the power of the ethnographic method and its relevance to theory and practice today.
Review
andquot;For anyone interested in ongoing dispossession and enduring inequalities, this powerful and compelling book is essential. Tania Murray Li shows how access to land, labor, and food eroded gradually and insidiously for many people, in a manner that undermined oppositional movements.andquot;
Review
andquot;Tania Murray Li, one of the foremost scholars of the native peoples, economies, and ecologies of Southeast Asia, here tells the subtle and challenging story of the Lauje, a group who defy cliches of indigeneity and whose destructive involvement in commodity production was willingly embraced. Her analysis complicates our understanding of rural agrarian transformation and the expansion of global capitalism, by showing how this adoption of export tree cropsandndash;unlike a century ago in Indonesiaandrsquo;s outer islandsandndash;is leading to a literal and#39;landand#39;s end.and#39; The value and power of this volume, based on twenty years of fieldwork, lies in its telling a difficult, nuanced story of the millions who do not fit into easy, pre-existing categories and narratives of modern rural transformation.andquot;
Review
andquot;This is a wonderful book. It may have the biggest general impact of a book centered on Southeast Asian rural social dynamics since James Scottand#39;s seminal Weapons of the Weak. With unusual clarity and great persuasiveness, Tania Murray Li explores theoretical and methodological issues through vivid depictions of peopleand#39;s lives.andquot;
Synopsis
An intimate account of the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders in Indonesia who privatized their common land to plant a boom crop, cacao. Spurred by the hope of ending their poverty and isolation, some prospered, while others lost their land and struggled to sustain their families. Tania Murray Liand#39;s richly peopled ethnography takes the reader into the highlandersand#39; world, exploring the dilemmas they faced as sharp inequalities emerged among them.
About the Author
Tania Murray Li is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in the Political-Economy and Culture of Asia. She is the author of
The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics, also published by Duke University Press; coauthor of
Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia; and editor of
Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power and Production.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Positions
2. Work and Care
3. Enclosure
4. Capitalist Relations
5. Politics, Revisited
Conclusion
Appendix: Dramatis Personae
Notes
Bibliography
Index