Li, Tania M.
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1807/67414
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Securing oil palm smallholder livelihoods without more deforestation in Indonesia(Springer, 2024-02-22) Li, Tania MurrayFacing criticism that Indonesia’s oil palm industry causes deforestation, government and industry representatives have highlighted the role of oil palm in improving the livelihoods of millions of oil palm smallholders, reducing poverty and meeting its Sustainable Development Goals. This line of argument conjures a moral dilemma that pits forest conservation against peoples’ well-being. It overlooks a crucial fact: Indonesia’s government policies favour plantation corporations, and smallholders struggle to access the land and other resources they need to prosper. More robust support for independent smallholders who grow oil palm on their own land could secure rural livelihoods without increasing forest loss.Item Raksasa Sawit di Kebun Petani(2023-07-09) Li, Tania M.; Pujo, SemediItem Oil Palm Giant in People's Land(2023-07-03) Li, Tania M.; Semedi, PujoWhen people's land is occupied by corporations, how do they survive? Scientists report from Indonesia's oil palm plantations.Item Palm oil: The myth of corporate plantation efficiency is failing Indonesians and furthering inequality(2023-07-27) Li, Tania M.; Semedi, PujoItem Mitos efisiensi perkebunan sawit: Merugikan Indonesia dan memperparah ketimpangan(2023-07-31) Li, Tania M.; Semedi, PujoItem Deforestation and development: A decolonial perspective from Indonesia(2022-02-10) Li, Tania M.'Development' is a much-used term in school geography. But, as Tania Murray Li argues, the current model of corporate-led development is doing more harm than good in IndonesiaItem Indonesia’s Plantationocene(2023-05-17) Li, Tania MurrayIn this short article I explore what a race-centered concept of the Plantationocene, developed mainly by scholars working in the Americas, yields analytically when it travels to another context. Race is not a concept in common use in contemporary Indonesia. Yet Cedric Robinson’s expanded concept of racialism as the practice of forging differences among people for the purpose of extraction, while treating such differences as innate, is profoundly resonant. To make this argument I first outline Indonesia’s colonial plantation regime and its racialized legacies. Then I draw on ethnographic research I conducted with Pujo Semedi to show how contemporary oil palm plantation corporations produce a racialized form of difference as a core element of their social, spatial, and political organization. In Indonesia’s plantation zone, I suggest, racialism is embedded in routine practices and arrangements, and so thoroughly normalized it passes without note. 主要由美洲学者提出的以种族为核心的种植园世概念, 在不同背景下会产生何种分析结果？本文对此进行了简短的探讨。种族这个概念在当代印度尼西亚并不常见。Cedric Robinson将种族主义扩展为一种以榨取为目的、制造人与人之间差异的行为, 并认为这种差异是与生俱来的。Cedric Robinson的观点引起了深刻的共鸣。为此, 我首先概述了印度尼西亚的殖民种植园制度及其种族化沿革。然后, 基于我与Pujo Semedi开展的民族志研究, 我展示了当代油棕种植公司如何制造种族化差异, 并将这种差异作为公司的社会结构、空间结构和政治结构的核心要素。我认为, 在印度尼西亚的种植园区, 种族主义扎根于日常行为和组织, 并得到彻底的正常化。 En este corto ensayo, exploro lo que un concepto sobre el Plantacionceno, centrado en raza, que ha sido desarrollado principalmente por eruditos dedicados al estudio de las Américas, contribuye analíticamente cuando es aplicado en otro contexto. La raza no es un concepto de uso común en Indonesia. Pero el concepto ampliado de racialismo de Cedric Robinson, como la práctica de forjar diferencias entre la gente con un propósito de extracción, a la vez que se tratan tales diferencias como innatas, es profundamente resonante. Para plantear este argumento, primero esbozo el régimen de la plantación tropical de Indonesia y sus legados racializados. Luego, basándome en la investigación etnográfica que llevé a cabo con Pujo Semedi para mostrar cómo las grandes compañías contemporáneas de plantaciones de palma africana generan una forma racializada de diferencia como el elemento medular de su organización social, espacial y política. En la zona de plantaciones de Indonesia, sugiero, el racialismo esta arraigado en las prácticas y arreglos rutinarios, y está de tal manera normalizado que pasa desapercibido.Item Dynamic farmers, dead plantations, and the myth of the lazy native(2023-01-07) Li, Tania MurrayThis 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 engagaement in growing global market crops, oil palm plantation corporations and their government supporters maintain that farmers are not interested in growing oil palm, or cannot do so efficiently, while corporations can be trusted to get the job done. The essay troubles this dualism on theoretical, empirical, and political grounds.Item Opini: Perusahaan perkebunan di Indonesia kerap menyalahi aturan hukum. Bagaimana mereka bisa lolos begitu saja?(The Gecko Project, 2023-03-03) Li, Tania M.Berbagai kajian menunjukkan bahwa perusahaan-perusahaan perkebunan di Indonesia biasa menyalahi aturan hukum hingga mengakibatkan kerusakan besar terhadap lingkungan alam dan membahayakan masyarakat pedalaman. Ini bukanlah cerminan dari tidak adanya hukum yang mengatur jalannya perusahaan. Namun, ini dikarenakan wilayah Indonesia yang diduduki perusahaan perkebunan diatur dengan serangkaian aturan tak tertulis, yang memungkinkan perusahaan untuk mengendalikan pejabat pemerintahan demi kepentingan mereka sendiri. Artikel opini ini ditulis oleh Tania Li, seorang profesor di Universitas Toronto dan peneliti di Pusat Kajian Asia Tenggara, Universitas Kyoto, Jepang, yang telah melakukan banyak penelitian mendalam tentang kehidupan masyarakat pedalaman di Indonesia. Isi artikel ini mencerminkan pandangan penulis sendiri, dan tidak sepenuhnya mewakili pandangan The Gecko Project.Item Analysis: How do oil palm companies get away with disregarding Indonesian law?(The Gecko Project, 2023-03-29) Li, Tania M.Plantation companies in Indonesia routinely flout laws and regulations with devastating consequences for the environment and rural people, extensive studies show. This is not a reflection of lawlessness. Instead, the areas where plantations flourish are governed by a parallel set of unwritten rules that allow companies to hold sway over officials for their own benefit. This article is a commentary written by Tania Li, a professor at the University of Toronto and visiting research fellow at Kyoto University's Center for Southeast Asian Studies, who has carried out extensive research on Indonesian rural life. The article reflects her views, which are not necessarily those of The Gecko Project.Item Making the Familiar Strange: Anthropological Reflections(Springer, 2023-02-18) Li, Tania MurrayTania 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 the 1970s shaped her academic work. The essay offers important reflections on Li’s home discipline, anthropology, and how it enables us to study global inequality in empirically rich and diverse ways. Importantly, this focus on the specific constellations of global inequality, as Li suggests, not only challenges grand narratives of universal progress. It equally cautions against our preoccupation with single stories of global inequality production.Item Introduction: Plantation Life Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone(Duke University Press, 2021-12) Li, Tania Murray; Semedi, PujoIn 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 plantations are often plagued by ruined ecologies, injury among workers, and a devastating loss of livelihoods for former landholders, small-scale independent farmers produce palm oil more efficiently and with far less damage to life and land. Li and Semedi theorize “corporate occupation” to underscore how massive forms of capitalist production and control over the palm oil industry replicate colonial-style relations that undermine citizenship. In so doing, they question the assumption that corporations are necessary for rural development, contending that the dominance of plantations stems from a political system that privileges corporations.Item Hidup Bersama Raksasa: Manusia dan Pendudukan Perkebunan Sawit(Marjin Kiri, 2021) Tania M., LiKeberadaan perkebunan besar didukung dengan klaim bahwa ia bisa mendatangkan kemajuan dan kemakmuran bagi masyarakat sekitar, bahwa ia efisien dan paling mampu mengolah tanaman komoditas yang tidak bisa dilakukan oleh petani desa. Namun benarkah demikian? Mengkaji struktur dan tata kelola dua perkebunan sawit di Kalimantan Barat —satu milik negara dan satu swasta—Tania Li dan Pujo Semedi meneliti bagaimana perkebunan datang dan mendominasi, bentuk-bentuk kehidupan seperti apa yang muncul dari kedatangan dan keberadaan perkebunan, serta mengapa sistem yang terus mengingkari klaim-klaimnya sendiri ini tetap mendapat dukungan politik dan finansial. Memakai paduan pendekatan ekonomi politik dan teknologi politik, upaya kedua penulis untuk memahami kawasan perkebunan membawa mereka kepada teori baru tentang perusahaan sebagai “bala pendudukan”.Item Problematizing the Project System: Rural Development in Indonesia(Routledge, 2019) Tania M., LiIn 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 others out of account. Thinking about rural development in terms of projects has become so routine that alternative ways of thinking and acting are scarcely considered. Yet, it was not always so. This article compares the present conjuncture, in which the project system dominates, with historical conjunctures at which projects did not take the center stage. Two empirical studies serve to illustrate how a disparate set of actors – Indonesian government officials and politicians, social development experts at the World Bank, transnational conservation agencies, and rural villagers – converged on the project system, with refractory results.Item Foucault Foments Fieldwork at the University(Routledge, 2022-07-28) Tania M., LiThe chapter outlines key themes from the work of Michel Foucault, focusing on his conceptualizations of the subject, different modes of power, and the regimes of practice that configure the taken-for-granted truths of our everyday lives. It suggests that Foucault’s commitment to historicizing social and institutional orders and subjecting them to critical scrutiny resonates with the anthropological approach that seeks to “make the familiar strange” in order to foment fresh lines of inquiry. To demonstrate, the chapter applies Foucauldian concepts and sensibilities to ethnographic research in the University, drawing on research conducted by students in residential dorms and scrutinizing the array of services designed to optimize student and faculty time management and self-care. It suggests two arenas in which Foucault’s theorizations and styles of investigation need to be supplemented: sites where multiple modes of power collide, and sites where critique is embryonic, embodied, and not (yet) available for explicit reflection.Item Situating Transmigration in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Labour Regime(NUS Press, 2016) Li, Tania MContemporary solutions to the sourcing and control of labour show marked similarities with the labour regime that emerged on Sumatra's East Coast a century ago, and I begin with a review of the debates and practices surrounding plantation labour in the colonial period drawing primarily on the work of Ann Stoler (1995). Then, I examine the new approach to transmigration captured in the late-New Order Transmigration Law of 1997, amended in 2009, and the Transmigration Ministry's Workplan 2010-2014. These documents advance the argument that private investment in mono-crop agribusiness ventures on a huge scale is the key to poverty reduction in backward rural areas outside Java. Since capital is globally mobile, however, attracting it is a matter of comparative advantage. Hence the goal of the re-focused transmigration program is to set conditions for investment that are favourable to capital, by placing abundant land and labour at the investors' disposal. Tracking the implications of this argument as they play out on the ground, I then describe the labour regimes I encountered in two contrasting sites in Central Sulawesi that I visited together with Arianto Sangaji of Yayasan Tanah Merdeka, Palu, in 2009. In both of these sites transmigration played an important role in shaping the terms of encounter between capital and labour, although the terms in each case were very different. Finally, I consider the implications of the current trend that favours capital over labour, absorbs huge areas of land, and leaves rural populations in need of land and/or work seriously exposed.Item Commons, co-ops, and corporations: assembling Indonesia’s twenty-first century land reform(Taylor and Francis, 2021-03-19) Li, Tania MurrayTwentieth 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 enable different parties to align around a progressive neoliberal platform that sets insurrectionary demands aside to focus on what seems plausible and fundable within existing constraints. Focusing on Indonesia where land reform recommenced circa 2016, I consider both the elements that comprise the land reform assemblage and the elements excluded from it.Item Agir pour les autres: Gouvernementalité, développement et pratique du politique(Karthala, 2020) Li, Tania M.; Le Meur, Pierre-YvesCet ouvrage propose un remarquable récit du développement en action, centré sur une série de tentatives visant à améliorer les paysages et les modes de vie. L’auteur y expose, en détail tant les pratiques qui permettent aux experts de diagnostiquer les problèmes et de concevoir des interventions, que la capacité d’action des personnes dont les conduites sont visées par les réformes. Combinant très efficacement théorie, ethnographie et histoire, il est mis en lumière le travail d’agents de développement ayant opéré à différentes époques : fonctionnaires et missionnaires coloniaux ; spécialistes de l’agriculture, de l’hygiène et du crédit ; activistes politiques ayant créé leurs propres modèles devant guider les villageois vers des vies meilleures. L’auteur décrit et analyse des opérations visant, sur financements extérieurs, à intégrer des objectifs de conservation de la nature et de développement via la participation des communautés, ainsi qu’un programme gigantesque, d’un milliard de dollars US, conçu par la Banque mondiale pour réactiver ou réinventer la communauté villageoise, inculquer de nouveaux comportements basés sur la compétition et le choix, et reconstruire la société « par le bas ». Démontrant que la volonté d’« agir pour les autres » a une longue et complexe histoire, souvent troublée, Tania Murray Li identifie des récurrences fortes allant de la période coloniale jusqu’à l’époque actuelle. Attentive aux spécificités du développement dans les hautes terres de Sulawesi, en Indonésie, elle montre comment une série d’interventions se sont succédées et aussi imbriquées les unes dans les autres, et elle piste leurs effets contrastés, entre bien-être et famine, suivisme et mobilisation politique, solidarités nouvelles, résistance identitaire et action violente.Item Tania Murray Li (Interview)(Bristol University Press, 2019-08) Li, Tania M.; Clarke, JohnOriginal conversation between John Clarke and Tania Li, about the dynamics of thinking critically in the social sciences.Item #201| At Land's End: The Emergence Of Capitalist Relations On An Indigenous Frontier w/ Tania Li(Last Born in the Wilderness, 2019-07-22) Farnsworth, PatrickIn this episode, I speak with Tania Li, Ph.D — Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and the author of ‘Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier.’ In our era of globalized neoliberal capitalism, we tend to examine the emergence of capitalist economic and social relations among indigenous communities primarily as a result of overbearing external pressures, e.g. governments, nonprofit organizations, and multinational corporations (often in tandem). It is important, however, to recognize that while this is often the case, this view does not include the ways capitalism can emerge and take hold in far more subtle ways. As documented in ‘Land’s End,’ from 1990 to 2009 Tania conducted annual ethnographic research in the Lauje highlands of Sulawesi Indonesia, and bore witness to the indigenous population’s rapid adoption of the tree crop cocoa for cultivation, transitioning away from the more communally managed production of food crops, as had been done traditionally in these communities for generations. As Tania explains in this episode, the seemingly banal transformation the highlanders of this region experienced —transitioning from the communal production of food crops to the more privatized production of cocoa — not only produced capitalist relations among the Lauje, but did so with very minimal to non-existent pressures from outside institutions. How did this happen? What can we learn about nature of capitalism and its emergence from Tania’s profound ethnographic study, and how can we apply this knowledge to more adequately respond to the material conditions that produce these results? Tania and I discuss these questions and much more in this episode. Tania Li, Ph.D is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and the author of several books, including ‘The Will to Improve,’ ‘Powers of Exclusion,’ and ‘Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier.’ Her current writing project is an ethnography, exploring the forms of social, political, cultural and economic life that emerge in Indonesia’s oil palm plantation zone.