Mergers & Acquisitions

In this conversation, Nikita Taniparti interviews Dr. Tania Li, who talks to us about her long-standing ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia. It focuses on assemblages of land reform – who is included and who is excluded, the history of land reform movements in Indonesia, and the implications of such assemblages. In particular, Dr. Li talks about the capitalist relations that emerge when indigenous highlanders self-organize to institute property rights. We see that it is not as straightforward as conventional neoliberal narratives suggest.

Today’s guest is Dr. Tania Li, a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. After her early research in Singapore, she has dedicated much of her career to researching land, labor, capitalism, development, politics and indigeneity in Indonesia. She has written about the rise of Indonesia’s indigenous peoples’ movement, land reform, rural class formation, struggles over the forests and conservation, community resource management, state-organized resettlement and the problems faced by people who are pushed off the land in contexts where they have little or no access to waged employment, and more. Her most recent book, Plantation Life (2021), co-authored with Pujo Semedi, examines the structure and governance of Indonesia’s contemporary oil palm plantations in Indonesia; the book theorizes the notion of “corporate occupation” to underscore how massive forms of capitalist production and control over the palm oil industry replicate colonial-style relations that undermine citizenship. Her book Land’s End (2014) draws on two decades of ethnographic research in Sulawesi, Indonesia and offers an intimate account of the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders who privatized their common land to plant a boom crop, cacao. This is the book that inspired the topic for this episode, so we’ll be digging into this more in a moment. Some of her other books include The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (2007) which incidentally was a huge inspiration for my own journey into anthropology, her book Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (2011), co-authored with Derek Hall and Paul Hirsch, and Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power, and Production (1999). Her scholarship engages interdisciplinarily with geography, philosophy, religion, politics, and much more. I’m delighted but also honored to be able to interview her for this episode, and I know there will be more to talk about than we have time for, so let’s get started.

Links:

https://www.taniali.org/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2021.1890718

https://www.taniali.org/papers/what-is-land-assembling-a-resource-for-global-investment