Tento autor zkoumá politicko-ekonomické a kulturní aspekty Asie a Pacifiku. Jeho práce se často zaměřuje na složité vztahy mezi globálními silami a regionálními dynamikami. Prostřednictvím svého akademického zázemí přináší do svých děl hlubokou analytickou perspektivu. Čtenáři ocení jeho pronikavý pohled na současné světové dění.
Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi examine the structure and governance of contemporary palm oil plantations in Indonesia, showing how massive forms of capitalist production and control over the palm oil industry replicate colonial-style relations that undermine citizenship.
The authors explore the exploitative dynamics of Indonesia's oil palm plantations, which dominate global palm oil production. They highlight the detrimental impact on local communities, including ecological degradation and loss of livelihoods, while contrasting this with the more sustainable practices of small-scale farmers. By introducing the concept of "corporate occupation," they critique the colonial-like power structures perpetuated by large corporations in the industry. The book challenges the notion that corporate presence is essential for rural development, revealing the political systems that favor corporate interests over community well-being.
Offers an account of development in action. Focusing on experts' attempts to improve landscapes and livelihoods in Indonesia, this title exposes the practices that enable experts to diagnose problems and devise interventions, and the agency of people whose conduct is targeted for reform.
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 strangers—they were kin and neighbors. Li's richly peopled account takes the reader into the highlanders' 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, land'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. Li'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.