Non-CAS Event
Friday, February 24, 2017, 4:00 p.m.
Hale Science, Room 230
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 plantations already cover ten million hectares, and more are planned. The polemical term 'land grab' usefully draws attention to what is being taken away: customary land rights, diverse farming systems, and ecological balance. Drawing on ethnographic research in the oil palm zone of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, this talk draws attention to what happens after the grab; to the social and political system that is put in place, together with the palms.
Tania Murray Li teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy and Culture of Asia. Her publications include Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier, (Duke University Press, 2014), Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (with Derek Hall and Philip Hirsch, NUS Press, 2011), The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics (Duke University Press, 2007) and many articles on land, development, resource struggles, community, class and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia.