17th Eric Wolf Lecture: Tania Murray Li
In his 1990 Distinguished Lecture: Facing Power - Old Insights, New Questions, Eric Wolf set out ambitious parameters for studying power and explaining how it works. He made the case for anthropology as an explanatory discipline and drew on the theoretical repertoire of both Marx and Foucault in ways that resonate with my own research practice. In this lecture I build on Wolf’s work to outline the multiple formations of power that shape the conditions of life in Indonesia’s plantation zone. I then draw on ethnographic research to explore how these powers are encountered or “faced” by particular interlocutors, and the actions and reflections that follow.
Tania Murray Li is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. 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, labour, class, capitalism, development, resources and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia. Her latest book Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation of Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone (Duke University Press, 2021) is co-authored with Pujo Semedi (Universitas Gadjah Mada). https://www.taniali.org/