The next presentation in our 2025 Ecological Anthropology Seminar Series is by Tania Murray Li titled "Agro-ecological imaginaries, smallholder ambitions, and the dull compulsion of market discipline". The talk will take place on Thursday 20.03.2025 at 14:00 (CET) in the seminar room of the Institute of Ethnology CAS, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1.  To attend in person or online please register here. 

AGRO-ECOLOGICAL IMAGINARIES, SMALLHOLDER AMBITIONS, AND THE DULL COMPULSION OF MARKET DISCIPLINE

Tania Murray Li

 

Critics of ecologically damaging plantations and industrial farms often place their hopes in smallholders, who they imagine to be more attuned to nature’s limits. However, as scholars in the Marxist tradition of critical agrarian studies have long recognized, when smallholders become subject to capitalist relations of market discipline, their options shrink. Drawing on my research in Indonesia I outline the reasons why smallholders opt to grow global market crops such as cacao, rubber and oil palm, and consider the implications for livelihoods, ecologies, and advocacy agendas.

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