Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Kanchana Ruwanpura, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore 

ABSTRACT

Recent concern over the so-called “global land-grab” has drawn attention to an important social fact: the plantation form is again expanding across the world, with massive areas dedicated to oil palm, timber, rubber, soy, sugar, and other industrial crops. There are already around 15 million hectares of oil palm in Southeast Asia, mainly in Malaysia and Indonesia, and up to 20 million more hectares held in “land banks” or designated for plantation development. Malaysian and other agri-business corporations are acquiring millions of hectares for oil palm in Liberia, the Congo, and in Latin America. The outcome of this massive expansion is not just a radically transformed landscape, but an entirely new form of social and political life for the tens of millions of people who live and work in the oil palm zone.

Plantations present themselves as “total institutions” governed by techno-bureaucratic rationales, in which neat rows of crops are tended by a disciplined workforce, contract farmers are tightly organized into co-ops, and investors contemplate tidy graphs promising productivity and profit. Drawing upon ethnographic research in the oil palm zone of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, this talk presents a quite different picture. The kind of totalizing order that reigns there is a tense and violent one, described by one transmigrant farmer as a “mafia system” characterized by coercion and extortion at all levels. At its core is monopoly: monopoly of massive areas of land by a single crop means monopoly over the means of livelihood (land, work, cash), and monopoly over the spaces in which social and political relations take shape. The talk examines the contours of this “mafia system,” focusing on the relations that form among politicians, government officials, plantation managers, migrant workers, and indigenous and transmigrant smallholders, all struggling to capture a piece of the prosperity promised by the palm.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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, forthcoming), 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.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: Jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg