#AsiaNow Speaks with Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi
2023. #AsiaNow. Association for Asian Studies.
To begin with, please tell us what your book is about.
Our book offers an ethnographic account of the forms of life that emerge in Indonesia’s plantation zone, to generate insights on the workings of global capitalism today. Since money only becomes capital when it is brought into relation with land and labor in their concrete forms, grounded inquiry in particular sites is a crucial resource. Focusing on two oil palm plantations in Kalimantan, we ask how they acquired their land, who does plantation work and why, how debt traps out-growers in unfair relations, and the sharp contrast between spaces designated for modernity and spaces that are abandoned.
Oil palm industry supporters argue that plantations bring prosperity to remote regions, yet these promises are oversold. The jobs generated by plantations are relatively few and of poor quality, while the losses they impose are severe. Small-scale farmers can grow oil palm very efficiently with far less damage. Two decades of critique have highlighted corporate harms, but reformers stop short of questioning the necessity for corporate presence. We argue that it is not agronomy or efficiency that dictate corporate dominance in rural spaces, it is politics: political economy, political technology, and the regime of impunity that characterizes Indonesia’s political milieu.
What inspired you to research this topic?
Tania: For me the interest started with crop booms, which bring dynamism to rural economies. I had studied a spontaneous, farmer-driven cacao boom in Sulawesi and wanted to see what happened in a boom where production was dominated by corporations. Since 2000 the plantation format, which had been in decline, started expanding massively in the Indonesian countryside, and I wanted to understand what that meant in human terms. There are many studies exploring what is lost when corporations occupy massive areas of rural land: customary land and institutions, diverse and flexible rural livelihoods, and habitats where multiple species can flourish, among others. Yet in all this description of loss, we do not find much examination of the new forms of life that plantations generate and fix in place. A plantation zone is the site of new identities and subjectivities; new political, economic and social relations; new practices and desires; and new distributions of wealth and poverty.
What obstacles did you face in this project? What turned out better and/or easier than you expected it would?
Pujo: Access to plantations is always challenging. With permission from the state plantation corporation headquarters, we came to a state-owned plantation unit. Perhaps out of obligation or courtesy, the managers seemed enthusiastic to welcome us. But their hospitality was short-lived. “Why are you guys still here?”, a manager asked at the end of the second week. Maybe it was because they were not used to long-term ethnographic research, maybe it was because they worried the longer we were there the more hidden things we would see. The second plantation corporation in our study is privately owned, and we did not gain access to their offices. However, we were able to generate information on the plantation’s operations from other sources—from the office of the smallholder cooperatives, from field managers who shared their notes and insights, and also from the hamlet chiefs who have to manage the relationship between the corporation and villagers living nearby.
In contrast to the two companies, farmers and company employees welcomed us into their homes. We had around sixty students in our research team, and they stayed with host families spread out through the different hamlets and plantation housing blocks in and around the two plantations. Some students needed a little time to adjust to the rural conditions and village social life, but with the generous support of the hosts the students were able to carry out their research. Up to now, we still have good and warm relations with the farmers and the plantation employees in our research area. Some have sent their kids to go to college in Yogyakarta, and some of our students continue to do research in the area, so the relationships initiated during our research continue.
What is the most interesting story or scrap of research you encountered in the course of working on this book?
Tania: For me the most interesting part of working on this book was the collaboration with Pujo. In our discipline, socio-cultural anthropology, conducting research with another person is quite rare and co-authorship is even more unusual. But as we got into it, we came to see the benefits. Each of us noticed different things as we drew on our different perspectives, prior reading, and experience. For example, on day one in the state plantation we studied Pujo said: these people are stealing. He had noticed that managers and office workers were sitting at the coffee stalls from 10am, brazenly stealing time while wearing their uniforms. I don’t think I would have noticed that, or understood how important the theme of theft would become in our analysis. Some of the techniques we developed were interesting too. We read field notes and looked at photos together, challenging ourselves to try to make explicit what we were seeing, or what a person was saying or doing, and what sense we could make of it. One person alone takes a lot for granted, so this exercise helped us to get deeper into the material and bring its significance to light.
What are the works that inspired you as you worked on this book, and/or what are some other titles that you recommend be read in tandem with your own?
Pujo: Hella Haasse’s 1992 novel, Heren ven de Thee (The Tea Lords), was one of my inspirations to engage in Indonesian plantation study. Hasse presents a tea plantation as an oasis of romantic and orderly white civilization in a faraway and backward, if not a completely wild, colony. In the view of the ruling classes, plantations were part of a colonial civilization mission, later renamed a development mission. I just want to know to what extent the civilizing mission worked. As Robert Burns warned us, “the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. And leave us nothing but grief and pain for promised joy.”
Sophie Chao’s work In the Shadow of The Palms is about the experience of Indigenous Papuans confronted by the massive presence of oil palm plantations. Like our book, Chao’s work conveys “grief and pain” while attending to how people (and other species) adapt to the new conditions imposed upon them. Amitav Ghosh’s book, The Nutmeg’s Curse, is also very educative. Indonesia is a country trapped in the tail of the global whirlpool of colonialism and later on capitalism, in which the driving force originates somewhere in the so-called global center. In this relation the wealth of some other nations often means trouble and burden for Indonesians.
Finally, what has captured your attention lately—as a reader, writer, scholar, professor, or person living in the world?
Pujo: After seeing what happens in Indonesia, a former colony that now remains a periphery in global relations, I am interested to know what happens in other parts of the world, in Europe, the center of colonialism and capitalism. I am currently conducting research in Germany, seeking to understand how agriculture and rural life have developed there, and if it turns out to be different from Indonesia, how can this be explained and understood?