Central European - 7 month ago

During a two-part engagement at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on March 25 and at CEU on March 26, Tania Murray Li, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, delivered the 17th Eric Wolf Lecture. With each edition, the named lecture honors an anthropologist for exceptional scientific accomplishments in the vein of scholar Eric Wolf’s legacy of anthropology engaged in international and global issues.  The 2025 event marks the first time that CEU’s Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology has served as a hosting partner for the distinguished Vienna lecture in collaboration with the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OEAW), the International Research Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Art and Design, Linz and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Li’s research concerns land, labor, capitalism, development, politics and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia. Her book, “The Will to Improve” (2007), explores a century of interventions by colonial and contemporary officials, missionaries, development experts and activists. “Powers of Exclusion”(2011) examines the transition of cultivated land to see what happens to farmers’ access to land in the context of competing land uses. Her prize-winning book, “Land’s End” (2014), tracks the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders when they enclosed their common land.  Most recently, “Plantation Life” (2021) co-authored with Pujo Semili, examines the structure and governance of contemporary oil palm plantations in Indonesia, which supply 50 percent of the world s palm oil. The book argues thatthese plantations should be understood as forms of corporate occupation, in which corporate entities—under the guise of economic development— perpetuate colonial-style relations that undermine local livelihoods and ecologies. This ethnographic study was a central reference during the recent Vienna lecture. Facing Power: Ethnographic Encounters in Indonesia’s Plantation Zone For her March 25 lecture, titled “Facing Power: Ethnographic Encounters in Indonesia’s Plantation Zone”, Li built upon a 1989 lecture by Eric Wolf, in which he outlined parameters for studying power and explaining how it works. Li said that at the time of his lecture, Wolf was writing against the idea that the job of the anthropologist was to simply reflect back the native’s point of view as complete and open for contemplation. He instead called for anthropology to be an “explanatory discipline” in which the anthropologist must name and compare things, formulating concepts for such naming and comparison. Addressing Wolf’s call, Li asked during the lecture: “How do we face or envision structural power? How do we actually see, imagine and envision this? [...] What I m particularly interested in is how do we, in this discipline, handle the gap between our explanations and what we think is going on [as anthropologists] and the explanations of our interlocutors and what they see and think is going on because these are not going to be identical.” Interlocutors are the individuals who engage with anthropologists during fieldwork providing insights into their culture, social structures and knowledge. During the lecture, Li used the process of her research to show how she personally approached this anthropologist-interlocutor gap–specifically regarding power dynamics that shape conditions of life in Indonesia’s plantation zone, which she said occupies a staggering 22 million hectares of land, roughly a third of the country’s agricultural area. “There is no history in Indonesia of corporate concessions going back to the people… So, the permanent imprint of these concessions is not to be underestimated. This really is a transformation of the nature of the countryside over huge areas of Indonesia,” said Li. To illuminate the anthropologist-interlocutor gap, she first noted the kinds of information available to her as an anthropologist, for example detailed maps of the plantation zones, knowledge of particular historical events in the region, as well as theoretical concepts related to capitalism and power. She highlighted that anthropologists examine the structures of power that put these plantations in place, from colonial land law to pro-corporate development policies. Li then described one particular interlocutor in depth, sharing the specifics of his experience and related descriptions of power. She said he characterized the plantations in terms of hierarchy and impunity and described acts of theft and bosses who bend the rules. The presentation of an individual interlocutor made clear that, as someone directly facing giant corporations in daily life, he generated explanations of power situated differently in terms of time, space and relationship. After describing the differences or gaps between how an anthropologist and her interlocutors viewed and explained power, Li concluded with suggestions for how scholars in the field can respond in three ways: Supplementation In recognizing that interlocutors have partial understanding of how power works, anthropologists can seek to supplement their explanations by building up ethnographic details from the field to inform concepts of power. Contextualization By examining the geography and historical processes that structure and limit the perspectives of interlocutors, anthropologists can help to situate these understandings. Listen and Learn Researchers should attend to the insights that interlocutors generate for themselves. They should seek out individuals engaged in their own analysis of the powers that confront them. Such expressions contribute to important insights in fieldwork.
Tania Murray Li (R) and Claudio Sopranzetti (L) onstage at CEU. Photo: CEU Following the two-part structure of the Eric Wolf Lecture, CEU hosted the question-and-answer section with the invited researcher the following day, giving the Vienna community an opportunity to reflect and discuss the lecture. The wide-ranging conversation spanned ethics, fieldwork, regional dynamics in Indonesia and engagement with the suggestions introduced the previous day. Closing the discussion, Li said: “In any place that an anthropologist examines, there are going to be a variety of forces at work. You don t follow every thread, and you re not going to give the same attention to every element of the conjuncture, but what I try to do is tease out the ones which seem most interesting or most pertinent.” She added: “It s that search and being ready. The key about our discipline of anthropology is that we never expect the explanation to be singular. There s always going to be a variety of relations and processes in play, and that s what we try to make sense of.” Learn about CEU’s programs in Sociology and Social Anthropology. Unit: Department of Sociology and Social AnthropologyResearch Area: Sociology and Social AnthropologyCategory: Research NewsNewsImage: Content Priority: High

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