Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. xi, 225 pp. (Illustrations, maps, tables.) US$84.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8223-5694-3; US$23.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-8223-5705-6.
Land’s End is a very fine book indeed. Tania Murray Li has written one of those studies—all too few in number—which, while empirically focused, builds an argument that will resonate with scholars working across widely differing contexts. She shows, through the lives of the indigenous Lauje highlanders of central Sulawesi, how market integration has reworked individual lives and wider society. The transformations that Li describes are usually problematic, often unsettling, and sometimes profoundly destructive. These, of course, will not be surprising conclusions to most critical scholars of development or agrarian change, wherever they happen to work. But while the broad conclusions may be familiar, how they are reached and Li’s interpretation of their origin, trajectory, and articulation is novel.
Li first visited the Lauje in 1990. Before she ventured into the highlands, lowlanders and government officials told her that the forests of the area were dense and the local people backward, lazy, and inhospitable. They tried to convince Li to stay away and, presumably, find some other subjects who would be more amenable to study. In good anthropological tradition, she chose to ignore their well-meant advice.
At a general level Li’s story, which stretches from this first visit in 1990 to 2009, and covering numerous returns, is one of dispossession, deepening inequality and polarization, and growing vulnerability. It is also one, puzzlingly, where the thirst for modernization among the affected people remained undimmed even while their subsistence security was progressively undermined. Far from being adverse to money and modernization, local people thirsted for such things. The Lauje, instead of seeking some alternative path to development, were avidly searching for alternative ways to enter the mainstream. The fact that so many were thwarted in these efforts is the tragedy that lies at the centre of Li’s account.
The opportunity to enter the mainstream came in the guise of cacao. The trouble was that it proved a productive route for only a subset of the Lauje, although this was not clear at the outset. Capitalist relations appeared in the highlands, as Li says, by stealth:
No rapacious agribusiness corporation grabbed land from highlanders or obliged them to plant cacao. No government department evicted them. Nor was there a misguided development scheme that disrupted their old ways of life. … Nor did [the highlanders] fit the role of victim, a central figure in the campaigns of many social movements and humanitarian organizations. There was no apocalypse, no famine, no natural disaster, no eviction, no dramatic event, and no villain to blame. Nor was there an obvious way out. (9, 16)
Until the expansion of cacao from the 1990s, land in the area was abundant and communally owned. The Lauje didn’t even have a word for land. By the time Li returned the word lokasi, appropriated from the English via Indonesian, was in widespread use. It signaled a profound change in the organization of society and the source of people’s living. Cacao meant that land, for the first time, was owned, and could be exchanged, sold, and inherited. It set the groundwork, quite literally, for new forms of social stratification. This privatization of land was not uncontested; who could plant ulat (secondary forest) to cacao and therefore lay permanent claim to that land was debated and struggled over. Those who could “prove” their genealogical rights were able to accumulate land at the expense of those who could not. The surprise is that this did not elicit much violence, or even a great deal of dissension.
By 2009, this process had created classes of land rich, land poor, and landless in the highlands, a situation that would have been “unthinkable” in 1990 (115). In 1990, Li writes, “one person’s prosperity was not gained, indeed could not be gained, at another’s expense” (152). At the same time as access to land became increasingly unequal, the traditional non-commoditized relations and interdependencies that used to see people through difficult times were gradually eroded, squeezing the poor from both ends of the subsistence equation. Surprisingly, however, few Lauje reflected back sentimentally on this preceding moral economy; there was little nostalgia and little recourse to discourses of morality. This refusal to romanticize the past was, perhaps, because people still told stories of extended periods of drought and struggles to survive. With traditional inter-household relations on the wane, class relations took their place, between the land-gaining and the land-losing classes. Wage labour increasingly linked the two.
The extension of roads into the highlands extended and intensified the inequality-deepening effects of cacao. Roads also permitted lowlanders easier access into the highlands. But even those who had lost their land through dispossession and then lost their work as porters because of the roads, could see the value of these connective threads. Without roads, how would their children gain access to the schools and education that would permit their engagement with the modern economy and wider Indonesia? While many Lauje may have been stuck in the highlands because their Indonesian language skills (or lack thereof) made it hard for them to move, this didn’t stop lowlanders and lowland tendencies from infiltrating the uplands.
By the close of Li’s book, which is as much a history as an ethnography, the impoverished Lauje have become a class without land, without work, and a class that cannot easily move. Some of them were, quite literally, dying before their time. “Shorn of teleological assumptions and optimistic win-win scenarios, land’s end,” for Li, “is a profoundly disturbing place” (173).
The wider point, which Land’s End so convincingly and evocatively captures, is that economic growth alone is not enough, even miracle growth. Those working on and in development, and especially those who believe that a rising tide will lift all boats, really do need to read this book.
Jonathan Rigg
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 489-491