Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. xii, 243 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 9781478014959.
The rapid expansion of the palm oil industry in the 2000s and the ensuing controversy has led to an increase in literature addressing the topic from different perspectives. Amidst these recently published works on palm oil, Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi’s book, Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone, stands out with its powerful combination of the depth of intensive ethnographic study and the refreshing conceptualization of corporate occupation and its “world-making” consequences. Furthermore, for a book written with academic rigour, the flowing storytelling makes it easy to read for everyone.
Based on five years of field research in Tanjung district, Sanggau, West Kalimantan, the book seeks to understand the forms of life that emerge in the plantation zones in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil. Simultaneously, it also aims to look at how the workings of global capitalism have manifested in these specific conjunctures and gain insights from embracing this specificity. It contends that the plantation, through the political technology of “corporate occupation,” has reshaped the forms of life in its occupied zones. Stretching the familiar conceptualization of occupation (which usually refers to political and military subjugation by a foreign power), the authors illustrate how plantations, driven by capital and the schemes of policy makers from far away, have forcefully established themselves as the new ordering powers in what the authors identify as “plantation zones.” The book elaborates on how the arrival and the workings of the plantations has reshaped the organization of social relations and the relationship between human and non-human nature in the area that falls under their sphere of influence. Supported and conditioned by a corrupt political system that prioritizes a particular idea of economic development, the plantations have taken over territories and forced people to transform into useful “subjects” of the occupation. Those deemed useless for the plantation have been abandoned or replaced, banished into what one leader describes as “ghosts in our own land” (36). However, migrants, who are preferred by the plantation managers because of their distrust towards the locals, are also subject to exploitation (“eaten up” by the company’s excessive demands) (70). The authors further argue that this reorganization of the social hierarchies, which is often entangled with racial identities, stems from “imperial debris”: “the rot that remains from the political technologies of colonial rule” (10).
However, the book adds an interesting twist to this argument. The machinery of corporate occupation, though powerful, does not necessarily work seamlessly and effectively. It is often fragile and ineffective. The book shows how many workers, who cannot mobilize collectively, have pushed back the exploitation by the plantations through small actions such as stealing and thus making the plantation ineffective. The authors also document the collective efforts by local communities, Dayaks and Malays, to resist the corporate occupation of their lands. Some have fought hard in the negotiation process with the plantation managers, while others have instrumentalized the limitations in the technical capacity of the plantations, such as their low-quality maps. As a result, the control of the plantations is often uneven, even within their formal concessions (49). These contradictions have led to the emergence of multiple forms of life (156), shaped by diverse forces enmeshed together by the presence of the plantations. After detailed elaboration on the dynamics in the specific plantation zones, the authors look at the big picture by trying to understand why, despite their limitations and criticism against them, oil palm plantations have continued to expand in Indonesia. The authors argue that the answer lies in the persistence of imperial debris. It is partly manifesting in the belief that “neither the government nor Indonesia’s small-scale farmers can create prosperity on their own” (188).
While its embrace of specificity and the use of intensive ethnographic study focusing on the specific area gives the book depth and richness, this approach also has some limitations. The focus on the specific and detailed situations has led the authors to miss the larger structural dynamics and how different scales of governance affect the practices of corporate occupation. While some parts of the book do provide a larger context (New Order policies, Reformasi, ethnic tensions, etc.) they are often recounted as background rather than an integral part of the analysis. The book would be richer if the authors connected the dynamics of corporate occupation in the plantation zones and the political-economic structure in which the corporations operate. The authors also occasionally leave some discussion unexplained, such as the claim that the language of Indonesia’s Constitution confirms hierarchy, which then contributes to the workings of corporate occupation. It would be more convincing if the authors could further elaborate on this claim by providing more evidence and how this contributes to the actual operation of corporate occupation.
The theorization of “corporate occupation” also prompts the question of how applicable this concept is to other plantation zones in Indonesia. What are the similarities and differences between life forms that emerged in plantation zones in Tanjung district and those in Riau, the Indonesian province with the largest production of palm oil and mature oil palm plantations, or in Papua, a new frontier in the oil palm plantation expansion? Since this question is beyond the aim of the book, we can consider this a call for further research.
While focusing on a particular site and consciously embracing its specificity, Plantation Life is an important contribution to numerous academic as well as policy discussions, from the consequences of the palm oil industry, models of development, contemporary capitalism, to the legacy of colonialism. It is recommended to be read together with Jonathan E. Robins’ Oil Palm: A Global History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), which offers a different angle on the development of oil palm plantations.
Shofwan Al Banna Choiruzzad
Universitas Indonesia, Depok