Land's End (2014)

Tania Murray Li, professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, published Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier in 2014. If you are interested in ideas put forward by James C. Scott, such as his Weapons of the Weak or Seeing Like a State, Li provides a number of challenges and alternative conclusions. In terms of reflections on international development, her earlier work, The Will to Improve (2007), is recommended as well. Some thought provoking quotes:

Background:

• "Land's End is about the attempt made by indigenous highlanders to join the march of progress promised in modernization narratives, only to encounter the polarizing effect of capitalist relations that soon emerged among them. Farmers able to accumulate land and capital prospered, and those who could not compete were squeezed out. My title plays on several meanings of land's end: the changed use of land, the end of a customary system of land sharing, and the end of the primary forest that had covered the highlanders' land frontier, the place in which they could expand when need or opportunity presented. It also flags their sense of bewilderment – coming to a dead end, the end of a peninsula surrounded by sea, without a raft or sense of direction. This was the predicament of Kasar and others like him, who could no longer sustain their families on the old terms, but had no viable alternatives." (p. 2)
  
• "…my ethnographic approach enabled me to explore how they became subjects with particular hopes and plans. It also enabled me to explore how capitalist relations formed around competition could take hold in the highlands, as an unintended effect of mundane practices like planting cacao, borrowing a sack of rice, or seeking a loan in a moment of crisis. Once formed, these relations really were compulsory. They eroded choice. They couldn't be deselected, or wished away." (p. 181)
  

On finding beneficiaries, being "out of sight" and the tarmac bias:

• "During a visit in 1991 I encountered a planning official from the provincial capital Palu, who was scouting ideas for a Canadian-funded development project intended to relieve poverty in the Lauje area. "Those coconut trees are old," he commented, looking at the tall spindly trees that produced few fruit. "We can replace them with hybrid varieties, or plant cacao underneath." It did not occur to him to ask who actually owned the coconut trees, who was positioned to capture the benefit from increased productivity, or who would lose out. I explained to him what I had learned about the area thus far: that over the decades, ownership of the coconut trees had become concentrated in the hands of very few families as the owners had sold their trees to pay for weddings and cover debts. The people in the tiny huts under the trees were squatting on the land and had no right to cultivate long-term crops. Even if the old coconut trees were replaced by more productive ones, the poor would not benefit, and they might even be evicted if the landowners decided to plant more trees to maximize their profits. I also tried to explain that the poorest people were living in the highlands, out of sight, but he was not interested. "These people here are quite poor enough for our project," he said. "We don't need to look any further." (p. 38)
  

On being ordinary:

• "… when the Canadian development project asked me to take some government officials and NGO people from Palu into the highlands in 1992, the visitors were disappointed that after so many long hot hours hiking up the mountain trails, the people we encountered were so ordinary: no paint and feathers, no carvings, costumes, music, or dance, no scary savages or noble ones, just a lot of poor people leading hard lives." (p. 45)
  

On coercion and control:

• "…highlanders did not resist state rule, nor did they have a "genius" for managing their affairs without state interference. Desires for security and access to trade goods drew them into the orbit of coastal powers. Minimally they wanted salt, knife blades, cooking pots, cloth sarongs, shorts, shirts, and kerosene for the tiny wick lamps they made from discarded tin cans. These relations make little sense if we focus only on the coercive or "deductive" dimension of power emphasized by Scott in his discussion of how states or state-like entities subjugate people, impose fines and taxes, and extract goods and profits. It makes more sense if we examine how power works to produce subjects who desire particular ways of living. Desires come from somewhere, they have histories, but these are not histories of unilateral imposition. It was an array of powers – attraction, threat, coercion, the channeling of choice – that combined to position the Lauje highlanders, and induced them to position themselves, in the spatially ordered hierarchy of an administrative regime and a set of extractive relations centered on the coast." (p. 33)
  

On invisibilization:

• "The headman's derisive dismissal of highlanders' food production, together with highlanders' invisibility on the desa map and data board, were not idiosyncratic. They were an indication of how a characterization of highlanders as wild, backward, and unproductive worked to secure particular relations of power." (p. 32)
  

On outcomes:

• "Development experts like the ones who write World Bank reports would readily recognize the process that divided highlanders into haves and have-nots – indeed they promote this process as necessary for increased productivity. They expect failed farmers to move along a transition path toward new work, somewhere else. But this expectation is challenged by the predicament of Lauje highlanders, and far too many others who find themselves at a dead end. Development planners have little to offer people who become landless in contexts where there aren't enough jobs that provide a living wage." (p. 177)