Globally the proportion of people who live in rural areas is declining, yet the net number continues to increase: from 3 billion in 1990 to 3.4 billion in 2020. In Southeast Asia, 30 million more people live and work in rural areas today than they did in 1990. Yet rural people are largely absent from public and academic discourse, out of sight and out of mind.
One reason for the neglect is the stubbornly persistent transition narrative which suggests that rural populations are anachronistic: they belong to the past, and sooner or later they will move to cities and join the march of progress. Hence it is not worth worrying too much about who they are or how they live, how national and global currents affect them, or how their aspirations and practices shape the course of history. The only question seems to be how to move them more quickly out of agriculture, into jobs, and off the land to free up more space for mining, corporate agriculture or conservation schemes. In this talk Tania Murray Li will outline the main powers and processes at work in transforming rural Southeast Asia and draw on her ethnographic research in Indonesia to illustrate how rural people navigate their ever-changing terrain.
Meet our speaker and chair
Tania Murray Li is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her publications include Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier, Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (with Derek Hall and Philip Hirsch, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics and many articles on land, labour, class, capitalism, development, resources and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia. Her latest book Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation of Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone is co-authored with Pujo Semedi (Universitas Gadjah Mada).
Catherine Allerton is Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology, and an Associate of the Southeast Asia Centre. She is interested in the materialities and mobilities of everyday life. Her research has focused on place, relatedness, childhood and migration, especially in island Southeast Asia. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a two-placed village in Flores, Indonesia and in the capital city of Sabah, East Malaysia. Her research to date has focused on five key themes: Place and Kinship: Within and Beyond the House; Spiritual Landscapes of Southeast Asia; The Interdisciplinary Ethnography of Children’s Lives; Rethinking Child ‘Illegality’ and Statelessness; and Temporalities of Migration and Care.
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The Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre () is a multidisciplinary Research Centre of the London School of Economics and Political Science (禁漫天堂). Building on the School’s deep academic and historical connections with Southeast Asia, SEAC seeks to foster world-leading academic research focused on the region’s cultural, economic, political, religious, and social landscapes, drawing on the 禁漫天堂’s signature strengths in the social sciences, history, and law.
The Department of Anthropology () is world famous and world leading. Our work is based on ethnographic research: detailed studies of societies and communities in which we have immersed ourselves via long term fieldwork. Placing the everyday lives and meanings of ordinary people - whoever and wherever they are - at the heart of the discipline, we take nothing for granted.
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