Why read Land's End?

Book cover of Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier

Book description

Drawing on two decades of ethnographic research in Sulawesi, Indonesia, Tania Murray Li offers an intimate account of the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders who privatized their common land to plant a boom crop, cacao. Spurred by the hope of ending their poverty and isolation, some prospered, while…

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Asian history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Land's End as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Carol J. Pierce Colfer

Author

Tania Li shows the impacts of the capitalist process of a highland group’s attempts to adopt commodity production of cacao in central Sulawesi, building on her two decades of ethnographic research there. The book shows how, in this process, relations among people and with their environment change as the forest disappears and land ownership and wealth become more inequitable – not particularly pretty. It taught me how the Sulawesi situation differs from the Bornean situation I know so well.

From Carol's list on Indonesian life and policy.