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Book launch and seminar | Plantation life: Corporate occupation in Indonesia’s palm oil zone | Tania Li & Pujo Semedi
21/02/2022 @ 15:30 - 17:00
Seminar
During this hybrid seminar Tania Li and Pujo Semedi will present some of the key ideas from their new book with a particular focus on the implications of their findings for the palm oil industry promise that “bad oil” can be made good. In Plantation life: Corporate occupation in Indonesia’s palm oil zone Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi examine the structure and governance of Indonesia’s contemporary oil palm plantations in Indonesia, which supply 50 percent of the world’s palm oil. They attend to the exploitative nature of plantation life, wherein villagers’ well-being is sacrificed in the name of economic development. While plantations are often plagued by ruined ecologies, injury among workers, and a devastating loss of livelihoods for former landholders, small-scale independent farmers produce palm oil more efficiently and with far less damage to life and land.
Li and Semedi theorize “corporate occupation” to underscore how massive forms of capitalist production and control over the palm oil industry replicate colonial-style relations that undermine citizenship. In so doing, they question the assumption that corporations are necessary for rural development, contending that the dominance of plantations stems from a political system that privileges corporations.
Read the introduction of the book.
Speakers
Authors: Tania Murray Li (University of Toronto) and Pujo Semedi (Universitas Gadjah Mada)
Chair: Tina Harris (University of Amsterdam)
Discussant: Ward Berenschot (KITLV/University of Amsterdam)
Organizers
Organized by the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam together with KITLV.
Registration
If you want to join the seminar on location, please register via: [email protected].
Seats are limited.
If you wish to join this seminar online, please register via:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMtf-Csrz8pEtXkntcNdKvED9V758rtnd3F
Livestream
Livestream available via: https://www.facebook.com/kitlv