In this episode, Gabriel Kozlowski and Tania Li discuss the concept of land and its inscription, colonization by plantation corporations, modes of distribution beyond the “proper job,” and ethnographic approaches to the practice of politics.
“What is the form of life that a plantation actually sets in place? It’s not limited to the area within its boundaries. It spills over into the entire apparatus of government, into the wider landscape, into the way that law works, politics works, and so on. So yeah, that’s the form of life, what we call life under corporate occupation.” –Tania Li, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto
“For indigenous highlanders [in Sulawesi] their own name for themselves was farming people. You ask them who they are, they would say tope jo’ong, people of the farms. So to be a farm person without a farm made no sense to them at all.” –Tania Li, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto
“I noticed that the local language, [spoken in the highlands of Sulawesi], actually has no word for land. They used the word lokasi, which is a strange word, something like location. Lokasi seemed to suggest the arrival of an entity that had not existed before and also that had a new kind of affordance or new purpose.” –Tania Li, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto