Description
Book SynopsisDrawing upon current theoretical debates in social anthropology, development studies and political ecology, and presenting original research from across the Archipelago, this book addresses the changing histories and identities of upland people as they relate in new ways to the natural resource base, to markets and to the state. It is an engaged study, which fills important analytical gaps and addresses real-world concerns, exploring the uplands as components of national and global systems of meaning, power, and production. It offers a significant re-assessment of concepts, processes, histories, relationships and discourses, many of which are not unique to either the uplands or Indonesia, making the book essential and compelling reading for both scholars and practitioners.
Trade Review"An important overall theme of the book is the ways in which political, social and economic marginality is constituted, expressed and sustained....Overall the quality of the contributions to the volume is high; Li's editorial introduction and her first chapter on marginality, power and production are especially useful....Several of the chapters...provide excellent historical and ethnographic detail."
Table of ContentsMarginality, power and production - analyzing upland transformations; constituting the uplands - economies and traditions; maize and tobacco in upland Indonesia; culturalizing the Indonesian Uplands; "It's Not Economical" - the market roots of a moral economy in highland Sulawesi; representing the Uplands - traditional knowledge and environments reconsidered; forest knowledge, forest transformation - political contingency, historical ecology and the renegotiation of knowledge in central Seram; becoming a tribal elder, and other green development fantasies; representations of the "Other" by others - the ethnographic challenge posed by planters' views of peasants in Indonesia; changing agrarian relations - commodity production and state agendas; nucleus and plasma - contract farming and the exercise of power in upland West Java. (Part contents).
