Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone

Grounded, rooted, and tangled: Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi's new book, Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone, is scholarship—brilliantly engaged scholarship—that speaks not to a time of biodiversity loss but instead to an age of degraded citizenship. It is a book inspired by the authors' own histories and how their histories and becoming stories shaped the ways in which they see and study the ethnographic present. Li spent her teen years in Singapore, took family road trips across rural Malaysia, and conducted undergraduate research in Sarawak just as oil palms were spreading upriver (vii–viii). Semedi grew up on one of Java's tea estates; his father worked as head of transport for the plantation while his mother taught at its primary school. After completing a PhD at the University of Amsterdam, Semedi returned to the same tea plantation he grew up on for postdoctoral research (ix). Their separate but shared experiences in the field and among people who work the land cultivated for each of them questions about the forms of life and loss in today's “plantation landscapes” and how these forms of life and loss are constituted on the ground (viii).Set against this personal backdrop, Plantation Life is a timely, urgent contribution to Indonesian studies and the study of palm oil more generally. Convincingly, it argues that the impunity and invasiveness of “plantations [stem] from a political system that privileges corporations” rather than an economic model that fosters rural development (back cover). It is a book that supports this argument over the course of five chapters, looking specifically at the interior lives of two plantation companies in Tanjung, Kalimantan Barat: Natco (state-owned) and Priva (private).But rather than analyzing the business of these two oil palm corporations, from above or outside, Plantation Life breaks new scholarly ground by exploring them from below and within. In this way, Li and Semedi's collaborative method is to listen to, archive, and document the frictions, fragilities, hopes, harms, and lived experiences of those who figure in the everyday workings of Indonesia's oil palm zone. Through a clear, meticulous, and impassioned ethnography, their scholarship narrates how plantations are established (chapter 1); why permanent and casual workers come, stay, and often cannot go (chapter 2); how farmers rise and fall with the two-hectare plot scheme (chapter 3); what forms of life and loss look like within the oil palm zone (chapter 4); and why corporate plantations endure and continue to eat more land than ever before in Indonesia (chapter 5).Central to Li and Semedi's understanding of plantation life and how this kind of life degrades citizenship are the voices and experiences of farmers, harvesters, fertilizers, and seeders as well as managers, foremen, guards, and drivers. Their bottom-up approach to the nuance and precarity of work, debt, and capital within the oil palm zone reveals more than a world that has been long cultivated out of view and kept at bay by monocrop horizons, “mafia practices,” impassable roads, and other forms of injurious infrastructure (17). Anchored in story as much as it is in theory, Plantation Life introduces its readers to the biographies of workers, families, and generations and how their lives and legacies shaped and were shaped by the cultures and ecologies of oil palm production. Rich in detail and care, Li and Semedi plow through, and peel away, the layers of law, policy, exploitation, and ruin in order to reveal a history of the present: one borne in the shadows of “monotonous palm” (viii).1 Powerful and persuasive, their ethnography mobilizes a body of participant observation, social evidence, and field research to explain why, and show how, Indonesia has endured as one of the planet's leading producers of oil palm. As noted on the book's back cover, the archipelago's plantation zone, which stretches from North Sumatra to West Papua, contributes more than half the world's supply of this ubiquitous oil.Finally, and by grounding oil palm's past and present in the lives of those who are entangled with—and entrapped by—the production of plantation life, Li and Semedi make, in my view, their most invaluable contribution to Indonesian studies and the study of Southeast Asia more broadly. It is a contribution that is methodological and material rather than theoretical. Indeed, what lies at the heart of the book's compelling research and its textured prose is a history of “collaborative practices” (198). Unlike most scholars, Li and Semedi open space and invite reflection for readers to know the origins and arc of Plantation Life, from how they first met at a social forestry conference in 2002, found common ground in their areas of research, and selected a field site that was new to both of them (Tanjung), to the ways in which they scoped the project, worked with a team of more than 180 undergraduate students (in total) across languages, three years, and two universities (Gadjah Mada and Toronto), and ultimately produced the manuscript (194). Alongside the book's collaborative spirit is its visual narrative, which weaves together words and images that centers and values the team's more than thirty photographs captured in the field. Taken together, Li and Semedi's Plantation Life is an exemplar for our times, revealing not only why research on the ground matters but also how it can be undertaken in meaningful and collaborative ways.

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