Tania Li

Homepage: http://anthropology.utoronto.ca/people/faculty-1/faculty-profiles/tania-li

Tania Li is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Toronto. She holds a senior Canada Research Chair in the Political-Economy and Culture of Asia-Pacific. She is Acting Director of the Asian Institute, 2007-8. She obtained her BA and PhD from Cambridge University in the UK.

Her early research in Southeast Asia concerned urban cultural politics in Singapore. Since 1990, her research has focused on questions of culture, economy, environment, and development in Indonesia’s upland regions. She has written about the rise of Indonesia’s indigenous peoples’ movement, land reform, rural class formation, struggles over the forests and conservation, community resource management, and state-organized resettlement. She recently published The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Duke University Press, 2007). The book explores governmentality in its colonial and contemporary iterations, tracking interventions devised by experts to improve landscapes and livelihoods in Indonesia. It includes programs of Dutch missionaries, New Order officials, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, the Nature Conservancy, and Indonesian NGOs.

Selected Publications >