In his 1990 Distinguished Lecture Facing Power–Old Insights, New Questions, Eric Wolf set out ambitious parameters for studying power and explaining how it works. He made the case for anthropology as an explanatory discipline and drew on the theoretical repertoire of both Marx and Foucault in ways that resonate with Tania Murray Li’s own research practice. In this lecture she builds on Wolf’s work to outline the multiple formations of power that shape the conditions of life in Indonesia’s plantation zone and then draws on ethnographic research to explore how these powers are encountered or »faced« by particular interlocutors, and the actions and reflections that follow.

Tania Murray Li is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research centers on land, labour, class, capitalism, development, resources and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia. Her latest publications include Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone (with Pujo Semedi, Duke University Press, 2021), and Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University Press, 2014).  www.taniali.org

In cooperation with the ÖAW Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA), the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna (KSA), and the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the CEU.