Last Born In The Wilderness

[INTRO: 13:02] In this episode, I speak with Tania Li, Ph.D — Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and the author of ‘Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier.’  In our era of globalized neoliberal capitalism, we tend to examine the emergence of capitalist economic and social relations among indigenous communities primarily as a result of overbearing external pressures, e.g. governments, nonprofit organizations, and multinational corporations (often in tandem). It is important, however, to recognize that while this is often the case, this view does not include the ways capitalism can emerge and take hold in far more subtle ways. As documented in ‘Land’s End,’ from 1990 to 2009 Tania conducted annual ethnographic research in the Lauje highlands of Sulawesi Indonesia, and bore witness to the indigenous population’s rapid adoption of the tree crop cocoa for cultivation, transitioning away from the more communally managed production of food crops, as had been done traditional