Many scholars have debated Geertz's characterization of Java as a site of social and economic involution, in which impoverished peasants worked ever harder to achieve static results. Fewer have taken up his characterization of Indonesia's Outer Islands as a zone of extremes - islands of export production surrounded by "a broad sea of essentially unchanging swidden making."
The image, shared by the contemporary indigenous rights movement, suggests that export crop production is driven by corporate investors. It fits poorly with indigenous peoples' commitments to community, tradition, and food sovereignty, hence they opt for stasis - rejecting cash crops, or integrating them cautiously, in order to leave social and economic relations unchanged. Yet the historical record shows that for three centuries, indigenous highlanders have eagerly adopted boom crops at the expense of food production whenever they had access to lucrative markets.
The difference today is that the land frontier is closing, so failed cash crop farmers become landless: a common fate in lowland regions, but a new experience for highlanders who could always clear a new patch of ground. Drawing on her ethnographic research in Sulawesi and comparative material from across Indonesia, Tania Li explores the configurations of stasis and dynamism that characterize Indonesia's indigenous frontiers, and the novel challenge presented by landlessness today.

Tania Murray Li teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy and Culture of Asia. Her publications include Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University Press, 2014), Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (with Derek Hall and Philip Hirsch, NUS Press, 2011), The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Duke University Press, 2007), and many articles on land, labour, development, resource struggles, community, class, and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia.