Tania Murray Li is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her work has explored changing forms of land use and governing in South East Asia. In particular she has worked 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-organised resettlement. Among her publications are The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics(2007) and Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier(2014). With James Ferguson she has produced a remarkable, thought-provoking pamphlet about work, welfare, subsistence and the politics of distribution (themes touched on in this conversation; Ferguson and Li, 2018).

I first met Tania at an anthropology conference in 2002 and became fascinated by her ethnographically grounded deployment and development of concepts like governmentality and assemblage. This fascination triggered a series of encounters and conversations that continue.

Further details can be found at her home page: https://anthropology. utoronto.ca/people/faculty/tania-li/.

This conversation was recorded in Toronto on 25 March 2013.

Themes and topics

• • A collaborative-working puzzle

• • Making concepts work

• • Questions of conservative rule

• • The problem of work

A collaborative-working puzzle

Tania: You know, the first thing I came across of your work was in collected things coming out of cultural studies which were multi-authored, and in my discipline, anthropology, that's a very rare thing. Now recently I’ve started to co-author things but it's very unusual and I wonder about that, working in groups at a young age, how formative that was? How do you think about the possibility of a group of people hammering out something together? Or was that actually what was going on there? When a string of names appeared on those publications, what was the process that you were all involved in?

John: It's a great starting point. It was absolutely formative and it still drives me to think that working and writing collaboratively is the best thing I do. I mean, time consuming, difficult in all sorts of ways, but it delivers things that I would never do by myself.