Tania Murray Li's book is of great interest for three reasons. First, it provides extensive information on socioeconomic changes among the Lauje communities living in the coastal strip and highlands north of the Gulf of Tomini in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Second, it extends theoretical reflections on the necessary conditions for the development of a socioeconomic model, capitalism, within peasant societies. Finally, it is situated in a historical perspective and, thus, reveals the dynamics of the transformation of a peasant society more clearly. The methodology adopted by the author does not proceed from an a posteriori reconstruction of past events based on agents’ memories. It began with three years of fieldwork in 1990. Then, over a period of twenty years, the author visited the Lauje nine times, a year in total, to observe the mutations of this society. Tania Murray Li's book is comprised of a series of vignettes of the Lauje communities, which are commented on and analysed to emphasise the local dynamics of social transformation.

In 1990, there were about 30,000 Lauje in the area studied. They still occupy a territory that the author splits into three parts: coastal, middle and upland areas. The Lauje are mainly settled in the uplands, hardly speak Bahasa Indonesia, the national language, and generally uplanders do not send their children for formal education in state or any other institutions. At the beggining of this study period, self-consumption was the prime mover of action for upland Lauje households, which sought to primarily produce goods to meet their own needs. Whoever farmed the land had a right to use it and work had a strong collective dimension: ‘it was not possible to farm or survive alone’ (p. 57). This relation to production did not exclude transfers of goods, but these did not, or hardly conflicted with, the objective of a subsistence lifestyle. The goods exchanged, generally specific to the each area, created social bonds, within villages, between villages, and between the areas. For example, in return for non-timber forest products sold in coastal villages, upland households obtained imported goods. The coastal villages were differently organised, with their coconut-based economy, schools and basic health services, and trading as a core function (importing rice, etc.). The coastal zones thus played a connecting function between upland/inland and ‘outside’ areas.

This situation has been gradually changing. The population has increased (to 44,000 in 2009) mainly in the coastal zones, and the focus on producing for self-consumption is fading. In 2009, most Lauje households sought to produce market crops or goods for sale. In the highlands, there is widespread cultivation of cocoa, garlic and shallots, for example, while at the lower elevations cocoa and clove cultivation is spreading. In both areas, food production has been much reduced. Coastal areas specialise in the trade of cocoa, cloves and supply the interior with the goods they do not produce. In this context, the price of agricultural products sold becomes crucial. Since the households no longer grow enough food for their own needs, they have to buy it, but lower prices for their agricultural produce impedes their capacity to get essential goods. In addition, access to land is also changing. Households now enclose plots to protect the marketable crops. The land is no longer accessible to all as a commons, and ‘some higlanders had no access to land at all, a condition unthinkable in 1990’ (p. 115). These mutations have established a form of work almost unknown before: wage labour. Without access to land, selling one's labour becomes the only legal means of eating.

Despite its interest and great qualities, this reviewer would like to express some reservations about this book. First, the author seems to be sometimes caught up in a ‘Western centric’ vision, as in the following sentence: ‘In 1990, … they had little or no access to education’ (p. 179). Of course, the Lauje especially in the uplands did not have access to education offered by the ‘formal’ school system established by the state or another authority. But it is not satisfying to reduce education to ‘formal education’. Even if local actors associate the deterioration of their living conditions with their difficulties in accessing the dominant modes of socialisation (formal education), from an anthropological point of view, a people without education does not exist. Second, Tania Murray Li uses a vocabulary directly derived from neoclassical economic theory: risk-averse (p. 14), path dependence (p. 16), land scarcity (p. 178), and so on. These terms have taken shape in a singular and ideational theoretical environment in which the ‘natural’ forces of the market explain individual choices. If I have understood the book correctly, these universal forces are not present amongst the Lauje. On the contrary, the transformation processes there are linked to socially and culturally situated representations. Therefore, why refer to concepts derived from a literature valuing theoretical principles, the universal forces, that are absent in the Lauje?

Be that as it may, even if neoclassical concepts do not seem to have been adapted, the work is nevertheless very interesting. It nourishes reflections on the dynamics of transformation of peasant societies and I strongly recommend reading it.