Making the Familiar Strange: Anthropological Reflections

Abstract

Tania Murray Li is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research concerns land, labour, class, capitalism, development, resources and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia. In this volume Li takes the reader back to her high school memories, describing how the author’s personal encounters with global inequality in the 1970s shaped her academic work. The essay offers important reflections on Li’s home discipline, anthropology, and how it enables us to study global inequality in empirically rich and diverse ways. Importantly, this focus on the specific constellations of global inequality, as Li suggests, not only challenges grand narratives of universal progress. It equally cautions against our preoccupation with single stories of global inequality production.