Irreversible

In Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier, a western anthropologist travels to far-off Indonesia, locates a community of indigenous people who live more or less isolated in the hills, and watches them struggle with the changes wrought by what one might broadly label the advancing “modern world.” The anthropologist is Tania Murray Li, a Cambridge-educated Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy and Culture of Asia at the University of Toronto. Her subjects are the Lauje people who, as a whole, number no more than 60,000 on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The cohort Li visits repeatedly over 20 years between 1990 and 2010, is a handful of families, traditional highland people whose customary existence was growing food crops—maize and rice—supplemented by small bits of cash from tobacco or shallots that they transported on foot to coastal market towns.

To the outsider, this looks idyllic. Families cultivated land considered...