Tania Murray Li

Tania Murray Li (née Murray) is a Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Toronto who is known for her work on labour, capitalism, development, politics and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia. She is an elected member of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Education and career Li has a B.A. (1981) and a Ph.D. (1987) from the University of Cambridge, where she studied at King's College. After her Ph.D., Li moved to Dalhousie University where she initially worked on a development project in Indonesia. After post-Doctoral research on Indonesia, Li began teaching at Dalhousie University in 1992, and in 2002 was appointed professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology. In 2004 she moved to the University of Toronto as Professor in the Department of Anthropology. From 2004 - 2018, Li was Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in the Cultural and Political Economy of Asia. . In 2024, Professor Li was appointed the Yusof Ishak Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore, and concurrently Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

She was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2024, with the rank of Officer.

Research Li's early research centered on Singapore where she worked on urban politics and the Malay community. From 1986 until 1989 Li worked on an environmental management project at Dalhousie University, and in a 2017 interview she described how the goals of "knowledge transfer and institution-building" made her uncomfortable.

Subsequently she worked on issues within Indonesia, particularly on the changing histories and identities of upland people as they relate in new ways to the natural resource base, to markets and to the state. Still using Indonesia as the basis for her research, she wrote a critique of the international development enterprise, and subsequently focused on land as the key resource governing capitalist relations among Indonesia's highland cacao farmers. Her most recent work has examined the social displacement resulting from the oil plantation boom in Indonesia.

Selected publications

Awards and honors In 2015 she was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Li's book Land's End won the Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Association in 2016, and the George McT. Kahin Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2017. In 2018 she was the winner of the SSHRC Impact Award (Insight category). In 2019 she was named a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and in 2022 she received the Ester Boserup Prize for Research on Development (Denmark). In 2024, Tania Li was awarded the Killam Prize for Social Sciences, and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.