M R Dove
Biographic Data
| ID | 3324 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M R Dove |
| GIVEN NAMES | M R |
| FAMILY NAME | Dove |
| SIGNATURE | DOVE M R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0009-0006-9013-1777 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 79 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 609 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 79 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Talk the Walk
Perhaps one of the most defining ‘techniques of the body’ for human beings is bi-pedal walking. This study brings together studies in socio-cultural anthropology to reflect on the nature of walking as a field method in different social-environmental contexts. The study offers an account of walking in relation to natural history, urban studies and contemporary conservation science. How has walking served as a field method in different knowledge-ma…
Staying put
Effective evacuations mitigate the harm of environmental disasters. Yet, many people who are able to evacuate remain in place during environmental disasters. The increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events that require evacuation, such as flooding and wildfires, warrant closer study of why some communities do not evacuate. This study seeks to explore the social phenomenon of non-evacuation through two central questions: Why do so…
Marginal ecologies
Both anthropologists and ecologists have increasingly recognized the need to reach beyond their own disciplinary frameworks when handling processes of marginalization that involve intersecting social–ecological dimensions, particularly as global environmental challenges force humans and wildlife into new and challenging conditions. In this letter, we suggest a cross-disciplinary framework for studying the social–ecological margins. We highlight t…
Frederick C. Leiner, Prisoners of the Bashaw
The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord in their pre-publication format at the Canadian theses site of the Library and Archives Canada, Theses Canada.These volumes bring together an impressive compilation of information from primary sources, so impressive as to have use as reference works.One barrier to their use as such is the absence of an index in either volume.This lack is offset to a limited extent by the use of a very detailed outline / tab…
Human–nature relationships
Re-Constructing Restoration
What does it mean to restore the environment? What is restored, according to whom, and at the expense of what? And when or where does restoration end? Restoration activities often presuppose environmental degradation, and posit a historical state that restoration will re-attain, in turn licensing activities that benefit the relatively powerful rather than the relatively weak. Thus, this article critiques a complex set of interlinked ideas and pra…
Sarah Craze, Atlantic Piracy in the Early Nineteenth Century. The Shocking Story of the Pirates and the Survivors of the Morning Star by Michael F. Dove
Anthropocene
The Anthropocene is a newly proposed geological epoch that situates humans as geological agents responsible for altering Earth systems as evidenced in the geological record and directly experienced through the earth’s changing climate. There remains significant debate regarding when humans manifested change in Earth systems, as well as how human influence in planetary processes is evidenced geologically. As of 2022, “Anthropocene” has yet to be a…
Bitter Shade
Process Versus Product in Bornean Augury
The practice of augury in Borneo has received at least passing mention from nearly every natural scientist or ethnographer to visit the island since the nineteenth century. Freeman therefore &s;reads&s; Bomean augury as saying something not about birds and men but about something else, about purposiveness in human society. The key to interpreting site-rejection in particular, and the system of augury in general, is the indeterminacy of the physic…
“Bitter Shade”
This chapter assesses a mimetic relationship between objects and their shadows, between things and their signs. It focuses on Pakistani farmers' concept of sayah , which loosely translates as “shade.” The roots of the concept of shade in Western intellectual traditions extends back to Plato's parable of the cave, the lesson of which pivots on the difference between shadows and reality. The difference between object and shadow has figured prominen…
Epilogue
This epilogue presents some conclusions, beginning with a comparison between Claude Lévi-Strauss's story of Amazonian natives who drown captives to see if they are human, and the story of hunters who journey to the pig village to probe their own humanity. The latter story is self-reflexive and thus perspectivist in a way the former one is not. Key to this perspectivism is the relationship between sign and thing. These are mimetic relations, in wh…
Historic Parting of the Wild from the Civilized in Pakistan
This chapter explores a dualistic system of environmental relations, one so ancient that it has evolved over time. The modern Hindi and Urdu term jangal means “dense forest,” but the ancient Sanskrit term from which it derives, jangala , referred to the arid, open savanna landscape of western India, which was culturally differentiated from the anupa wet forests of eastern India. There are other differences beyond the vegetative: whereas the janga…
Reframing conservation and development perspectives on bushmeat
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has drawn renewed attention to bushmeat consumption in the Global South, with the risks and consequences of zoonotic disease transmission proving critical for global public health. Conservation and development practitioners have long targeted bushmeat trade and consumption, seeking to reduce hunting pressures on wildlife and natural ecosystems by introducing alternative proteins and livelihoods to rural communities. …
A World at Sea
Reviewed by: A World at Sea: Maritime Practices and Global History ed. by Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal Michael Dove Benton, Lauren and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, eds. – A World at Sea: Maritime Practices and Global History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 280 p. The latest volume in the Early Modern Americas series edited by Peter Mancall, A World at Sea explores several neglected aspects of the period while also refr…
Bitter Shade
Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups
Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the inter…
Unsettling the Land
Revitalizing indigenous communities requires more than recognition of tribal sovereignty. Samara Brock shows how it also requires a recuperation of indigenous understandings of existence and ways of being. Including multiple ontologies opens up possibilities for creating relational, hybrid forms of practices that cultivate mutuality and reciprocity between humans and the land
Chains of Meaning
Plants, Politics, and the Imagination over the Past 500 Years in the Indo-Malay Region
This is an analysis of the way that the colonial-era model of plantation production in Southeast Asia disciplined plants and people and, of most importance, the way that production relations between plants and people were conceived. This discipline was challenged during historic moments of crisis that stimulated the imagination of alternative modes of production. The analysis will focus on the histories of three plants in particular: black pepper…
Environmental Anthropology
Environmental anthropologists have refined, challenged, and reconfigured the conceptual divide between human culture and nonhuman nature through multidisciplinary, cross‐cultural ethnographic inquiry. Problematizing the assumption that society is fundamentally separate from the biospheric realm, scholars have called attention to the various ways in which the physical environment shapes human culture and vice versa. This entry explores environment…
Agrarian Change and Agricultural Development
In the late nineteenth century evolutionary theories shaped anthropological thinking about society's development and the diffusion of innovations like agricultural production, which was framed as a natural progression from hunter‐gatherer lifeways. Cultural ecology models of the 1950s looked at functional relationships between the environment and adaptation, interpreting cultural traits as homeostatic systems that ensured equilibrium between peop…
Social Movements
The study of social movements has tended to focus on how collective political action on the part of marginalized groups may have systematic structural effects. At the most general level, it asks how sociopolitical change occurs. Historically these inquiries have clustered around four theoretical strands: collective behavior, resource mobilization, new social movements, and political process theory. More recently social movements literature has be…
Unsettling the Land
This article examines different ontologies of land in settler colonialism and Indigenous movements for decolonization and environmental justice. Settler ontologies of land operate by occluding other modes of perceiving, representing, and experiencing land. Indigenous ontologies of land are commonly oriented around relationality and reciprocal obligations among humans and the other-than-human. Drawing together scholarship from literatures in polit…
The Banana Tree at the Gate
The “Hikayat Banjar,” a native court chronicle from Borneo, characterizes the irresistibility of natural resource wealth to outsiders as “the banana tree at the gate.” Michael R. Dove employs this phrase as a root metaphor to frame the history of resource relations between the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the world system. In analyzing production and trade in forest products, pepper, and especially natural rubber, Dove shows that the involvem…
Indigenous People and Environmental Politics
Modernity has helped to popularize, and at the same time threaten, indigeneity. Anthropologists question both the validity of the concept of indigeneity and the wisdom of employing it as a political tool, but they are reluctant to deny it to local communities, whose use of the concept has become subject to study. The concept of indigenous knowledge is similarly faulted in favor of the hybrid products of modernity, and the idea of indigenous envir…
Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups
Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the inter…
The Agroecological Mythology of the Javanese and the Political Economy of Indonesia
Indonesia is a country known both for the magnitude of efforts directed towards the development of its agriculture, and for the apparently problematic results of many of these efforts. Some of the problems reflect the real difficulties of successfully articulating land, people, and work in a developing country; but others, as I will argue in this article, result from discontinuities between the empirical agricultural reality that must be addresse…
Smallholder rubber and swidden agriculture in Borneo
Unsettling the Land
This article examines different ontologies of land in settler colonialism and Indigenous movements for decolonization and environmental justice. Settler ontologies of land operate by occluding other modes of perceiving, representing, and experiencing land. Indigenous ontologies of land are commonly oriented around relationality and reciprocal obligations among humans and the other-than-human. Drawing together scholarship from literatures in polit…
The Multiplication of Labor
The Banana Tree at the Gate
The “Hikayat Banjar,” a native court chronicle from Borneo, characterizes the irresistibility of natural resource wealth to outsiders as “the banana tree at the gate.” Michael R. Dove employs this phrase as a root metaphor to frame the history of resource relations between the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the world system. In analyzing production and trade in forest products, pepper, and especially natural rubber, Dove shows that the involvem…
Environmental Anthropology
Our brief overview of developments in environmental anthropology since 1980 and their antecedents is organized around three themes: systems ecology, political ecology, and cognitive science. In some areas, the context is familiar. As Latour recently observed, the intellectual themes captured by the emergent concept of the Anthropocene have long been familiar to anthropologists. After decades of research on human-environmental interactions, anthro…
Exploring the mundane
Rice-Eating Rubber and People-Eating Governments
Deux evenements ont eu lieu dans les annees 1930 a Borneo : un mythe s'est repandu dans les societes tribales de l'interieur les avertissant que l'arbre de caoutchouc Para etait hostile a leur riz ; l'accord international de regulation du caoutchouc fut etabli afin de proteger la production de caoutchouc en limitant la production des petits agriculteurs a travers un impot a l'exportation et d'autres mesures. Une analyse comparative de ces deux ev…
Hybrid histories and indigenous knowledge among Asian rubber smallholders
Living rubber, dead land, and persisting systems in Borneo; Indigenous representations of sustainability
Whereas the Kantu' use the term tanah mati (dead land) for rubber gardens, they do not use the term tamh idup (living land) for swidden land.In this opposition, swidden land is the privileged register: rubber land needs to be differentiated from swidden land, but not the reverse.Gordon (1993:138) notes, however, that many of the Westem ecologists whom one would expect to be familiar with the success of smallholder rubber cultivation in Coutheast …
Plants, Politics, and the Imagination over the Past 500 Years in the Indo-Malay Region
This is an analysis of the way that the colonial-era model of plantation production in Southeast Asia disciplined plants and people and, of most importance, the way that production relations between plants and people were conceived. This discipline was challenged during historic moments of crisis that stimulated the imagination of alternative modes of production. The analysis will focus on the histories of three plants in particular: black pepper…
Transition from native forest rubbers toHevea Brasiliensis (Euphorbiaceae) among tribal smallholders in Borneo
The Existential Status of the Pakistani Farmer
Vernacular Models of Development
The Dialectical History of "Jungle" in Pakistan
The term jangal in contemporary Pakistan refers to "forest." Its etymological antecedent, the Sanskrit term jangala, referred to "savanna." Francis Zimmermann argues that the change in meaning is a historical "misunderstanding." It is argued here, on the contrary, that the change in meaning accurately reflects a fundamental, historical alteration of relations between culture and nature. The economy of the early pastoral societies of this part of …
Swidden Agriculture in Indonesia
Beyond the Sacred Forest
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
Peasant versus Government Perception and Use of the Environment
I began this paper with a critique of current analyses of development problems, which I suggested were not “sociological” enough. I proposed to illustrate this by analyzing the recent development history of the Riam Kanan valley in South Kalimantan. Following a brief description of the valley, its inhabitants, and the hydroelectric project that has become the dominant factor in its development planning, the two major agroecosystems of the Riam Ka…
The Double Binds of Indigeneity and Indigenous Resistance
During the twentieth century, indigenous peoples have often embraced the category of indigenous while also having to face the ambiguities and limitations of this concept. Indigeneity, whether represented by indigenous people themselves or others, tends to face a “double bind”, as defined by Gregory Bateson, in which “no matter what a person does, he can’t win.” One exit strategy suggested by Bateson is meta-communication—communication about commu…
Writing for, versus about, the ethnographic other
This article examines current thinking about the divide between the ethnographic subject and object, based on my recent work with a Dayak NGO in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. I suggest that the increasing complexity of relations between ethnographer and subject, as in my involvement with this NGO, necessitates some rethinking of our concept of the ethnographic project. I argue, first, that this new ethnographic order of things challenges us to thin…
James C. Scott, The art of not being governed
In this feature we highlight a recently launched book. We invite specialists in the field to comment on the book, and we invite the author to respond to their comments. In this issue we focus on James C. Scott's, The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. Those invited to comment on the book are Michael Dove, Hjorleifur Jonsson and Michael Aung-Thwin. James Scott, in keeping with his long-standing practice, has …
The view from the volcano
The Real and Imagined Role of Culture in Development
General and Theoretical
On Criticality
The use of the finger knife among the Iban
Household Composition and Intensity of Labour
Theories of swidden agriculture, and the political economy of ignorance
Problems of Rural Development in Central Java
Rural development, when it has been conceived of as a science at all, has generally been conceived of as a quantitative science. Numbers are used to establish the baseline of the population at issue, to plan changes in the population, and to measure the impact or success of these changes. It is the argument of this paper that this confident quantification led to critical weaknesses in much of the past and pre sent work in development. More specif…
Man, Land and Game in Sumbawa
The Agroecological Mythology of the Javanese and the Political Economy of Indonesia
Indonesia is a country known both for the magnitude of efforts directed towards the development of its agriculture, and for the apparently problematic results of many of these efforts. Some of the problems reflect the real difficulties of successfully articulating land, people, and work in a developing country; but others, as I will argue in this article, result from discontinuities between the empirical agricultural reality that must be addresse…
The practical reason of weeds in Indonesia
Peasant versus Government Perception and Use of the Environment
I began this paper with a critique of current analyses of development problems, which I suggested were not “sociological” enough. I proposed to illustrate this by analyzing the recent development history of the Riam Kanan valley in South Kalimantan. Following a brief description of the valley, its inhabitants, and the hydroelectric project that has become the dominant factor in its development planning, the two major agroecosystems of the Riam Ka…
Swidden Agriculture in Indonesia
The Multiplication of Labor
The Real and Imagined Role of Culture in Development
The Real and Imagined Role of Culture in Development
The Real and Imagined Role of Culture in Development
Socio-Political Aspects of Home Gardens in Java
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Anthropology Development vs. Development Anthropology
The Forest Service of Pakistan has concerned itself since colonial times largely with the production, protection, and extraction of trees in the nation's state forests. The only contact that its officers had with most farmers (except large landowners, with whom they had traditional patron-client relations) was to levy punishments for violations of forest laws or gather fees for the use of forest resources. In recent years, the state forests have …
The Development Counterpart as Development Subject
The Dialectical History of "Jungle" in Pakistan
The term jangal in contemporary Pakistan refers to "forest." Its etymological antecedent, the Sanskrit term jangala, referred to "savanna." Francis Zimmermann argues that the change in meaning is a historical "misunderstanding." It is argued here, on the contrary, that the change in meaning accurately reflects a fundamental, historical alteration of relations between culture and nature. The economy of the early pastoral societies of this part of …
The Development Counterpart as Development Subject
A Revisionist View of Tropical Deforestation and Development
This study critiques one of the prevailing theories of tropical deforestation, namely that the forest is being cleared because its riches have been overlooked (the purported solution to which is the marketing of ‘rainforest crunch’). Edelman's work on the language of ‘helping’ is drawn on to suggest that a focus on the microeconomics of forest dwellers diverts attention from macro-economic and political issues whose impact on the forest is far mo…
D. George Sherman (1947–1992)
Obituary| August 01 1993 D. George Sherman (1947–1992) Michael R. Dove Michael R. Dove East-West Center Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Asian Studies (1993) 52 (3): 816. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911800037906 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site C…
The coevolution of population and environment
The Political Economy of Mountain Java
Smallholder rubber and swidden agriculture in Borneo
Sociology (41 works) · Political science (39 works) · Geography (36 works) · Law (27 works) · Biology (22 works) · History (22 works) · Politics (21 works) · Ecology (18 works) · Asian Studies and History (17 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (17 works)