Michael R. Dove – författare

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 involvement of Borneo’s native peoples in commodity production for global markets is ancient and highly successful and that processes of globalization began millennia ago. Dove’s analysis replaces the image of the isolated tropical forest community that needs to be helped into the global system with the reality of communities that have been so successful and competitive that they have had to fight political elites to keep from being forced out.

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our times, yet also seemingly intractable. This book offers novel insights on this contemporary challenge, drawing together the state-of-the-art thinking in anthropology. Approaching climate change as a nexus of nature, culture, science, politics, and belief, the book reveals nuanced ways of understanding the relationships between society and climate, science and the state, certainty and uncertainty, global and local that are manifested in climate change debates. The contributors address three major areas of inquiry: how climate change issues have been framed in previous times compared to the present; how knowledge about climate change and its impacts is produced and interpreted by different groups; and how imagination plays a role in shaping conceptions of climate change.

This chronicle of natural history argues that the modern environmental crisis and rise in science skepticism codeveloped with the historic distancing of scientific knowledge from folk knowledge  For millennia, the field of natural history promoted a knowledgeable and unifying view of the world. In contrast, the modern rise of narrow scientific disciplines has promoted a dichotomy between nature and culture on the one hand and between scientific and folk knowledge on the other. Drawing on the fields of anthropology, history, and environmental science, Michael R. Dove argues that the loss of this historic holistic vision of the world is partly to blame for contemporary environmental degradation and science skepticism.  Dove bases this thesis on a study of four pioneering natural historians across four centuries: Georg Eberhard Rumphius (seventeenth century), Carl Linnaeus (eighteenth century), Alfred Russel Wallace (nineteenth century), and Harold C. Conklin (twentieth century). Dove studies their field craft and writing; the political, cultural, and environmental circumstances in which they worked; the sources of their insight; and the implications of their work for modern society. Most of all, the book seeks to discover what enabled those natural historians to straddle boundaries that today seem impassable and to distill that wisdom for a modern world greatly in need of a holistic vision of people and environment.

This chronicle of natural history argues that the modern environmental crisis and rise in science skepticism codeveloped with the historic distancing of scientific knowledge from folk knowledge  For millennia, the field of natural history promoted a knowledgeable and unifying view of the world. In contrast, the modern rise of narrow scientific disciplines has promoted a dichotomy between nature and culture on the one hand and between scientific and folk knowledge on the other. Drawing on the fields of anthropology, history, and environmental science, Michael R. Dove argues that the loss of this historic holistic vision of the world is partly to blame for contemporary environmental degradation and science skepticism.  Dove bases this thesis on a study of four pioneering natural historians across four centuries: Georg Eberhard Rumphius (seventeenth century), Carl Linnaeus (eighteenth century), Alfred Russel Wallace (nineteenth century), and Harold C. Conklin (twentieth century). Dove studies their field craft and writing; the political, cultural, and environmental circumstances in which they worked; the sources of their insight; and the implications of their work for modern society. Most of all, the book seeks to discover what enabled those natural historians to straddle boundaries that today seem impassable and to distill that wisdom for a modern world greatly in need of a holistic vision of people and environment.

A unique comparison of how people living in the shadow of volcanoes and those residing continents away experience and live with their effectsIn 1815, when the volcano Tambora in what was then the East Indies erupted, it precipitated global cooling that lasted for several years and led to one of the great subsistence crises in the western world. In the vicinity of the volcano itself, the eruption had equally devastating but differently interpreted effects. Surviving local accounts in the form of syair, epic Malay poetry, interpreted the cataclysm as divine punishment for everyday violations of traditional social orders.Through the histories of three Indonesian volcanoes—Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa; Krakatau, with its catastrophic 1883 eruption, off the west coast of Java; and Merapi, which is in a state of near-continuous eruption in Central Java—Michael R. Dove compares the global perception of massive eruptions as an incomprehensible break in normality with local villagers’ practice of “domesticating” and thereby adapting to and wresting a livelihood from volcanic activity. Given the historic role of volcanoes as climate-forcing agents, this comparison offers a lesson in how local communities can understand and respond to a global phenomenon like environmental change.

A seminal anthropological work on the paradoxical relationship between human consciousness and the environment“Innovative, insightful, incandescent.”—Arun Agrawal, author of Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of SubjectsThis book asks age-old questions about the relationship between human consciousness and the environment: How do we think about our own thoughts and actions? How can we transcend the exigencies of daily life? How can we achieve sufficient distance from our own everyday realities to think and act more sustainably?To address these questions, Michael R. Dove draws on the results of decades of research in South and Southeast Asia on how local cultures have circumvented the “curse of consciousness”—the paradox that we cannot completely comprehend the ecosystem of which we are part. He distills from his ethnographic, ecological, and historical research three principles: perspectivism (seeing oneself from outside oneself), metamorphosis (becoming something that one is not), and mimesis (copying something that one is not), which help a society to transcend the hubris and myopia of everyday existence and achieve greater insight into its ecosystem.

Reflecting new thinking about conservation in Southeast Asia, Beyond the Sacred Forest is the product of a unique, decade-long, interdisciplinary collaboration involving research in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Scholars from these countries and the United States rethink the translation of environmental concepts between East and West, particularly ideas of nature and culture; the meaning of conservation; and the ways that conservation policy is applied and transformed in the everyday landscapes of Southeast Asia. The contributors focus more on folk, community, and vernacular conservation discourses than on those of formal institutions and the state. They reject the notion that conservation only takes place in bounded, static, otherworldly spaces such as protected areas or sacred forests. Thick with ethnographic detail, their essays move beyond the forest to agriculture and other land uses, leave behind orthodox notions of the sacred, discard outdated ideas of environmental harmony and stasis, and reject views of the environment that seek to avoid or escape politics. Natural-resource managers and policymakers who work with this more complicated vision of nature and culture are likely to enjoy more enduring success than those who simply seek to remove the influence and impact of humans from conserved landscapes. As many of the essays suggest, this requires the ability to manage contradictions, to relinquish orthodox ideas of what conservation looks like, and to practice continuously adaptive management techniques. Contributors. Upik Djalins, Amity A. Doolittle, Michael R. Dove, Levita Duhaylungsod, Emily E. Harwell, Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, Lye Tuck-Po, Percy E. Sajise, Endah Sulistyawati, Yunita T. Winarto

This timely anthology brings together for the first time the most important ancient, medieval, Enlightenment, and modern scholarship for a complete anthropological evaluation of the relationship between culture and climate change. Brings together for the first time the most important classical works and contemporary scholarship for a complete historical anthropological evaluation of the relationship between culture and climate changeCovers the historic and prehistoric records of human impact from and response to prior periods of climate change, including the impact and response to climate change at the local levelDiscusses the impact on global debates about climate change from North-South post-colonial histories and the social dimensions of the science of climate change.Includes coverage of topics such as environmental determinism, climatic events as social catalysts, climatic disasters and societal collapse, and ethno-meteorologyAn ideal text for courses in climate change, human/cultural ecology, environmental anthropology and archaeology, disaster studies,  environmental sciences, science and technology studies, history of science, and conservation and development studies

This timely anthology brings together for the first time the most important ancient, medieval, Enlightenment, and modern scholarship for a complete anthropological evaluation of the relationship between culture and climate change. Brings together for the first time the most important classical works and contemporary scholarship for a complete historical anthropological evaluation of the relationship between culture and climate changeCovers the historic and prehistoric records of human impact from and response to prior periods of climate change, including the impact and response to climate change at the local levelDiscusses the impact on global debates about climate change from North-South post-colonial histories and the social dimensions of the science of climate change.Includes coverage of topics such as environmental determinism, climatic events as social catalysts, climatic disasters and societal collapse, and ethno-meteorologyAn ideal text for courses in climate change, human/cultural ecology, environmental anthropology and archaeology, disaster studies,  environmental sciences, science and technology studies, history of science, and conservation and development studies

Environmental Anthropology: A Reader is a collection of historically significant readings, dating from early in the twentieth century up to the present, on the cross-cultural study of relations between people and their environment. Provides the historical perspective that is typically missing from recent work in environmental anthropologyIncludes an extensive intellectual history and commentary by the volume’s editorsOffers a unique perspective on current interest in cross-cultural environmental relationsDivided into five thematic sections: (1) the nature/culture divide; (2) relationship between environment and social organization; (3) methodological debates and innovations; (4) politics and practice; and (5) epistemological issues of environmental anthropologyOrganized into a series of paired papers, which ‘speak’ to each other, designed to encourage readers to make connections that they might not customarily make

Environmental Anthropology: A Reader is a collection of historically significant readings, dating from early in the twentieth century up to the present, on the cross-cultural study of relations between people and their environment. Provides the historical perspective that is typically missing from recent work in environmental anthropologyIncludes an extensive intellectual history and commentary by the volume’s editorsOffers a unique perspective on current interest in cross-cultural environmental relationsDivided into five thematic sections: (1) the nature/culture divide; (2) relationship between environment and social organization; (3) methodological debates and innovations; (4) politics and practice; and (5) epistemological issues of environmental anthropologyOrganized into a series of paired papers, which ‘speak’ to each other, designed to encourage readers to make connections that they might not customarily make