Michael Dove wins the Julian Steward Award

Michael R. Dove won the 2011 Julian Steward Award for his book “The Banana Tree at the Gate: The History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo.” The award is granted by the Environmental Anthropology section of the American Anthropological Association for the best monograph in environmental/ecological anthropology. 

Dove is the Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology, professor of anthropology, curator of anthropology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and director of the Tropical Resources Institute at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

In the book, published earlier this year by the Yale University Press, Dove frames 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, he shows that the involvement of Borneo’s native peoples in commodity production for global markets is ancient and successful, and that processes of globalization began millennia ago.