Yale Bulletin and Calendar

November 2, 2001

Volume 30, Number 9

Michael Dove

Michael Dove is appointed Musser
Professor of Social Ecology

Michael R. Dove, newly named as the Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology, is an ecological anthropologist whose research is focused on the interaction between local communities, national governments and global agencies concerning the use of natural resources.

Dove's principal appointment is in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology and is chair of the Council on Southeast Asia Studies, part of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. He has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1997.

Dove's recent research, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, examines the wider dimensions of the relationship between society and biodiversity in Southeast Asia. His other areas of research and teaching include the theory of sustainable development and resource use; contemporary and historical environmental relations in South and Southeast Asia; human use of tropical forests and grasslands; resource-based linkage of local communities to global systems; the study of developmental and environmental institutions, discourses and movements; and the sociology of resource-related sciences.

Other projects in which he is currently engaged include a study of local and national responses to volcanic hazards in Central Java; a study of the North-South exchange of environmental concepts with students in his doctoral lab; and a historical study of images of the natural world in the Indo-Malay region with Carol Carpenter, his wife and fellow School of Forestry and Environmental Studies faculty member. He currently supervises doctoral students carrying out research in 11 different countries.

Over the years, Dove's work has led him to Borneo, where he spent two years in a tribal longhouse studying swidden agriculture; to Java, where he was a research adviser studying the formation of government resource policy for six years; and to Pakistan, where he served for four years as an adviser to the nation's forest service on social forestry policies. Proficient in Kantu' (Dayak), Indonesian and Urdu, Dove has long been active in research networks that bring together environmental scientists from Asia, Europe and North America.

Prior to coming to Yale, Dove was director of the East-West Center Program on Environment with responsibility for supervising an interdisciplinary program of collaborative research on the environment throughout the Asia/Pacific region. He was affiliated with the center for more than a decade. He was a visiting fellow in Yale's anthropology department and a visiting associate in the University's Program on Agrarian Studies 1991-1992.

Dove served as a consultant and senior project anthropologist at the Winrock International Institute for Agricultural Development from 1985 to 1989. He has also directed projects for the Ford Foundation and the United Nations Development Programme, among other institutions.

Dove has published approximately 100 academic papers, including over 20 in the Indonesian language. He is also the author of "Swidden Systems in Indonesia" and "Swidden Agriculture in Indonesia: The Subsistence Strategies of the Kalimantan Kantu'." He is editor of "The Real and Imagined Role of Culture in Development: Case Studies From Indonesia" and coeditor of "Sociology of Natural Resources, In Pakistan and Adjoining Countries" as well as four books in the Indonesian language, plus several works in progress, including a textbook, "Ecological Anthropology."

A graduate of Northwestern University, Dove earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. He has taught at the University of Hawaii and Stanford University, as well as institutions in Indonesia and Pakistan. A member of numerous professional organizations, Dove is a fellow of Calhoun College.

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Campus Notes