Projects

Grants and
Fellowships

Fieldwork and
Consulting

Professional Memberships

Awards

Planting rice in newly burned field

Projects [ top ]

My research encompasses several interrelated areas within cultural anthropology, the main one being ecological/environmental anthropology. My chief concern is to increase our understanding of complex human-environment interactions, and I focus on historical and modern trajectories of natural resource use and management in tropical forests, with their links between local-level social-economic organization, forest-based agriculture, historical ecology, and wider globalizing forces. My work centers on Iban communities in West Kalimantan, Indonesia (Indonesian Borneo), along the international border with Malaysia and often in close interrelation with a nearby conservation area, Danau Sentarum National Park (DSNP). However, my work is not limited to ecological/environmental issues, and my other interests include kinship and social organization, warfare, ethnohistory, religion, cultural evolution, and the anthropology of borderlands.

[ Southeast Asia map ]

A Welcome Home 1996

My research over the past decade has focussed on these diverse topics, beginning with my dissertation research, which concerned the effects of transnational circular labor migration by Iban men on women’s farm labour productivity, household composition, and the forest fallow cycle. My 30 months of doctoral fieldwork produced a voluminous database relevant to a wide range of topics, and I continue to draw on it in my current work, as do my students.

In addition to this, I have worked collaboratively on forest management- and conservation-related projects through the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and Wetlands International. (One result of this work with CIFOR has been a user-friendly field manual, now available in five languages, for assessing human well-being in forested areas subject to commercial logging.) I am also one of the original contributors to the Dana Declaration on Mobile Peoples and Conservation (http://www.danadeclaration.org/), an advocacy statement on the necessity of recognizing indigenous mobile peoples’ rights and interests in conservation, which was visibly promoted at the 2003 World Parks Congress.

From 1998 to 2001, I researched the environmental history and ethnohistory in western Borneo using largely untapped archival and oral sources. Based at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, Netherlands, I conducted research in the Dutch colonial archives, as well as additional fieldwork in Indonesia. This study added a strong historical perspective to my ongoing interests, leading me to issues of political ecology, colonization, warfare, tribal-state relations and the intersection of oral and archival histories.

My interests in land use culminated in an international conference that I organized with Ole Mertz and Andreas Egelund Christensen on Local Land Use Strategies in a Globalizing World: Shaping Sustainable Social and Natural Environments. Held in Copenhagen during August 2003, it brought together a number of researchers from different disciplines working on similar issues throughout Southeast Asia and southern Africa. We have completed editing three sets of conference papers in special issues of research journals, the Danish Journal of Geography (Vol. 105, No. 1, 2005), Agricultural Systems (Vol. 85, No. 3, 2005), and Land Degradation & Development (Vol. 17, No. 2, 2006).

My most recent field research project, conducted during the Winter semester 2006, involved traditional ecological knowledge of short-term and medium-term climatic variations, with particular attention to the often destructive El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In my ongoing analyses, I am investigating the relevant distinctions Iban subsistence and small-scale commercial farmers make in these phenomenon, their coping strategies, and how such knowledge is transmitted over time. Also of concern are the incorporation of outside knowledge (such as government-issued weather forecasts) and its influence on traditional knowledge and decision-making. I aim to turn this research into a larger project incorporating international specialists in other fields (primarily geography [remote sensing/GIS], forest ecology, and climatology).

In addition, I am planning new archival research, focusing on the effect of both chronic raiding and European pacification campaigns on Iban swidden cultivation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through a study of British colonial archives on Malaysian Borneo. My central hypothesis is that frequent resource instability and insecurity – themselves products of often violent pacification tactics – during the colonial period helped generate the recorded destructiveness of Iban farming by promoting short-term survival strategies. I will re-evaluate Derek Freeman’s original, 1950s diagnosis of Iban as “prodigal” farmers against the hypothesis that much of the landscape devastation he described was the result of past farming going back to the early twentieth century under conditions of chronic resource insecurity.

Eventually I hope to link these research foci with a broader investigation of long-term land use and land cover change, especially as structured by cross-border social and economic networks, and by the dramatic political-economic changes stemming from the Asian economic crisis of 1997.

[ satellite image of Danau Sentarum National Park ]

Grants and Fellowships [ top ]

University of Missouri-Columbia, Research Council Grant (2006), $3772.

University of Missouri-Columbia, Department of Anthropology Research Incentive Grant (2005-2006), $1500.

University of Missouri-Columbia, Faculty International Travel Grant (2005), $486.

International Institute for Asian Studies (Netherlands), Conference Funds (2003), €2500 (with Ole Mertz).

University of Missouri-Columbia, Faculty Grant Writing Institute Fellowship (2002), $5000.

University of Missouri-Columbia, Faculty International Travel Grant (2001), $1025.

Koninklijke Nederlandse Academie van Wetenschappen (Netherlands), Research Seminar Funds (2000), NLG 2000.

Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Netherlands), Maatschappij- en Gedragswettenschappen, Research Seminar Funds (2000), NLG 6000.

Leiden Universiteit Fonds (Netherlands), Research Seminar Funds (2000), NLG 2000.

International Institute for Asian Studies (Netherlands), Research Fellowship (1998-2001).

Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Small Grant for Predoctoral Research (1992-94), $3700.

National Science Foundation, Dissertation Improvement Grant (No. BNS-9114652) (1991-93), $9658.

Sigma Xi, Grants-in-Aid of Research (1990 & 1992), $250 each.

Arizona State University, Research and Development Grants (1990 &1992), $350 each.

U.S. Department of Education, Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Fellowship (1990).

U.S. Department of Education, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (1987, 1989).

U.S. Department of Education, National Resource Fellowship (1988).
 

Fieldwork & Consulting [ top ]

Field research on local ecological knowledge of climatic variation and change, West Kalimantan, Indonesia (February-March 2006).

Associate Scientist, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Bogor, Indonesia (1999 - 2000). Collaboration with project on "Local People, Devolution, and Adaptive Co-management of Forest Resources" through archival and field research on West Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Archival research in the Netherlands and archival/field research in Indonesia on the economic, ecological, and demographic history and ethnohistory of the Iban in West Kalimantan, Indonesia (August 1998 - July 2001).

Consultant, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), West Kalimantan, Indonesia (May-September 1996). Conducted and supervised field tests of social science rapid appraisal methods for "Assessing Sustainable Forest Management Project," in cooperation with Wetlands International and the Indonesian Directorate General of Forest Protection and Nature Conservation.

Consultant, Wetlands International (formerly Asian Wetlands Bureau) / Worldwide Fund for Nature Conservation Project, Danau Sentarum Wildlife Reserve, West Kalimantan, Indonesia (November 1992 - February 1994). Conducted and supervised collection of data on natural resource use, time allocation, and hunting among Iban forest farmers on the reserve periphery; provided recommendations on conservation extension and education approaches.

Field research among the Iban of West Kalimantan, Indonesia (February 1992 - June 1994): Collected ethnographic data including time allocation, hunting, farming, wage labor, household consumption, land tenure, demography, ritual, economic development, and travel.

Ph.D. dissertation: "Circular Labor Migration and Subsistence Agriculture: A Case of the Iban in West Kalimantan, Indonesia" (an analysis of male circular labor migration and its effects on the domestic agricultural economy, including household composition, women's labor productivity, and the forest fallow system)

Preliminary field survey of Iban and Embaloh communities, West Kalimantan, Indonesia (August - September 1990): Collected basic information on settlement patterns, subsistence economy, and ethnic distribution.

Research on reproductive histories of the Havasupai Indians of Arizona using genealogies and Bureau of Indian Affairs censuses; for M.A. thesis and for a university project on inbreeding and disease (1987-89)

M.A. thesis: "Headmanship and Reproductive Success Among the Havasupai Indians of Northwestern Arizona"

Professional Memberships [ top ]

American Anthropological Association (periodic)
Association for Asian Studies (periodic)
Borneo Research Council (Fellow)
Current Anthropology (Associate)
Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde
Society for Anthropological Sciences (founding member)
Society for Economic Anthropology

Awards [ top ]

Elected to Sigma Xi, Arizona State University (1992)
Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, University of Idaho (1985)
Elected to Phi Kappa Phi, University of Idaho (1984)
Elected to Pi Gamma Mu, University of Idaho (1984)

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