Microsoft Word - Anderson_review_dove.docx


   
 

 

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Book Review

 

The Banana Tree at the Gate:  A History of Marginal Peoples and 
Global Markets in Borneo 
 

Michael R. Dove.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2011.  Xix, 332 pp.  Illus.  Bibliography, indexes.  ISBN 
978‐0‐300‐15321‐7 (hardcover).  $55.00 
 

Reviewed by E. N. Anderson1 
 
Reviewer Address: 1Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside. 
 
Received: October 12, 2011                                           Volume 3:13 
Published: March 7, 2012                         © 2012 Society of Ethnobiology 
 

 

Michael Dove has been a leader in the field of political 
ecology since it began.  With this book, which recently 
won the Julian Steward Prize for the best ecological 
anthropology book of 2011, he consolidates his 
standing in the field.  This is a major work that should 
be read by anyone interested in the fate of traditional 
societies and their economies in the modern world. 

The book builds on Dove’s decades of research 
among the Kantu’ Dayak of the remote interior of 
Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). The title comes from 
a local proverb; a banana tree at a front gate is 
unprotected and becomes fair game for anyone who 
wants to snitch some fruit.  The “marginal peoples” of 
Borneo and elsewhere are indeed vulnerable to 
exploiters.  In this case, pepper is the commodity of 
choice.  The Kantu’, like many in Indonesia, have 
grown it for centuries as a cash crop.  The vicissitudes 
of the trade over the last couple of centuries emerge 
from Dove’s account.  The usual story appears:  the 
actual growers are at the mercy of a long chain of 
authorities, from local political figures to Dutch 
colonials and then to the world market. Dove also 
considers the role of rubber as a smallholder crop, 
showing the success of smallholders at producing it.  
They are fully competitive with modern plantations.  I 
have observed the same phenomenon in Malaysia. 

Yet, unlike too many such books, this work is not a 
victims-and-villains melodrama.  The Kantu’ maintain 
themselves as subsistence cultivators, they continue to 
survive and keep their culture going, and they take 
every opportunity to get something back from the 
system.  When pepper does not sell, they fall back on 
food crops; when pepper provides opportunity, they 
seize that. They keep trying for political agency through 
it all. Dove reads and interprets the Hikayat Banjar, a 

local historical text (a hikayat is history fictionalized 
enough to make a good story, but still basically 
founded on fact).  He finds much commentary therein 
on the world-system and Borneo’s marginal place in it. 

One is led to respect the indigenous smallholders 
rather than simply blame the unfair world—though the 
latter is certainly not spared. Dove is well aware of 
issues of representation, and deals forthrightly with the 
problems of how to represent indigenous and less than 
affluent cultivators. Earlier generations had their 
stereotypes, including the inevitable colonial ones; how 
will we do better? 

Intellectual issues also include most of the serious 
topics of current political ecology, from smallholder 
rights to “globalization.”  Dove points out that 
Indonesia has been well integrated into world trade 
networks for millennia.  Pepper, as well as cloves and 
other spices, were traded to China from early times.  
The Indian Ocean and South China Sea were almost, or 
quite, as busy as the Mediterranean, from the Roman 
Empire onward; Roman coins abound in south India.  
The speed and volume of transport has increased, but 
dynamics of peripheralization and exploitation are not 
much changed.  I am reminded of my own favorite 
Malaysian proverb:  “Even though ten ships come, the 
dogs have no loincloths but their tails.”  The ships are 
understood to be carrying luxury imported fabrics, the 
choicest goods in the old Malaysian trade.  Low-status 
humans, like canines, have slim chances of getting any. 

Being the product of decades of work and 
reflection by one of the most thoughtful, insightful, and 
industrious anthropologists of our time, this book 
defies summary.  I can only urge all those interested in 
human ecology to obtain a copy.