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Christine Padoch
Winner of the 2005
Robert McC Netting Award
Christine Padoch is a
Ukrainian by origin, a New Yorker by upbringing, an anthropologist by
training, and an ethnobotanist by experience. After graduating in 1969 she first went to
Costa Rica to learn about tropical agriculture and ethnobotany,
then undertook a three-year period of field work among the Iban in Sarawak, for a PhD in which she carried the study
of shifting cultivation in Southeast Asia forward a long way. Developing an unusual taste for
field research in the equatorial lowlands, she then moved her field to
Amazonian Peru. There she and Bill Denevan
pioneered the understanding of what really takes place in what is still often
called the fallow stage of shifting cultivation. Production moves forward into a new phase
in which natural processes are managed to yield a further range of
products.
Migration and its Alternatives among the Iban of Sarawak was her first
major international publication, and it has been widely quoted. Soon after it appeared in 1982 she joined
the New York Botanical Garden as an Associate
Scientist, the only social scientist among a staff of botanists and other
hard scientists. She made her way
there remarkably successfully, rising through four promotions to her present
senior position. From the mid-1980s
onward, she began increasingly to be involved in the international research
scene. She joined the United Nations
University PLEC project at its first meeting in Washington in 1992, and became one of its
core members. Work with that project on people, land management and ecosystem
conservation took her to China,
Thailand, Kenya, Tanzania,
Uganda, Ghana, Brazil
and Jamaica, as well as to
meetings in Japan and France.
In spite of all this, Amazonia
and Borneo remained the field base of her
work. She continued
to spend time in both regions up to the end of the old century, although this
became increasingly difficult in the face of growing demands on her
time. She has continued to go back to
the field despite two life-threatening infections incurred during field
work. One major aspect of her field
persona has been her involvement in teaching and supporting colleagues in
developing countries, helping them in very tangible ways, and being very
generous in assisting them in publication.
A high proportion of her published titles are joint titles, and in all
of them she has a large contribution.
As her co-author or co-editor at times, I can offer testimony to how
exacting she can be with her collaborators!
Christine Padoch has
become an intellectual leader in the field of cultural ecology through
writings that now extend over a period of 25 years. Her work on the
sequential use of tropical forests has had major influence both elsewhere in
the neo-tropics and more recently also in Asia. She is a truly multi-disciplinary person,
and inspires students in a range of fields.
Introducing herself once at a meeting in Brazil she said ‘I am not a
geographer, but I might as well be one’.
Indeed she might, and is.
Harold Brookfield
March 2005
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