Reed L. Wadley: 1962-2008.(MEMORIALS)

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Reed Wadley, Associate Professor at the University of Missouri (Columbia) died June 28 after a courageous two-year long battle with Ewing's sarcoma. Dr. Wadley's cremated remains were divided between his family in Idaho and his Iban family in Borneo. He is survived by his wife, Dr. Oona Paredes, also a cultural anthropologist, and by their 10-year old son, Lucas.

He was an energetic and dedicated field worker, having spent three years in West Kalimantan with Iban communities; many members of these communities remained his close friend and sent him Iban medicines for this illness. Dr. Wadley's research interests while focused on Borneo ethnography, were wide. His major research was on human-environmental interactions with a focus on the historical and modern trajectories of natural resource use and management in the tropical forest, and the impacts of these on local-level socioeconomic organization and forest-based agriculture. His many publications (some of which are still in press) make major contributions to anthropology, including the understanding of swidden cultivation, local ecological knowledge, and ritual. His most significant publication is his edited volume Histories of the Borneo Environment: Economic, Political and Social Dimensions of Change and Continuity (KITLV Press), which arose from his three-year study of the Dutch archives at Leiden University where he focused on the ethnohistory of the Iban on the border between West Kalimantan and Sarawak.

Dr. Wadley worked collaboratively on various projects with the Center for International Forestry Research. He was one of the original signatories for the Dana Declaration on Mobile Peoples and Conservation. Dr. Wadley served on the Board of Directors of the Borneo Research Council and Board of Sponsors of the Anthropologists' Fund for Urgent Anthropological Research. His research materials from the Dutch archives are to be housed at the Tun Jugah Foundation, Kuching, Sarawak (see Brief Communications), and copies of his unpublished field notes, records, and manuscripts at the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research, Phillips, Maine.

The Reed Wadley Memorial Fund has been established by the Borneo Research Council to honor his life and work. The fund will provide supplemental grants to graduate students in cultural anthropology planning to do research in Borneo. Dr. Wadley's wife, Oona Paredes Ph.D., has been asked to be one of the advisors to the fund. Gifts to honor Dr. Wadley's memory should be sent to the Borneo Research Council, P.O. Box A, Phillips, Maine, 04966, USA.

Bibliography of Reed L. Wadley's Writings

Books