Biography
Paige West,
Associate Professor of Anthropology, joined the faculty in 2001 the year after
earning her Ph.D. in cultural and environmental anthropology. Dr. West’s
general research interests include the linkages between environmental
conservation and international development, the material and symbolic ways in
which the natural world is understood and produced, the aesthetics and poetics
of human social relations with nature, and the critical analysis of the
creation of commodities and practices of consumption. She has conducted
ethnographic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea,
Australia, Germany, England,
and the United States.
Her primary research site, since 1996, has been Papua New Guinea.
In 2002 Dr. West
received the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology and
Environment Junior Scholar award for her work, in 2004 she received the
American Association of University Women Junior Faculty Fellowship and the
American Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellowship, in 2006 she received
the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Fellowship, and in 2007 she was named a
Fellow by the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania. Dr. West is
currently the president-elect of the Anthropology and Environment Section of
the American Anthropological Association.
All of Dr. West’s
research examines how ‘sustainable development’ has become an important vehicle
by which the social and economic ideologies of late liberalism are circulated
globally. She approaches this topic through the study of how the deployment of
particular ideologies and imaginaries of nature and culture work to produce
society and space and the analysis of how people make places, plants, and
animals valuable and meaningful. Through detailed ethnography she demonstrates
that ‘sustainable development’ projects do not simply ‘affect’ social and
material lives but bring new ways of thinking about and finding meaning in
people’s surroundings, new ways of physically and ideologically producing those
surroundings, and new forms of subjectivity and agency, into being.
Within this focus
her research has been driven by five primary questions. First, how do the
political-economic processes termed neoliberalism interpenetrate global
conservation and development policies and practices? Second, how does the
circulation of European notions of nature and culture work to displace or
supplant other ways of understanding sociality and the environment? Third, how
do spaces taken-for-granted as ‘natural’ and practices taken-for-granted as
‘cultural’ come into being? Fourth, how do people come to be in the world as
subjects and agents in relation to their natural environments? Fifth,
what are the material transformations of the natural world that are wrought by
these processes?
Dr. West has
pursued these questions in three major intellectual projects. In her first
book, Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua
New Guinea (Duke University Press, May 2006), she examined the exportation
of Euro-American ideas about the suitable relationship between the natural and
cultural world to rural areas in Papua New Guinea and explored how these ideas
produced particular kinds of socio-cultural institutions and physical spaces.
In her second book, which will be published by Duke University Press this year,
From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: Crystallizing Coffee from
Papua New Guinea, she analyzes the global circulation of coffee beans as
valuable meaning-filled agricultural commodities and social vessels for
particular symbolic representations of nature and culture and also examines
notions of ethnical consumption through fair trade and organic
certification. In her current project, Making Value in the Pacific
Tropics, she considers how particular animals and plants come to have value
and meaning for people living in both tropical forests and cosmopolitan global
cities. This project has two parts, the first part is focused on animals,
value, and the globalization of particular ideologies of nature and culture and
you will hear about part of it in this talk today. The second part is
focused, generally, on plants, value, and contemporary attempts to counter
global climate change through the seemingly ethnical consumption of biofuels.
It is specifically focused on oil palm plantations in Papua New Guinea.
Dr. West's research
and scholarship have been supported by The Wenner Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research, The National Geographic Society, The Christensen
Fund, The National Science Foundation, the American Association of University
Women, the American Council of Learned Societies, The Rockefeller Foundation,
and Columbia University's Institute for Social and
Economic Research and Policy
Selected Publications
Single Author
Monographs
2006.
Conservation is our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea.
Durham: Duke
University Press.
Under Contract. From
Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: Crystallizing Coffee from Papua New Guinea.
Duke University Press.
Edited Volumes
(As Editor)
2009.
Carrier, James G. and Paige West, eds. Virtualism, Governance and
Practice. London:
Berghan Books.
2009. Surroundings,
Selves and Others: the Political Economy of Identity and the Environment. Paige
West and James G. Carrier, eds. Landscape Research.
2008. Walters,
Bradley, Bonnie J. McCay, Paige West, and Susan Lees, eds. Against the
Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology. Lantham, MD: Lexington Books.
2006. West, Paige
and Martha Macintyre, eds. Melanesian Mining Modernities. The
Contemporary Pacific 18 (2).
Peer Review
Journal Articles
West, Paige. 2008.
Scientific Tourism: Imagining, Experiencing, and Portraying Environment and
Society in Papua New Guinea,
Current Anthropology. (with comments and reply) 49 (4): 597-626.
West, Paige and
James G. Carrier. 2009. Introduction: Surroundings, Selves, and Others:
The Political Economy of Environment and Identity, Landscape Research.
Peterson, Richard,
Paige West, Diane Russell and Peter Brosius. 2008. Seeing (and
Doing) Conservation Through a Cultural Lenses, Environmental Management October,
2008.
West, Paige, and Daniel Brockington. 2006. Some Unexpected
Consequences of Protected Areas: An Anthropological Perspective. Conservation
Biology 20 (3):609-616.
West, Paige, and Daniel Brockington. 2006. Una Perspectiva Antropológica de
Algunas Consecuencias Inesperadas de Áreas Protegidas. NeoCons 6 (3):609-616.
West,
Paige, Daniel Brockington, and James Igoe. 2006. Parks and Peoples: The Social Effects of
Protected Areas. Annual Review of Anthropology 20
(3):609-616.
West, Paige. 2006.
Environmental Conservation and Mining: Between Experience and Expectation in
the Eastern Highlands of Papua
New Guinea. The Contemporary Pacific
18 (2):295-313.
West, Paige. 2005.
Translation, Value, and Space: Theorizing an Ethnographic and Engaged
Environmental Anthropology. American Anthropologist 107 (4):632-642.
West, Paige. 2005.
Holding the Story Forever: The Aesthetics of Ethnographic Labor. Anthropological
Forum 15 (3):267-275.
West, Paige, and
James G. Carrier. 2004. Getting Away From It All? Ecotourism and Authenticity
(with commentary and reply). Current Anthropology 45 (4):483-498.
West, Paige. 2003.
Knowing the Fight: The Politics of Conservation in Papua New Guinea. Anthropology
in Action: Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice 10
(2):38-45.
West, Paige. 2001.
Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations and the Nature of Ethnographic
Inquiry. Social Analysis 45 (2):55-77.
|