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Biography
Professor
West is a cultural and environmental anthropologist with a wide range of
interests, many of which center around human social relations with nature.
Professor 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. Her research
focuses on Papua New Guinea
and the forms of social power that tie the area to other sites where it is
imagined, made legible, and consumed. In perusing this form of analysis
concerned with Papua New Guinea
she has conducted research in Australia,
Germany, England, and the United States. 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? She has pursued these questions in three intellectual projects. In
my 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, 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.
Professor
West's research and scholarship have been supported by The Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research,
The National Geographic Society, 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
PUBLICATIONS
AND CREATIVE WORK
Single
Author Monographs
2006.
Conservation is our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea.
Durham: Duke
University Press.
In
prep. From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: Crystallizing Coffee
from Papua New Guinea.
To be reviewed by Duke University Press.
Edited
Volumes
West,
Paige and Martha Macintyre, eds. 2006. Melanesian Mining Modernities. The
Contemporary Pacific 18 (2).
Walters,
Bradley, Bonnie J. McCay, Paige West, and Susan Lees, eds. 2007. Against
the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology.
Lantham, MD: Lexington Books.
Under
Review. Trading in Coffee: Commodity Chains, Nature, and Space. Molly
Doane and Paige West (eds.) Under Review: University of Indiana
Press.
Under
Review. Surroundings, Selves and Others: the Political Economy of Identity
and the Environment. James G. Carrier and Paige West (eds). Under Review: Landscape
Research.
Peer
Review Journal Articles
Under
Review, “From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Ethnography of
Coffee from Papua New Guinea,”
Submitted January 20, 2008, Paige West, Ethnography.
Under
Review, “Introduction: Surroundings, Selves, and Others: The Political
Economy of Environment and Identity,” Submitted September 1, 2007, James G.
Carrier and Paige West, Landscape Research.
West,
Paige. Forthcoming, “Scientific Tourism: Imagining, Experiencing, and
Portraying Environment and Society in Papua New Guinea,” Submitted June 19,
2006, Revise and Resubmit February 26, 2007, Resubmitted July 15, 2007,
Accepted December 5, 2007. Current Anthropology.
Peterson,
Richard, Diane Russell, Paige West, and Peter Brosius. Forthcoming, Seeing (and
Doing) Conservation Through a Cultural Lenses. Environmental Management.
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 35 (1):14.1-14.27.
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.
Chapters
in Books
West,
Paige. 2007. Conservation Actions and Events in Papua New Guinea. In Against
the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology.
Bradley Walters, Bonnie J. McCay, Paige West, and Susan Lees, eds.. Lantham, MD: Lexington Books.
West,
Paige. 2004. Environmental NGO’s and the Nature of Ethnographic Inquiry. In Anthropology
and Consultancy. P.J. Stewart, and A. Strathern, eds.. New
York and Oxford:
Berghahn Books.
Ellis,
David M., and Paige West. 2004. Local History as ‘Indigenous Knowledge’:
Aeroplanes, Conservation and Development in Haia and Maimafu, Papua New Guinea.
In Investigating Local Knowledge: New Directions, New Approaches.
Bicker, A., P. Sillitoe, and J. Pottier, eds.. London: Ashgate Publishing.
Under
Review, “Marking the Market: Specialty Coffee, Generational Pitches, and Papua New Guinea”
IN Trading in Coffee: Commodity Chains, Nature, and Space. Molly Doane and
Paige West (eds.) UNDER REVIEW, U of Indiana
Press.
Under
Review, “Introduction: Trading in Coffee: Commodity Chains, Nature and
Space” Paige West and Molly Doane, IN Trading in Coffee : Commodity Chains
Nature, and Space. Molly Doane and Paige West (eds.) UNDER REVIEW, U of Indiana Press.
Working
Papers
Mack, Andrew, and Paige West. 2005. Ten Thousand Tonnes
of Small Animals: Wildlife Consumption in Papua New Guinea, a vital
resource in need of management. RMAP Working Papers, Resource Management in
Asia and the Pacific Working Group, Australian
National University.
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