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.

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.

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.