Paige West
Affiliation
- Faculty Fellow, Department of Anthropology, Barnard College
Research
Paige West received her MA in Environmental Anthropology from the University of Georgia and her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and teaches graduate courses at Columbia University. In 2002 she received the American Anthropological Association's Anthropology and Environment Junior Scholar award for her work. She is a cultural and environmental anthropologist with interests in 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. Since 1996, drawing on the theories, methods, and insights of both cultural anthropology and political ecology, she have conducted fieldwork in Melanesia and the United States. Dr. West has recently completed a book entitled Making Crater Mountain: Integrated Conservation and Development Interventions in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, (Duke University Press, 2005), and is now working on a second manuscript entitled Coffee, Gold, and Souls: Commodity Chains and Environmental Change in Papua New Guinea. She is the author of several articles, including "Environmental NGO's and the Nature of Ethnographic Inquiry," recently published in the journal Social Analysis, and co-author, with James G. Carrier, of "Ecotourism and Authenticity: Getting Away From It All?" which is in the most recent edition of Current Anthropology. In addition, in collaboration with tropical ecologists Dr. Andrew Mack and colleagues from WCS and AMNH Dr. West is currently designing a new research project in which we will examine the multiple social and environmental scales of influence on hunting practices at three sites in Papua New Guinea. Dr. West teaches undergraduate classes on Environmental Anthropology, Political Ecology, and Environment and Development at Barnard College and graduate classes on Consumption and Political Ecology at Columbia University.
Selected Work
- Conservation is our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
- "Local history as 'indigenous knowledge': Aeroplanes, conservation and development in Haia and Maimafu, Papua New Guinea." David M. Ellis and Paige West in Bicker, A., P. Sillitoe & J. Pottier. (eds.) Investigating Local Knowledge: New Directions, New Approaches. London: Ashgate Publishing.
- "Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations and the Nature of Ethnographic Inquiry." In Anthropology and Consultancy. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern (eds.) Special Issue of Social Analysis 45(2), November 2001.
- "The Environment and the Candidates." Anthropology News, Vol 41, No 7, pp 30-31, 2001.
