Paige West, Associate Professor of Anthropology, joined the Barnard 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, 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

Mack, Andrew, and Paige West. 2006. 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.