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Paige West Associate Professor |
Dr. West received her MA in Environmental Anthropology from the University of Georgia and her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers University. Drawing on the theories, methods, and insights of cultural anthropology, cultural geography, and ecology, she has conducted 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 she 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. Dr. West's 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 is the author of Conservation is our government now: The politics of ecology in Papua New Guinea, published by Duke University Press. She has just completed a second manuscript entitled From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: Tracking the Commodity Ecumene for Papua New Guinean Coffee, which will be published by Duke University Press. She is also the author of numerous articles and papers. Dr. West current research, funded by The Christensen Fund and Columbia University, is a study of the meanings and values attributed to plants and animals in Papua New Guinea with a focus on how these objects articulate with economic needs and social change. Her sites include primary forests in the Highlands, marine reserves on the coasts, and palm oil plantations in New Ireland Province. Dr. West's work in New Ireland Province is undertaken in partnership with Ailins Awareness, a locally-based NGO run by Papua New Guineans. Dr. West is also on the board of directors of the Papua New Guinea Institute for Biological Research, a small NGO in PNG that is run by national biologists and ecologists and whose mission is conservation through biological and anthropological education. |
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