Paige West, who is the Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, joined the faculty at Barnard College and Columbia University in 2001, the year after earning her Ph.D. in cultural and environmental anthropology at Rutgers University.

Dr. West’s broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments. More specifically, she has written about the intersections between indigenous epistemic practices and conservation science, 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 creation of commodities and practices of consumption. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea (PNG), Australia, Germany, England, and the United States.

Dr. West’s most recent books are Dispossession and The Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea (2016, Columbia University Press and winner of the 2017 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award), From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea (2012, Duke University Press), Conservation is our Government now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea (2006, Duke University Press).

Cultural Anthropology, Environment, Dispossession, Climate Change, Development, Migration, The Imagination, Tourism, Anthropology Of Sciences

Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO)

Melanesia
Australia (area)

20th century
21st century
The Colonial time
Anticipatory

Gimi, Tok Pisin