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Sun Min
Director of Media Relations
Alyssa Vine
Associate Director of Media Relations
Paige West
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Paige West, associate professor of anthropology, joined the Barnard faculty in 2001. She is a cultural and environmental anthropologist with a wide range of interests, many of which center on human social relations with nature.
In addition to her teaching duties for the department of anthropology, Professor West is also affiliated with Barnard's human rights studies program, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and the department of environmental science at Barnard. She teaches such courses as "Introduction to Environmental Anthropology"; "Political Ecology"; "The Interpretation of Culture"; "Environment and Development"; and "Environment and Cultural Behavior."
Professor West's research, which focuses on Papua New Guinea, examines how 'sustainable development' has become an important vehicle by which the social and economic ideologies of late liberalism are circulated globally. Through detailed ethnography, she demonstrates that sustainable development projects do not simply affect social and material lives, but bring into being 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.
Professor West's research and scholarship have been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Geographic Society, 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.
Selected Publications
From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: Crystallizing Coffee from Papua New Guinea (Durham: Duke University Press, under review)
Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)
"Una Perspectiva Antropológica de Algunas Consecuencias Inesperadas de Áreas Protegidas" (with D. Brockington), NeoCons 6 (2006)
"Parks and Peoples: The Social Effects of Protected Areas" (with D. Brockington and J. Igoe), Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006)
"Environmental Conservation and Mining: Between Experience and Expectation in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea," The Contemporary Pacific 18 (2006)
"Translation, Value, and Space: Theorizing an Ethnographic and Engaged Environmental Anthropology," American Anthropologist 107 (2005)
"Holding the Story Forever: The Aesthetics of Ethnographic Labor," Anthropological Forum 15 (2005)
"Getting Away From It All? Ecotourism and Authenticity" (with J. G. Carrier), with commentary and reply, Current Anthropology 45 (2004)
"Knowing the Fight: The Politics of Conservation in Papua New Guinea," Anthropology in Action: Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice 10 (2003)
"Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations and the Nature of Ethnographic Inquiry," Social Analysis 45 (2001)
212.854.5933
EDUCATION:
B.A., Wofford College
M.A., The University of Georgia
M.Phil., Ph.D., Rutgers University
RELATED LINKS:
SPECIALIZATIONS:
Sustainable development
Political ecology
Melanesia