Paige West

Environmental Anthropology, Political Ecology, Climate Change, Human-Animal Relationships, Ethnographic Writing                                                                                

The Pacific, Oceania; Papua New Guinea

Dr. Paige West is The Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. A cultural and environmental anthropologist by training, she earned her Ph.D. in 2000 and joined the Barnard and Columbia faculty in 2001. Since the late 1990s, her research and teaching have focused on the relationships between Indigenous ecological knowledge, environmental conservation, and socio-political transformation in Oceania, particularly in Papua New Guinea, where she has conducted over 110 months of field-based research since 1997.

Dr. West’s scholarship bridges the social and environmental sciences, exploring themes such as the intersections of conservation and development, Indigenous alternatives to externally imposed environmental agendas, the symbolic and material engagements with biodiversity, the commodification of ecological knowledge, and climate change. Her more recent work focuses on how ethnographic and Indigenous epistemologies can be brought into dialogue to shape new forms of socio-environmental understanding and practice. Her current research investigates sea level rise, managed retreat, and how communities adapt and forge futures in the face of climate change.

She is the author of three books—Conservation is Our Government Now (2006), From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive (2012), and Dispossession and the Environment (2016)—the last of which won the 2017 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award. She has edited five additional volumes and is completing a fourth single-authored book, Aunty: A Prayer for the World, a collection of essays on women, animals, climate change, and place. In addition to her books, she has published widely in scholarly journals and is the founding editor of Environment and Society: Advances in Research, which she led for a decade.

Dr. West is the recipient of numerous fellowships and honors. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021 and has received additional fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the American Museum of Natural History. She was named a Phi Beta Kappa National Distinguished Scholar in 2017, a Distinguished Scholar at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center in 2016, and one of "50 People Changing the World" by The Explorers Club in 2021. She has also served as Chair of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania and as President of the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association.

Since 2001, Dr. West has delivered over two hundred invited and distinguished lectures across the United States and internationally in Fiji, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Norway, Denmark, France, Switzerland, England, Scotland, and Malaysia.

Her long-term collaborative engagements in Papua New Guinea are grounded in her commitment to foregrounding Indigenous biocultural diversity revitalization in her work. She is the co-founder of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, an NGO that supported research led by Papua New Guinean scholars, and the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school focused on integrating Indigenous and scientific knowledge. She also supports biocultural sovereignty and revitalization initiatives with over twenty Indigenous communities in collaboration with her longtime colleague and friend, Chief John Aini.

 You can learn more about her work on her personal website: https://paige-west.com

Rutgers University, PhD in Cultural and Environmental Anthropology, 1999
University of Georgia, MA in Anthropology, 1994
Wofford College, BS in Sociology, 1991