Remembering Daniel West

Daniel West, 1982 - 2025

In Memoriam

Daniel West (1982 – 2025) came to the Columbia University Department of Anthropology after more than a decade as a journalist working in London, Berlin, and Beijing. In 2015, in the magazine HOLO, he described his journalism as tracing “the contours of the Anthropocene across science, technology, and economics.” It is hard, looking back, not to see the anthropologist peeking out of his journalism. In his Master’s program at Oxford, he found conceptual language for the questions that he had pursued as a reporter. He arrived at Columbia, to pursue a doctorate, with a journalist’s desire to follow unexpected stories and make difficult material legible, and a scholar’s impulse to read voraciously and critically. Daniel’s time in our department traces an intellectual journey that changed dramatically in form while remaining remarkably consistent in the questions that animated it. He began his doctoral research thinking about coral in Hawaiʻi and ended up writing about beavers in English rivers. The COVID pandemic was responsible for much of that shift, but the beaver project was not an abandonment of the Hawaiian work; rather, it grew from it.

Daniel’s initial hoped-for dissertation project, “Aquacultures: Hawaiian Selfhood and Sovereignty Across Species Boundaries,” was centered on two sites in Kāneʻohe Bay. On Moku o Loʻe, scientists in the Gates Lab were experimenting with the “assisted evolution” of coral. Heʻeia Fishpond, an Indigenous Hawaiian aquaculture system, lies across the bay from that lab. Both are places where people work with marine life to produce possible futures, but they emerge from different histories of knowledge and responsibility. Daniel wanted to know what happened when different ways of knowing life existed alongside one another. For Kānaka ʻŌiwi revitalizging Heʻeia, coral stands at the beginning of a genealogy of all life, so he began thinking about what happens when one group’s experimental organism might be another group’s ancestor.

In the Hawai’i project Daniel was interested in who had the authority to define what a living thing was and who could determine the future of a reef. He asked how anthropology might take nonhuman life seriously without allowing multispecies theory to obscure colonial history or Indigenous political claims. Drawing on Pacific philosophers, he also challenged accounts of settler colonialism that privileged property in land, a framing he found inadequate for Hawaiʻi, where the sea and its inhabitants were also central to histories of sovereignty and dispossession. 

COVID then made his planned fieldwork impossible. His March 2021 prospectus acknowledges that Moku o Loʻe had become inaccessible. His first response was not to leave Hawaiʻi but to make the project larger, imagining essays that moved through what he called “sea, earth, and sky.” Across coral, surfing, extinction, and the 30-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, he proposed to ask how humans and other forms of life make worlds together and how those worlds become objects of scientific management.

Eventually Daniel turned toward England and beavers. His new project, “Beaver: Science, Sovereignty, and Sex on English Rivers,” seems at first a radical departure from his earlier project, but the same questions continued to animate him. Beavers were celebrated as “ecosystem engineers” whose dams could reshape landscapes, while their return generated conflicts over property and political authority. Daniel understood that they were not simply being reintroduced into an ecosystem; they were being reintroduced into a political landscape. Here we see his questions about infrastructure and sovereignty, attached to an animal whose movements ignored human boundaries.

Daniel did not have the time he should have had to finish answering these questions, but we should not remember his shortened intellectual life only through the dissertation he was unable to complete. In 2017, he participated in “Biodiversity and Its Histories”, an exhibition created by Columbia and Barnard students for the Washington Heights branch of the New York Public Library. The project asked students to make complicated histories of biodiversity accessible without making them simple. That seems particularly right as a way of remembering Daniel. Even as he became an anthropologist, he never lost the journalistic conviction that difficult ideas should travel beyond the university. From journalism, to Hawaiʻi, to the rivers of England, Daniel kept asking how knowledge is made and what it does once it enters the world. His intellectual journey was unfinished, but unfinished is not the same as absent. The work he left behind shows a mind moving and revising, and a scholar who believed that understanding worlds was work we should do with and for other people.