Dr. West is an environmental anthropologist who studies the relationship between humans and the environment. Within this focus her research has been driven by five primary questions. First, how do the political-economic processes termed neoliberalism interpenetrate global conservation and development policies and practices? Second, how does the circulation of European notions of nature and culture work to displace or supplant other ways of understanding sociality and the environment? Third, how do spaces taken-for-granted as ‘natural’ and practices taken-for-granted as ‘cultural’ come into being? Fourth, how do people come to be in the world as subjects and agents in relation to their natural environments? Fifth, what are the material transformations of the natural world that are wrought by these processes?

Dr. West has pursued her research questions in three major intellectual projects. In her first single author book, Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea, she examined the exportation of Euro-American ideas about the suitable relationship between the natural and cultural world to rural areas in Papua New Guinea and explored how these ideas produced particular kinds of socio-cultural institutions and physical spaces. In her second single author book, From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: Crystallizing Coffee from Papua New Guinea, she analyzes the global circulation of coffee beans as valuable meaning-filled agricultural commodities and social vessels for particular symbolic representations of nature and culture and also examines notions of ethnical consumption through fair trade and organic certification. In her current project, Making Value in the Pacific Tropics, she considers how particular animals and plants come to have value and meaning for people living in both tropical forests and cosmopolitan global cities. This project has two parts, the first part is focused on animals, value, and the globalization of particular ideologies of nature and culture and you will hear about part of it in this talk today. The second part is focused, generally, on plants, value, and contemporary attempts to counter global climate change through the seeminglyethnical consumption of biofuels. It is specifically focused on oil palm plantations in Papua New Guinea.