Paige West

West looks at the process from which coffee is grown, gathered, sorted, shipped, and served from the highlands of Papua New Guinea to coffee shops in far away places. She shows how coffee becomes a commodity, the different forms of labor involved, and the way that coffee shapes the lives and understandings of those who grow, process, export, sell and consume coffee.

The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea

From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive

When journalists, developers, surf tourists, and conservation NGOs cast Papua New Guineans as living in a prior nature and prior culture, they devalue their knowledge and practice, facilitating their dispossession. Paige West's searing study reveals how a range of actors produce and reinforce inequalities in today's globalized world. She shows how racist rhetorics of representation underlie all uneven patterns of development and seeks a more robust understanding of the ideological work that capital requires for constant regeneration.

Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea

Dispossession and the Environment

A contemporary art expert demystifies the process of finding, appreciating, and collecting contemporary art on any budget. Contemporary art is often misunderstood as intentionally controversial, obnoxiously self–indulgent, or painfully obscure. In this book, contemporary art expert and gallery owner Paige West guides readers toward the understanding that contemporary art can be just as original, tasteful, and breathtaking as traditional paintings. West draws from her experience as a professional art dealer to break all these misconceptions and allow readers to begin developing and enjoying a private collection. Beautiful full–colour illustrations and smart layout accompany the humor with which this book explores the current art scene. Dealing with everything from the outrage surrounding Chris Ofili's Sensation, to Salvador Dali's rampage through a department store, this book will appeal to the artistically minded individual as well as the potential art buyer. Beginning with what constitutes original art, the book moves on to discuss how to start collecting, where to find modern art, and what are reasonable prices. With gorgeous photographs of representative pieces used as examples, the book is as much a fashionable tool for home decorating as it is an open door into the world of contemporary art. This book educates readers to take those gilded–frame, poster–size wedding photos off their living room walls, or those college poster art sale finds, and put up interesting pieces from limited editions by current artists – without breaking the bank.

An Insider's Guide to Collecting Contemporary Art

The Art of Buying Art

A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly ngo workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both. West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—including ideas of space, place, environment, and society—was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea

Conservation Is Our Government Now

James G. Carrier

Many people investigating the operation of large-scale environmentalist organizations see signs of power, knowledge and governance in their policies and projects. This collection indicates that such an analysis appears to be justified from one perspective, but not from another. The chapters in this collection show that the critics, concerned with the power of these organizations to impose their policies in different parts of the world, appear justified when we look at environmentalist visions and at organizational policies and programs. However, they are much less justified when we look at the practical operation of such organizations and their ability to generate and carry out projects intended to reshape the world.

Paige West

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