Munro Lecture - Dr Paige West

'Stepping up, mobilizing resources, and stepping back: An anthropology of anthropological collaboration ?'

Much contemporary cultural anthropology seeks to draw on engaged empirical research to make powerful political commentary about pressing social and ecological issues. Anthropologists argue that this work is crucial for solidarity projects with the communities in which they work. Yet the metrics by which most professional anthropologists are measured are tied to publishing in forms, formats, and venues that are not open to non-anthropologists. And in socio-cultural anthropology the imagination of the lone ethnographer continues to hold extraordinary power. Even when projects undertaken by anthropologists are conceived of collectively, many of them still rely on a single scholar working, thinking, and writing.

In this lecture Paige West describes the decade of collaboration she has had with Mr John Aini, the founder and director of an NGO in Papua New Guinea, and that they, in turn, have had with twelve communities in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Their relationships have become familial and now fully animate both of their work lives. They are not, however, always easy. Working in true partnership with others means stepping back and committing to doing anthropology differently and it often means refusing the structures of assessment and forms of validation that underpin the field as a whole.  

Dr Paige West

Dr Paige West holds The Claire Tow Professorship in Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and serves as the Director of the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference. She has worked in Papua New Guinea since 1996 and has conducted over 100 months of field-based research in the country focused on in the relationship between societies and their environments. She has written about the linkages between environmental conservation and international development, the material and symbolic ways in which the natural world is understood by Indigenous peoples and natural scientists, and the production of biodiversity-based commodities. Her current research is focused on sea level rise, managed retreat, and the question of how people forge new lives in the face of climatic change. Dr. West is the author of three books and the editor of five more. She has also published numerous scholarly papers.  She is the founder of the journal Environment and Society: Advances in Research and served as its editor for a decade. Her most recent book, Dispossession and the Environment, won the 2017 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award. In addition to her academic work, Dr West is the co-founder of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small NGO dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans. She is also the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge.