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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.
Price: $32.00
Pages: 216
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Series: Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures
Publication Date:
11 October 2016
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231178792
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, NATURE / Environmental Conservation & Protection, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Developing & Emerging Countries, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography
This is a brilliant work with theoretical force and wide-ranging epistemological and ethical implications. Rigorously researched and historically grounded, West documents how representational strategies – discursive, semiotic, and visual – in relation to Papua New Guinea underpin the enduring boundary between the nature/culture divide, which produces destructive material effects while entrenching white supremacy and capitalism in the globalized world of the twenty-first century. Rich, lucid, and incisive, Dispossession and the Environment is a must-read for scholars in anthropology, environmental studies, Pacific studies, and beyond.
Paige West is professor of anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University.
Acknowledgments
Map of the Island of New Guinea
Introduction
1. "Such a Site for Play, This Edge": Tourism and Modernist Fantasy
2. "We Are Here to Build Your Capacity": Development as a Vehicle for Accumulation and Dispossession
3. Discovering the Already Known: Tree Kangaroos, Explorer Imaginings, and Indigenous Articulations
4. Indigenous Theories of Accumulation, Dispossession, Possession, and Sovereignty
Afterword. Birdsongs: In Memory of Neil Smith (1954–2012)
Notes
Bibliography
Index