Promotional Information

An ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea

Table of Contents

Preface xi
Acknowledgments xxiii
Abbreviations and Acronyms xxix
1. New Guinea-New York 1
2. Making Crater Mountain 27
3. Articulations, Histories, Development 52
4. Conservation Histories 125
5. A Land of Pure Possibility 147
6. The Practices of Conservation-as-Development 183
7. Exchanging Conservation for Development 215
Appendices 239
Notes 251
Bibliography 279
Index 311

About the Author

Paige West is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University.

Reviews

“Conservation Is Our Government Now is a timely and significant contribution to contemporary critical scholarship on conservation. More than any other study of which I am aware, it provides an ethnographically rich, nuanced account of the encounter between conservation practitioners and a local community. It is an exemplar of the power of ethnographic writing to reveal other subjectivities and other ways of being.”—J. Peter Brosius, coeditor of Communities and Conservation: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management

“Incisive, moving, and beautifully written, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an absolutely exemplary study and a completely absorbing narrative. It is quite simply one of the most sophisticated political ecology books I have read to date.”—Neil Smith, author of The Endgame of Globalization