Dispossession and the Environment

Joshua A. Bell, curator of globalization, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution:
In this wide-ranging, passionately argued and beautifully written book, West examines the discursive, semiotic and visual strategies that work to dispossess Papua New Guineans of their land, livelihoods and sovereignty. Through lively case studies, she demonstrates not only the depth of ethnographic insight that only results from long-term engagement with communities, but also makes important connections between diverse sets of theory. This book is an important reminder of what anthropology can, and should, be.

Jerry Jacka, author of Alchemy in the Rain Forest: Politics, Ecology, and Resilience in a New Guinea Mining Area:
In this intellectually groundbreaking study of uneven development, Paige West demonstrates how non-material representations of people and place in Papua New Guinea have profound material consequences. Her masterful analysis examines accumulation by dispossession through representational strategies that allow surfers, development experts, and other expatriates to dispossess Papua New Guineans of both their culture and their environment. A unique and powerful contribution to political ecology and environmental studies.

Katerina Teaiwa, author of Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba:
How do we ensure that anthropology does not set the stage for dispossession? This brilliant, powerful collection of essays by Paige West demonstrates the profoundly material effects of disabling colonial and anthropological representations of Melanesia. Papua New Guinean lives and environments matter, and hardly just for the benefit of capitalists, tourists, conservationists, and social scientists.

Ty P. Kawika Tengan, author of Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai'i:
Provocative and absorbing, Dispossession and the Environment clarifies the roles that ideologies of 'nature' and 'culture' play in the production of global inequalities. West demonstrates how indigenous philosophy and political ecology can offer new grounds for theorizing worlds remade by dispossession. A much-needed intervention in current debates over ontology and epistemology, this is decolonial anthropology at its best.

J. Kehaulani Kauanui, professor of anthropology and American studies, Wesleyan University:
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.