RG: When you were doing research for your book, how did you engage with different communities of local people, of scientists, of coffee growers?

PW: One of the interesting things about this book is that it’s a very long-term project that in earnest began many years ago. When I was finishing up my PhD project, I asked the people I work with in rural villages in Papua New Guinea what they thought an interesting second project would be. They all said coffee because they live in this place where everyone thinks—or used to think—that conservation was a form of development.

It’s 1998, and I’m about to leave the village – maybe forever, nobody knows – and I say to a guy named Philip and a guy named Jonah, “So what’s a good research project?” We’re looking out over Philip’s dad’s coffee groves, and they say, “Well, really the only development we have here is coffee and Christianity. So maybe you should look at coffee and Christianity.”

I thought about it and decided that coffee was an interesting thing to look at, so the book project itself was generated from the engagements I already had with rural people living in the Lufa district of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

The project became complicated in terms of the types of relationships I had with the people I was working with because the global commodity chain for coffee literally stretches globally.

With the rural farmers who grow the coffee that I write about, I have a long-term ethnographic relationship. I go back to Papua New Guinea every year and spend time with them. I speak their language, and I know a lot about local ontology and epistemology.

That kind of social relationship was very different from the kind of social relationship I had with, say, the people in Goroka, the mountain town where most of the coffee is processed. Most of those people I knew socially because there’s a whole social world of middle-class Papua New Guineans and expatriates in Goroka, and before I ever knew I would do work on coffee, I was part of that social world.

So I had to approach people whom I already had a social relationship with and say, “Look, I’m doing this book on coffee, it would be great if I could interview you, it would be great if I could spend time at your factory.”

The initial part of the book—the rural research—was very ethnographic. I mean ethnographic in the true sense—living in a village, spending all day everyday with people for months and years on end. The sort of middle part of the commodity chain in Goroka and then in Lae and Port Moresby, two other urban areas in Papua New Guinea, a lot of it was ethnographic work, but also a lot of it was interview work.

I lived with people, I spent time in factories, but I also interviewed people. And then as I moved farther away from the source of coffee, the project became much more interview based. If you’re talking to, say, a head of one of the largest coffee importers in the world, you can’t go live with them. You can’t really afford to spend seven months in Hamburg.

And so the part of the project that is about distribution and the international marketing of coffee, that’s much more interview-based. I feel like I had a range of relationships with people—everything from the very traditional ethnographic to the much more interview-based style of ethnography that many people practice today.

RG: In the course of your fieldwork for this book and in your ongoing research, how has your work sparked on-the-ground engagements with projects that are meaningful to local communities?

PW: I have a couple of different projects now. The coffee project is basically finished in terms of my research, but one of the things that came out of it is that I got connected with a lot of people in the coffee industry who do really interesting work around social justice.

One of the things I was recently able to do was bring a group of researchers from a large international coffee company to the villages in the Eastern Highlands to get them talking to the people about ways to have more money flowing into communities and less money slipping out along the commodity chain.

It has led to some really positive engagement. One of the other things that’s come out of the coffee work is that pretty much everybody in the coffee industry in Papua New Guinea is reading the book, and I think that there’s an ongoing conversation now about ethical trade and ethical consumption and whether that’s actually benefitting people in rural areas that I have helped to generate.

And so I feel like I’ve contributed to a national conversation about coffee in Papua New Guinea in addition to connecting these rural growers with some really wonderful people in the coffee industry.

It’s interesting how, once you become an “expert” on something, you find people contacting you to ask you for advice.  Someone whom I interviewed and spent quite a bit of time with in London, and who owns five small coffee shops, recently contacted me to say, “Hey, I want to source some fair-trade, organically certified coffee from Papua New Guinea, and I want to do it from a great company.”

I was able to connect him with a locally owned company, with a company that is owned and run by Papua New Guineans, and they now have a relationship where he is sourcing all of his coffee from them. And so in some ways I’ve been able to connect people with the rural growers whom I know so well. And in some ways I’ve also been able to connect some of the people who get constructed as middlemen.

That’s another thing about the book that I think is important. In the narratives that we hear in the Global North about coffee and all sorts of things, there’s this notion of the middleman as a kind of evil character who takes money away from the poor growers and who doesn’t add any value.

What I do in the book is show that the middleman in Papua New Guinea is actually a Papua New Guinean who is really trying to make a living as an ethical part of the industry and who is usually someone that has connections to growers, very intimate connections to growers, and also connections to these international houses that can buy the coffee.

In terms of other work, my first book is, in part, a critique of environmental conservation projects, and one of the things that has come out of that book is really sustained engagement with small, local NGOs.

I helped found an NGO called the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research, and we work to get young Papua New Guineans who are interested in anthropology and biology into PhD and masters programs, and then help support their research. So that’s one way that my work has led to engagement.

One of the critiques in that book is that conservation can’t always be this kind of western construct that gets put down on top of people in Papua New Guinea, so one way that I’ve tried to help move that idea along is to work with these young Papua New Guinean scientists.

My current research is in New Ireland, a province of Papua New Guinea, where I work with an NGO called Ailan Awareness. We work with twenty small communities, and those twenty small communities all have teeny-tiny protected areas created using traditional conservation techniques.

These are communities who have decided they want to do something positive for the environment.  They want to work with some people like us, some external actors, but they want to have control over their conservation projects, and so I’ve helped a lot with that process.

You can read the full interview here: http://www.aaanet.org/sections/ae/index.php/paige-west-interview/