Harry G West

Harry G. West is Professor of Anthropology, and Chair of the Food Studies Centre, at SOAS, University of London. He worked for many years in rural Mozambique, focusing his research onthe ways in which colonialism and revolutionary socialism reconfigured institutions of local authority, and, more recently, how post-socialist reforms fostered a "revival of tradition". His major published works include:Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique(University of Chicago Press, 2005,...See more

Harry G. West is Professor of Anthropology, and Chair of the Food Studies Centre, at SOAS, University of London. He worked for many years in rural Mozambique, focusing his research onthe ways in which colonialism and revolutionary socialism reconfigured institutions of local authority, and, more recently, how post-socialist reforms fostered a "revival of tradition". His major published works include:Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique(University of Chicago Press, 2005, first-runner-up for the US-based African Studies Association's Melville J. Herskovits Award in 2006, winner of the UK-based Royal Anthropological Institute's Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology in 2007, and in Portuguese translation awardedSpecial Distinction in the Portuguese-based Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa's A. Sedas Nunes Social Sciences Prize Competition in 2012);Ethnographic Sorcery(University of Chicago Press, 2007, first-runner-up for the US-based Society for Humanistic Anthropology's Victor Turner Prize in 2008);Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order(Duke University Press, 2003, co-edited with Todd Sanders);Borders and Healers: Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa(Indiana University Press, 2005, co-edited with Tracy Luedke); andEnduring Socialism: Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation(Berghahn Books, 2008, co-edited with Parvathi Raman). His recent research in the anthropology of food, funded by the British Academy, has focused on artisan cheese, discourses of 'terroir', and the global market niche in 'heritage foods.' He is particularly interested in how cheese makers have preserved and/or transformed cheesemaking techniques while navigating a changing marketplace, as well as how they have presented themselves, their locales of production, and their productive traditions to consumers new and old. Professor West directs the SOAS MA in the Anthropology of Food and was co-recipient of the 2009 Excellence in Instruction Award given by the US-based Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society, and joint runner-up for the SOAS Director's Teaching Prize in 2011-2012. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery Trust and a Trustee of the Sophie Coe Memorial Fund, as well as a member of the summer school organizing committee of the European Institute of Food History and Culture (François-Rabelais University, Tours, France). He also serves on the editorial boards of:American Anthropologist;Food, Culture and Society; andThe Journal of Agrarian Change. See less