Prof. Harry West

Harry G West is a socio-cultural anthropologist with expertise in political anthropology and the anthropology of food, farming and agrarian society. He has conducted research in Africa, as well as in Europe and North America. His most recent research is in the anthropology of food. He has focused on artisan cheese, the discourse of “terroir,” and the global market niche in “heritage foods.” He is particularly interested in how cheesemakers 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. He is also interested in how engagement with food—from making food, to sharing it and eating it—affords opportunities for people to remember, including the acquisition of memories of things they have not themselves directly experienced.

His most recent book is entitled Food Between the Country and the City: Ethnographies of a Changing Global Foodscape, and is co-edited with Nuno Domingos and José Manuel Sobral. He also serves on the editorial boards of: Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies; Food, Culture and Society; The Graduate Journal of Food Studies; The Journal of Agrarian Change; and Análise Social: Revista do Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa.

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