SMA awards: Basker Prize 2004
This year’s competition saw an exceptionally strong field with fourteen initial nominations, of which twelve ultimately met the necessary criteria to be considered in competition. Entries ranged in subject area across cultural anthropology, medieval history, clinical medicine, cultural studies and anthropological demography and included first works by junior scholars as well as books by internationally renowned academics. They were judged by a committee composed of: Virginia Dominguez, Sarah Franklin and Helen Lambert (Chair).
The judges were impressed by the quality of many of the nominated works but eventually decided to award the Prize this year to a single winner and to make Honorable Mention of one further work. An Honorable Mention goes to Anne Line Dalsgaard’s meticulous, thoughtful and beautifully written ethnography, Matters of Life and Longing: Female Sterilization in Northeast Brazil (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004). This study seeks to place the high rates of sterilization found among poor women in urban Brazil in the context of their everyday struggles to find self-respect and autonomy under precarious conditions. Dalsgaard successfully achieves that difficult balance between attending to the workings of individual agency while giving due weight to the structural inequalities that so constrain it. Sterilization is understood as one of the few means through which women can exert control over their own lives and achieve recognition from others in the favela environment. A first book derived from the author’s doctoral research, the judges found this to be an unusually mature work offering a fresh approach that deserves particular acknowledgement.
The Basker Prize itself goes to an extended case study that exemplifies genuinely engaged scholarship combined with rigorous sociological analysis. An exceptionally detailed, complex and wide-ranging body of social historical research has been deftly handled to produce a work that is accessible to non-anthropologists while maintaining scholarly integrity. Sandra Morgen’s Into our own hands: The women’s health movement in the U.S., 1969-1990 (New Brunswick, New Jersey & London: Rutgers University Press 2002) valuably documents this feminist movement, while offering an interesting and innovative theoretical contribution to the study of social movements and highlighting the emotional dimensions of political engagement. The study demonstrates how this significant but underreported women’s movement shaped mainstream healthcare and policy, while itself being influenced by changing social, political and economic conditions. It explores the movement’s multiple origins and the ways in which individual, local and regional strands constructed their own histories and dealt with fundamental issues of race and class. ‘Into Our Own Hands’ well satisfies the Prize criteria of a courageous, significant and potentially influential contribution to scholarship in the area of gender and health.