Society for Medical Anthropology: report from the prize coordinator 2004
Vincanne Adams (UCSF)
To be presented at SMA business meeting Canterbury Hotel, SF
As chair of the Prize Committee for the Society, I am happy to report that we have a winner this year for each of the three prizes: Polgar, Hughes and Rivers.
This year, we had fewer submissions for both the Undergraduate WHR Rivers prize, and for the graduate Charles Hughes Prize, although again most of them were of very good quality. I would, again, encourage anyone who has students producing good work to submit their essays for these competitions.
The Polgar Prize, as you know, is selected from the articles appearing in a single volume of Medical Anthropology Quarterly. This year it was selected from volume 17.
As you also know (some from first hand experience) there is a lot of hard work that goes into the selection process of deciding which papers, on the basis of 1) quality of writing, 2) potential impact on the discipline and 3) clarity of argument should be the winners. In forming these committees, I try to obtain representation from a variety of different sorts of institutions, a mix of practicing and academic scholars and, as always, sometimes my wish for diversity and representation is thwarted by the fact that people are just to busy to do the work. I urge anyone who is interested in serving on these committees to please contact me. This year, we had very strong committees for all three prizes. They included:
Polgar: Pamela Erikson (our current MAQ editor); Lorna Rhodes (U of Washington); Peter Guarnaccia (Rutgers)
For the Hughes Graduate Student Prize, the committee consisted of: James Pfeiffer (Case Western); Steve Ferzacca (Canada); Joao Biehl (Princeton)
And for the Rivers Undergraduate Prize: Paul Brodwin (Univ. of Wisconsin-milwaukee); Simon Lee (National Cancer Institute); Adriana Petryna (Princeton)
All of these folks deserve a round of applause and thanks for their generous time and effort in service to the Society.
Finally, the big news—the winners.
Most of you already also know that the winners of the Rivers and Hughes Prizes are encouraged to submit their essays for publication, for which MAQ has right of first refusal. They also receive $250 in prize money.
This year’s winner of the Rivers undergraduate Prize is Tiffany Star Behringer, from the University of Pennsylvania. Her essay “Changing paradigms of the one-child Policy: Exploring the Cultural Model of Reproduction and Gender Role of Chinese Immigrant Women” offers an ethnographic exploration of reproductive choice in this immigrant community. Using interviews with Chinese women in the US at the beginning of their reproductive lives, she notes that ideas about childbearing are closely tied to considerations of gender equality, the status of women, and occupational labor. She found that women did not find life easier in the US despite both countries’ rhetorical commitment to gender and work equality and despite these women’s embrace of the possibility of having more children here than in China. Rather, the new cultural and governmental milieu produced in some cases just as much, though different, and sometimes more confusion than would be seen in China. Her work is also subtle in that it undertakes to affirm literature that shows how women’s attitudes and behaviors here in the US provide us with insight about the ineffectiveness of China’s one Child policy, with a good deal of resentment lying just below the surface of compliance seen there.
Congratulations Tiffany.
The winner of the Hughes Graduate Student Paper Prize this year goes to Benjamin Hickler for his essay “Sexually Violent Predators and the Truth about the Future.” In this essay, Ben takes a close look at the new technological and legal apparatuses that attempt to evaluate the risk of recitivism among so-called violent predators. The category itself, he notes, is quite broad—referring at one extreme to the consensual sexual relations of a man with a 17 year old “minor” and at the other extreme to the violent molestor and murdering pedophile. In looking through the materials used in courtrooms and medical and psychiatric settings, along with interviews with lawyers and medical experts as well as SVPs, Ben explores not just the attempts to ground the ideas of risk of recitivism in biology –in brain reactions and penile stimulation rates—but also how these apparatuses might be a harbinger of the future for many instance of medico-legal collaboration. The attempt to predict the future of medical and legal offenses in a compliant public that also believes in the accuracy of new biological technologies is quite frightening. We look forward to seeing revised versions of it submitted to MAQ.
Congratulations Ben.
Finally, the winner of this year’s Polgar Prize for the best essay in volume 17 of MAQ goes to Charles Briggs, for his essay entitled: “Why Nation-States and Journalists Can’t Teach People to be healthy: Power and Pragmatic Miscalculation in Public Discourses on Health”. In this essay, Charles provides us with an encapsulated version of the brilliant analysis of discursive relations between media, various publics, public health efforts and an epidemic of cholera in Venezuela, that can be found in his new book co-authored with Clara Mantini-Briggs “Stories in the Time of Cholera.” In this article, we learn about the ways that journalists helped script the racial profiling of various publics—making poor peasants into unsanitary subjects who harbored and in some sense were made “blamable” for the epidemic and, on the other hand, sanitary citizens, whose imagined lifestyles of hygienic discipline were seen as models for public health messages. In constructing the epidemic in this way, the media became allied with public health efforts that in the end completely missed their mark in being able to enlist participation of those victims of the epidemic who needed the most help. With clarity and a wealth of cogent ethnographic materials, he shows us how this sort of ascription of diseases and populations is not just a thing of the colonial past (where we have seen it described often) but is actively produced in the late 20th century as epidemics still unfairly affect the poorest of the poor and as conditions of structural inequality and globalization continue to be masked by medicalized discourses of public health intervention. The book is also quite brilliant.
Congratulations Charles.
Once again encourage everyone to remember to have students submit and anyone interested in serving on the selection committees please contact me.
Check out our past awards archive.