Newsletter: October 2006
Janelle S. Taylor, Contributing Editor
George Foster Memorial Award in Practicing Medical Anthropology
Submitted by Merrill Singer (Hispanic Health Council)
In 2005, the SMA Board created the Practicing Medical Anthropology Award, given to recognize individuals who have made extraordinary contributions in applying medical anthropology’s theory and methods in addressing health and social problems, particularly those who have worked in diverse contexts, addressed multidisciplinary audiences, and had impact on social policy. The first recipient of the award was Merrill Singer. After learning of the death of world renowned medical anthropologist George Foster in his Berkeley, California home on May 22, 2006, the SMA Board voted to rename the Practicing Award in honor of Foster in light of his many notable contributions to the field. Honoring the heartfelt admiration for Foster among his colleagues, the new name of the prize will be The George Foster Memorial Award in Practicing Medical Anthropology. Both of Foster’s children, Jeremy Foster of Basalt, Colorado and Melissa Bowerman of the Netherlands, were delighted to hear of the proposed name change.
Foster, who conducted pioneering studies of social change among residents of the Mexican village of Tzintzuntzan, and was one of the founders medical anthropology, was 92 at the time of his death. As a medical anthropologist, he analyzed processes of acceptance and rejection of biomedicine among populations in low-resource countries, examined processes of transmission of health culture, and assessed the effects of medical bureaucracies on health care consumers. In addition to his many years as a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley, and as a consultant to the WHO and other institutions, Foster was the author of 21 books and monographs and more than 100 scientific articles. During the 1960s he served as president of the American Anthropological Association.
Basker Prize Endowment
Submitted by Helen Lambert (Bristol U)
Dear Colleagues,
We are writing to ask for your support in securing the future of one of the Society for Medical Anthropology’s most prestigious awards, the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize. The Prize endowment was originally established to commemorate Eileen Basker’s passionate commitment to the study of gender and health and to extend her groundbreaking achievements in this field following her death in 1986 at the age of 50. The annual competition for the Prize is open to scholars from any discipline or nation for a specific book, article, film, or exceptional PhD thesis produced within the preceding three years. The Basker Prize is awarded to the work judged to be the most courageous, significant, and potentially influential contribution to scholarship in the area of gender and health.
Over the twenty years since it was first conceived, the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize has amply succeeded in its aim to promote excellence in research on gender and health. Former prizewinners are among the most prominent anthropologists in the field, and several have gone on to become globally esteemed scholars. As the first and only book award in this field for a considerable period, the Prize has almost certainly been influential in spurring a publishing boom in the area of gender and health scholarship. By creating momentum in this field, the Prize competition has also helped to substantiate the relevance of medical anthropology as an important related area.
Sadly, over the past twenty years, the value of the Prize endowment has not kept pace with inflation, and it no longer generates enough income to cover the cost of the annual $1000 award. The SMA is therefore launching an urgent fundraising campaign with the aim of supplementing the Basker endowment sufficiently to secure the cash award at the existing level for future prizewinners.
2007 will see the twentieth anniversary of the launch of the Basker Prize, and we are planning a number of activities at the 2007 AAA meetings to celebrate this event, including a special session and reception for all past awardees. This year is therefore the ideal time to launch our fundraising campaign; with your help we will be able to announce a secure future for the Basker Prize at its 20th anniversary year celebration.
Please give generously via the AAA’s secure payment site at https://secure.aaanet.org/rd/pledge.htm. After completing your details, click on the ‘Other’ box and type in ‘Basker’.
For more details of the terms and conditions for this year’s Prize competition or about recent Basker prizewinners, please see the web page at http://medanthro.net/awards/basker.html
With many thanks and best wishes.
Yours sincerely,
Helen Lambert (Basker Prize Committee Chair) Marcia Inhorn (President, SMA)
Virginia Dominguez (Basker Prize Founder)
Please send column contributions to the SMA Contributing Editor Janelle Taylor (jstaylor@u.washington.edu)