2003 Annual Reports
Prize Committee Report
To be presented at AAA, Chicago, November
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. For the Rivers Prize, we received only four submissions, although most of them were of very good quality. For the Hughes prize, we received six submissions. I would, as always, 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 16.
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)
Catherine Maternowska (one of our practicing medical anthropologists, currently
working with California State Health Department in Sacramento with adjunct
appt. in Dept. of OB/Gyn at UCSF)
And Linda-Anne Rebhun (Yale)
For the Hughes Graduate Student Prize, the committee consisted of
Sandra Hyde (McGill)
Nancy Chen (Santa Cruz)
James Quesada (San Francisco State)
And for the Rivers Undergraduate Prize:
Vinh-Kim Nguyen (MD PhD at McGill)
Kathleen Erwin (Center for Aids Prevention Studies at UCSF)
Shanti Parikh (Wisconsin)
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 Jennifer Staple,
who graduated last year from Yale’s Dept. of Anthropology. Her essay,
titled: “Forging Activist Identities in the Kalaupapa Community of
Leprosy Patients” offers an original analysis of the historical creation
of identity-based activism in the colonial context of Hawaii. Using both
historical archival materials and interviews with survivors, this essay
expands an understanding of the contextualization of medically-based identity
politics. Most interestingly, Jennifer accomplishes this analysis through
the skillful use of Latour and Callon’s actor network theory, showing
how disease and human actants together enable the creation of new social
networks in the absence and severing of kin relations under colonial-based
quarantine arrangements. It is a wonderful essay and I look forward to seeing
it in print.
Congratulations Jennifer.
The winner of the Hughes Graduate Student Paper Prize this year goes to Nili Kaplan-Myrth for her essay entitled: “Black, White or Brindle: Community Advocacy in Austrailian Aboriginal Health.” Nili’s essay is a very subtle, compelling and ethnographically rich analysis of the ways that Australian Aboriginal Koori populations work through political infrastructures of community health care. She asks “what does community control really mean to aboriginal participants, given the ambiguity in defining communities, and when does the bureaucratically-controlled infrastructural notion of community really work against or with their own ideas of health provision, when these themselves are debated? With insights that apply equally well outside of the Australian context, Nili has provided a model for analysis in the field of community health research and in the methods of applying thick ethnographic engagement to problems of health care systems.
Congratulations Nili.
Congratulations also to the anthropology department at Yale and Linda-Anne Rebhun. It is very rare to have two prize winners from the same department in the same year. This speaks to both Linda-Anne’s mentoring and diligence getting students to submit essays! Well done.
Finally, the winner of this year’s Polgar Prize for the best essay
in volume 16 of MAQ goes to James Pfeiffer, for his essay entitled: “African
Independent Churches in Mozambique: Healing the Afflictions of Inequality”.
In this essay, we are given an extraordinarily close reading of the relationships
between traditional Shona notions of the causes of illness (including witchcraft,
sorcery and spirits), and the rapid proliferation of evangelical, pentacostal
churches in Mozambique as institutions for healing by way of the “Holy
Spirit.” Following the lead of Jean Comaroff, who explored similar
relationships among the Tswana of Southern Africa, Pfeiffer traces the links
between intensification of witchcraft, envy and sorcery and their perceived
outcomes in reproductive failure to the conditions of poverty and disenfranchisement
that, in the post-war recovery period, have intensified competition, and
interpersonal conflict and violence among poor families, and particularly
among poor Shona women who increasingly resort to sex work. Where traditional
healers have failed to resolve the social problems that are perceived to
lay at the root of physical suffering, the evangelical churches have filled
the void, promising protection from avenging spirits blamed for both social
and physical disorders. His essay poses compelling challenges to both the
idea that modernization would witness a decline in institutions of witchcraft
and sorcery, a topic of great interest to Africanists today, and the idea
that evangelical movements should be seen as globally uniform or monolithic
in any sense of the term. The essay also offers compelling methodological
insights about how to parse the complex imbrications of the effects of global
economies, traditional belief systems and healing resources in ways that
refuse both political economic reductionisms and simplistic ethnographic
particularities. James is well-deserving of this very prestigious Polgar
Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology.
Congratulations James.
Once again encourage everyone to remember to have students submit and anyone
interested in serving on the selection committees please contact me.