The absolute deadline for receipt of the required materials is May 1, 2013.

2013 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing

JUDGES: Ruth Elizabeth Toulson, Angela Garcia, and Ather Zia

The Society for Humanistic Anthropology (SHA) announces the 23rd annual juried competition for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. The late Victor Turner devoted his career to seeking a language that would reopen anthropology to the human subject, and the prize will be given in recognition of an innovative book that furthers this project. Eligible genres include ethnographic monographs, narratives, historical accounts, biographies, memoirs, dramas, or single-authored collections of essays, short stories or poems. A $500 first-place, a $300.00 second place and $ 200.00 third-place prizes, for books published between April 2011 and April 2013, will be awarded at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago in November 2013.

Books may be entered into the competition by authors, book editors, or colleagues. No formal letter of nomination is needed. Books published in 2011 – 2012 and entered in last year’s competition may be resubmitted this year with the appropriate entry fee.   Submission fee: For authors who are already SHA members, the entry fee is $25/book. For authors who are not SHA members, the entry fee is $75/book.

1.  Send three (3) copies of each book separately addressed to: Victor Turner Prize, c/o Ruth Elizabeth Toulson, Department of Anthropology, Dept. 3431, 100 University Avenue, Laramie, Wy 82071- 2000; Victor Turner Prize, c/o Angela Garcia, 1737 Willington Ct., Oakland, Ca 94602; Victor Turner Prize, c/o Ather Zia, 7201 Palo Verde Road. Irvine, Ca 92617.

2.  Send the submission fee of $25 for current SHA members and $75 for non-members along with the completed Submission Fee Form to:

Suzanne Mattingly, Controller
American Anthropological Association
2200 Wilson Blvd – Suite 600
Arlington, VA  22201
phone: 703.528.1902, ext 1160,  fax: 703.528.3546
smattingly@aaanet.org

(Publishers: for all books you submit, please check with the author first to discover whether s/he is a current SHA member)

3.  All who enter the contest must include a cover letter with four items of required information:

• (a) book title, publication year, and publisher,
• (b) the author’s contact information including the mailing address, all telephone numbers and e-mail address;
• (c) the author’s biographical sketch (1-2 paragraphs) including highest degree awarded, in which discipline, and from which institution; and
• (d) current affiliation (university or otherwise).

Entrants may also include an optional short statement about intellectual training/ orientation, and the circumstances surrounding the research/ writing of the book. Biographical information will be used for presenting the winners and publicizing the results of the competition and will not be used for judging the quality of the entries.  Please send the cover letter and accompanying statements and biological information to Victor Turner Prize, c/o Billie Jean Isbell (bji1@cornell.edu) Department of Anthropology, McGraw Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. 14853

2013 Ethnographic Fiction Competition

JUDGES: Jessica Falcone, Rachel Newcomb and Cynthia Mahood

The Society for Humanistic Anthropology announces our annual fiction competition to encourage anthropologists to use alternative literary genres to explore anthropological concerns associated with the four fields of anthropology. Stories should not exceed 20 pages typed double-spaced. There is a limit of one story for each submission.

Please submit three hard (printed) copies per entry without the author’s name to SHA Ethnographic Fiction Prize, c/o Dr. Jessica Marie Falcone, 204 Waters Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506, by May 1, 2013. There is no entry fee for this competition.

Winning entries and honorable mentions will be recognized at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago in November 2013. The winning story will be published in the Society’s journal, Anthropology and Humanism. The winner(s) will receive a certificate and award of $100.

2013 SHA Ethnographic Poetry Competition

JUDGES: Renato Rosaldo, Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, and Kate Harding

The Society for Humanistic Anthropology announces our annual poetry competition as a means to encourage scholars to use alternative literary genres to explore anthropological concerns. These concerns may be any of those associated with the fields of anthropology: archaeological, biological, linguistic, sociocultural and applied.

The first-place winner will receive a certificate and award of $100, the second-place winner will receive $75, and the third-place winner will receive $ 50.00. All entries will be considered for publication in the journal.

Winning entries and honorable mentions will be recognized at the SHA Awards Ceremony at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in fall 2013, and will be published in the Society’s journal, Anthropology and Humanism.

Send poems postmarked no later than August 1, 2013 to Renato Rosaldo, SHA Poetry, Department of Anthropology NYU
25 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10003

2013 AAA ANNUAL MEETING:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

The Society for Humanistic Anthropology welcomes paper and poster session proposals for consideration at this year’s Annual Meeting in Chicago (November 20-24, 2013). The theme for the meeting is “Future Publics, Current Engagements,” which provides a rich context for exploring the innovative and exciting work conducted under the broad rubric of humanistic anthropology.

The 2013 Programming Committee consists of Kristen Ghodsee (kghodsee@bowdoin.edu) and Jonathan S. Marion (jsmarion@gmail.com)

Both Kristen and Jonathan are more than happy to work with you on your paper, poster, or roundtable sessions – please be in touch early, and as often as necessary, with us! We’re happy to assist session organizers with the structuring of their proposals. SHA encourages innovative formats, including poster sessions and fostering more dynamic discussion periods.

Paper/Poster/Roundtable Sessions – submit through the AAA website

SHA Section Invited Session Proposals – due March 15, 2013 online

All Invited Session Proposals (paper, poster, or roundtable sessions) must include a session abstract of up to 500 words and information for all participants (including individual abstracts). Submission will be through the AAA website. We highly encourage anyone planning to submit an invited session proposal to contact Kristen ASAP, ideally by March 1. Decisions will be announced in early April.

SHA Sponsored Session Proposals – due April 15, 2012 online

All sponsored session proposals must be submitted online by April 15, 2012. This includes all paper and poster sessions, roundtable proposals, and individual paper/poster submissions. Submissions must include a 250-word abstract as well as individual abstracts for each participant (as necessary). Participants must abide by the AAA rules regarding roles, registration, and fees.

AAA website (for full meeting details): www.aaanet.org

SHA website: http://www.aaanet.org/sections/sha/

SHA is proud to announce the winners of the 2012 Ethnographic Fiction, Ethnographic Poetry, and Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing competitions who were honored at the SHA awards ceremony at the 111th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco.

Ethnographic Fiction Prizes

The readers for the 2012 Ethnographic Fiction competition are Jessica Falcone, Kristen Ghodsee and Ruth Behar and they voted to award first prize to Thararat Chareonsonthichai (Australian National University) for “The Fragrance of the Classical Past,” and Honorable Mention to Cynthia Keppley-Mahmood (Notre Dame) for “How Jesse Became a Revolutionary.”

Ethnographic Poetry Prizes

The readers for the 2012 Ethnographic Poetry competition are Renato Rosaldo, Melisa Cahmann-Taylor and Lorraine Healy and they voted to award first prize to Irina Carlota Silber (CUNY) for “Nanita,” second prize to Kuo Zhang (Georgia) for “One Child Policy,” third prize to Jonathan Glasser (William and Mary) for “Enemy Territory,” and Honorable Mention to Elena Harap (Independent Scholar) for “Sanctuary/Home.”

The Victor Turner Prize

The readers for the 2012 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing are Misty Bastian, Kevin O’Neill, Neni Panourgía, and John Watanabe and they awarded first-place to Angela Garcia (Stanford) for her book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande (California 2010), second place to Mark Auslander (Central Washington University) for his book, The Accidental Slaveowner. Revisiting the Myth of Race and Finding an American Family (Georgia Press 2011), and third place to Daniel R. Reichman (University of Rochester) for his book, The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras (Cornell 2011).

Citation for Angela Garcia’s The Pastoral Clinic.

Less than a year before his last, Victor Turner published an article with Edith Turner on performing ethnography in The Drama Review (volume 26, no. 2 [Summer 1982]). It was a meditation on method. They recounted how they would prompt their students to perform different rites of passage, to step into liminal spaces. They acted out weddings. They acted out funerals. They wanted their students to feel “how people in other cultures experience the richness of their social existence, what the moral pressures are upon them, what kinds of pleasures they expect to receive as a reward for following certain patterns of action, and how they express joy, grief, deference, and affection, in accordance with cultural expectations.” This was not play-acting. This was not just fun. It was a reflexive exploration of ethnography. They asked, what does it mean to feel a story?

If posed this question today, by Victor or Edith Turner, or by anyone for that matter, I would not orchestrate a ritual—although that would not be a bad idea. Rather I would pick up Angela Garcia’s The Pastoral Clinic, turn to page one, and begin reading out loud. What does it mean to feel a story? “The clinic is a house,” Angela begins her book.  “Small, brown, made of straw bale and mud plaster.” The Pastoral Clinic is an ethnography of heroin addiction and fatal overdoses in northern New Mexico’s Española Valley. Heroin problems, Angela argues, are a contemporary expression of material and cultural dispossession, which makes her book a portrait of addiction and of place. But maybe most of all, at least for this competition, in light of Victor and Edith Turner, The Pastoral Clinic is also a statement about ethnography. Angela writes, with possibly unintentional echoes of Turner, “I understood my task as an anthropologist to conjure up the social life that produced these signs, to give it flesh and depth. Indeed, that is why I went to New Mexico to study heroin—to try to give purpose and meaning to an aspect of American life that had become dangerously ordinary, even cliché” (p. 6). The Pastoral Clinic shuttles between joy and grief; it is an ethnographic meditation that foregrounds, to quote Turner yet again, “the kinds of pleasures [that people] expect to receive as a reward for following certain patterns of action.”  It is for this reason, and for many more, that The Pastoral Clinic emerged from a stack of successful ethnographies. The book feels a story, which makes it a true accomplishment. Many, many congratulations.

Kevin Lewis O’Neill
University of Toronto

Citation for Mark Auslander’s The Accidental Slaveowner

In 1844, a national controversy erupted in the strongly abolitionist Methodist Church over the censure of Bishop James Osgood Andrew of Oxford, Georgia for owning slaves. The censure precipitated a schism between northern and southern Methodists, black and white congregants, that would last a century. The first president of the board of trustees of Emory College, precursor of Emory University, Bishop Andrew claimed he had inherited a slave named Catherine Boyd—known locally as “Kitty” to whites, “Miss Kitty” to African Americans—who, upon reaching her majority, had refused manumission and transport back to Africa to remain in his household. For many white southerners then and now, the story of Bishop Andrew and Miss Kitty captures both abolitionist intolerance and northern misunderstanding of the lifelong attachments, if not love, that often united owners and domestic slaves, many of whom grew up together. For African Americans, Miss Kitty’s story epitomizes the intimate injuries and iniquities of dehumanizing property rights and relations crosscut by the all too often unspoken bonds of kinship between black and white families during and long after slavery. Bishop Andrew, the “accidental slaveowner” in the title of Mark Auslander’s fine book, thus becomes occasion for this exemplary ethnography of race relations past and present in the United States.

Most concretely, as all ethnographies should, this book opens to us the unexpected world of domestic relations between masters and slaves in antebellum Georgia and what happened to those relations after emancipation—a world all the more unexpected because it lies so close to home, especially in the association of so many universities north and south with slaves or the slave trade. More broadly, the book traverses the fraught ground that all ethnographies must between what people believe to be true about themselves and what we as ethnographers may discover about them from others. In this, Auslander never presumes to render the myth of Miss Kitty and Bishop Andrew into his own or others’ history, but rather, he wisely and painstakingly shows us how for whites their various myths came to be, and how for African Americans, including Miss Kitty’s desendants, the history got lost, the myth forgotten or remembered otherwise. Most importantly, Auslander writes in the face of all ethnographers’ greatest fear that the people we write about will actually read what we write and find it incomprehensible, irrelevant, insulting, wrong, or simply banal. In knowing full well that those about whom he writes will read his book, Auslander writes with modest conviction yet quiet courage that giving voice to hidden, half-remembered or long forgotten pasts is essential to “saying something now” in the present to help reopen dialogues across difference too long stifled or stigmatized by power, anger, fear, and shame. There are larger lessons we can all learn from this book about what writing anthropology could—and should—be. We are pleased to recognize Mark Auslander for his signal achievement, and above all, for his deep concern, abiding commitment, and always human voice.

John M. Watanabe
Dartmouth College

Citation for Daniel R. Reichman’s The Broken Village

La Quebrada, the pseudonymous “broken place” in Daniel Reichman’s compelling book, evokes a telling series of breaks. Historically, a boom then bust in international migration to the United States prises open this small coffee growing town in central Honduras, itself the result of earlier internal migration to its forests and coffee lands that globalization has already, ominously, serially commodified. Socially, La Quebrada fractures along growing moral, not just political, economic, or religious, divides precipitated by unseen others in faraway places. And anthropologically, globally interconnected ruralities like La Quebrada decisively challenge ethnography to break with any vestige of past romances—or even tragedies—of solitary communities local, global, or otherwise. At the heart of all these breaks lies the double bind of all modern, and now postmodern, human experience infused with the disembodied, contagious magic of market competition, not only in the Marxian sense of commodification and alienation, but also experientially in having to habituate, often unwittingly, to ever wider and ultimately unfathomed webs of appeal and obligation that distance and disguise us from our interdependencies: whether in rural Honduras or New York coffee houses, Reichman finds in Foucauldian-like fashion that the more we mind our respective runaway worlds, the more we privatize—that is, personalize and internalize—the perceived causes and consequences of our disquiet in terms of individual moral worth or monetary value that only further distracts us from the systemic imperatives that bind us.

So, more than beleaguered Central American villagers, Reichman shows us would-be migrants from La Quebrada caught between the dissatisfactions of providing (or not) for their families and leaving them for distant perils yet possibilities; between risking all only to fail—foolishly in the eyes of sanctimonious neighbors—or to return successfully but never again feel quite at home at home. He shows us evangelicals in La Quebrada who grapple personally with their sinfulness to assure salvation but disattend to the inbuilt inequalities in their lives. He shows us coffee growers who rationalize volatile markets as just another cost of doing business but who themselves must migrate during downturns if they want to recapitalize their smallholdings for when the market returns. And finally, even closer to home, he shows us how supporters of fair trade coffee aspire through their individual consumer choices to make the world a better place percisely because they can afford to (and not coincidentally, display their taste while gratifying it), but in fact the markups from buying fair trade go mostly to the largest coffee marketers, not to small growers in Central America.

In this multifaceted way, The Broken Village becomes a meditation on the perils of thinking and acting in overly individual, private ways in an increasingly upscaled world; but confounded by so many already inescapably entangled places, how can we do otherwise without impossibly changing that world? In finding in the most particular of circumstances this most general dilemma of globalization, Daniel Reichman’s book exemplifies the ethnographer’s craft at its best because he understands that realizing what we all have most in common constitutes the first step of mutual recognition in seeking necessarily diverse solutions across our abiding differences. For this important, deeply humanistic insight that shows why ethnography still matters, Daniel Reichman deserves our keenest recognition and warmest congratulations.

John M. Watanabe
Dartmouth College

SHA Awards Ceremony is Friday evening 8-9:15 pm.  Learn who won the Turner, Ethnographic Writing and Poetry prizes for 2012 (4-1185)

SHA Invited Sessions
Thursday
8-9:45 am  “Literary Ethnography: Anthropology that Breaks Borders and Breaks Your Heart,” Elizabeth L. Krause, Melisa (Misha) S. Sahnmann-Taylor organizers (3-0010)

Friday
8-11:45 am  “The Ethnographer’s Craft: Works Inspired by Ruth Behar I,” Vanessa J. Díaz Erica Lehrer, Ellen E. Moodie, Ruth Behar and Renato Rosaldo organizers (4-0165)

SHA Sponsored Sessions
Wednesday
2-5:45 pm  “Sensing the Political: Materiality, Aesthetics, and Embodiment,” Frances E. Mascia-Lees, M. Nell Quest, Yael Navaro-Yashin, and Alex Hilton
organizers (2-0475)

4-5:45 pm  “Ethnography of Imaginary Cultures: Storied Innovations,” Roger Ivar Lohmann, and Rena Lederman organizers (2-0580)

4-5:45 pm  “Crossing Borders with Miles Richardson: Teacher, Scholar Poet, Provocateur,” Helen A. Regis, Matt Samson, and James Peacock organizers (2-0590)

Thursday
10:15-12:00 pm  “Aesthetics and Advocacy” (3-0435)

10:15-12:00 pm  “The Restless Anthropologist: Crossing Borders to New Fieldsites,” Virginia R. Dominguez, Alma Gottlieb, and Paul Stoler organizers (3-0300)

1:45-3:30 pm  “Species of Non-Said: Linguistic and Other Tricks to Live, Feel and Know the Ineffable,” Bernard Bate, Marko Aivkovic, and James W. Fernandez organizers (3-0700)

SHA Special Events
Thursday
8-9:15 pm  “A Conversation with Writer, Rebecca Solnit, and Anthropologists Brian Palmer, Yana Stainova and Andrew Buckser,” hosted by Billie Jean Isbell (3-1125)

Friday
6:15-7:30 pm  “Secret Conspiracy of Hope: A Multimedia Show” with Brian Palmer, and Billie Jean Isbell (4-1025)

SHA Workshops
Thursday
9-11:OO am  “Getting an Article Published in a Peer-Reviewed Journal” with Michael Harkin and Geroge Fitspatrick Mentore (3-0245) registration required

Friday
3-5:00 pm  “SHA Poerty Workshop” with Renato I. Rosaldo (4-0845) registration required

Saturday
1-3:00 pm  “Writing Ethnography” with Alma Gottlieb and Phillip Graham (5-0630) registration required

3-5:00 pm  “Crafting Narrative Ethnography” with Julia Offen (5-0905) (registration required)

SHA Round Tables
Wednesday
12-1:45 pm  “Music, Art, Narrative and Fiction” with Sadiah Nynke Boonstra (2-0215)

SHA Writer’s Group
Thursday
8-9:15 pm  James M. Taggart and Renato I. Rosaldo (3-1120)

2012 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing

JUDGES: Misty Bastian, Kevin Oneill, Neni Panourgiá, and John Watanabe

The Society for Humanistic Anthropology (SHA) announces the 22nd annual juried competition for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. The late Victor Turner devoted his career to seeking a language that would reopen anthropology to the human subject, and the prize will be given in recognition of an innovative book that furthers this project. Eligible genres include ethnographic monographs, narratives, historical accounts, biographies, memoirs, dramas, or single-authored collections of essays, short stories or poems. A $500 first-place, a $300 second place and $200 third-place prizes, for books published between April 2010 and April 2012, will be awarded at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco in November 2012.

Books may be entered into the competition by authors, book editors, or colleagues. No formal letter of nomination is needed. Books published in 2010 or 2012 and entered in last year’s competition may be resubmitted this year with the appropriate entry fee. Submission fee: For authors who are already SHA members, the entry fee is $25/book. For authors who are not SHA members, the entry fee is $75/book.

1. Send one copy of each book for a total of four copies separately addressed to: Victor Turner Prize, c/o Misty Bastian, Department of Anthropology, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA 17604-3003; Victor Turner Prize, c/o Kevin Oneill, Department for the Study of Religion, Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street, floor 3, Toronto, Ontario M5r 2M8 Canada; Victor Turner Prize, c/o Neni Panourgiá, ICLS, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027; Victor Turner Prize, c/o John M. Watanabe, Department of Anthropology, 6047 Silsby Hall, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755.

2. Send the submission fee of $25 for current SHA members and $75 for non-members, along with the completed Submission Fee Form to:

Suzanne Mattingly, Controller
American Anthropological Association
2200 Wilson Blvd – Suite 600
Arlington, VA 22201

703.528.1902, ext 1160 – fax: 703.528.3546

smattingly@aaanet.org

3. All who enter the contest must include a cover letter with four items of required information: (a) the book title and the publisher; (b) the author’s contact information including the mailing address, all telephone numbers and e-mail address; (c) the author’s biographical sketch (1-2 paragraphs) including the required highest degree awarded, in which discipline, and from which institution; (d) current affiliation (university or otherwise). Entrants may also include an optional short statement about intellectual training/orientation, and the circumstances surrounding the research/writing of the book. Biographical information will be used for presenting the winners and publicizing the results of the competition and will not be used for judging the quality of the entries. Please send the cover letter and accompanying statements and biological information to Victor Turner Prize, c/o James M. Taggart (jim.taggart@fandm.edu), Department of Anthropology, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA 17604-3003

The deadline for submitting the required materials is May 1, 2012.

2012 Ethnographic Fiction Competition

JUDGES: Jessica Falcone, Kristen Ghodsee and Ruth Behar

The Society for Humanistic Anthropology announces our annual fiction competition to encourage anthropologists to use alternative literary genres to explore anthropological concerns associated with the four fields of anthropology. Stories should not exceed 20 pages typed double-spaced. There is a limit of one story for each submission.

Please submit three hard (printed) copies per entry without the author’s name to SHA Ethnographic Fiction Prize, c/o Dr. Jessica Marie Falcone, 204 Waters Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506, by May 1, 2012. There is no entry fee for this competition.

Winning entries and honorable mentions will be recognized at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco in November 2012. The winning story will be published in the Society’s journal, Anthropology and Humanism. The winner(s) will receive a certificate and award of $100.

2012 SHA Ethnographic Poetry Competition

JUDGES: Renato Rosaldo, Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Lorraine Healy

The Society for Humanistic Anthropology announces our annual poetry
competition as a means to encourage scholars to use alternative literary genres to
explore anthropological concerns. These concerns may be any of those associated
with the fields of anthropology: Archaeological, Biological, Linguistic,
Sociocultural and Applied.

The first-place winner will receive
a certificate and award of $100, the second-place winner will receive $ 75, and the third-place winner will receive $ 50.00. All entries will be considered for publication in the journal.

Winning entries and honorable mentions will be recognized at the SHA Awards Ceremony at the annual meeting
of the American Anthropological Association in Fall 2012, and will be published
in the Society’s journal, Anthropology and Humanism.

Send poems postmarked no later than August 1, 2012 to:

Renato Rosaldo,Times, SHA Poetry
Department of Anthropology
NYU
25 Waverly Place
New York, NY 10003

Electronic or faxed submissions will not be accepted except by request from ethnographic poets working outside the U.S. and Canada.

Members of the American Anthropological Association do not have to submit an entry fee. Others must submit a check for $ 10 accompanied by the Submission Fee form to:

Suzanne Mattingly, Controller
American Anthropological Association
2200 Wilson Blvd – Suite 600
Arlington, VA 22201

703.528.1902, ext 1160 – fax: 703.528.3546

smattingly@aaanet.org

Please submit proposals for SHA invited sessions, special events, round tables and innovents for the 2012 AAA meeting in San Francisco in November to Prof. Billie Jean Isbell (bji1@cornell.edu), the SHA Program Chair and President-Elect, by the deadline of March 1st. We especially encourage co-sponsorship with another section as well as innovative round tables.

Turner Prize winners

The Turner Prize committee, composed of Regna Darnell, Tracey Heatherington, and Misty Bastian, awarded first prize to Neni Panourgiá for her Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State (Fordham). Second prize went to Amira Mittermaier for Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (California). The committee decided to award a special prize for an Oral History and Collaborate Ethnography and they selected Shirleen Smith and the Gwich’in First Nation’s People of the Lakes: Stories of Our Van Tat Gwich’in Elders/Googwandak Nakhwach’ànjòo Van Tat Gwich’in (Alberta).

Ethnographic Fiction winner

The committee of Jessica Falcone and Kirin Narayan awarded the Ethnographic Fiction prize to Kristen Ghodsee for her short story, “Tito Trivia.”

Ethnographic Poetry winners

The committee of Misha Cahmann-Taylor, Lorraine Healy and Renato Rosaldo awarded ethnographic poetry prizes of first place to Carolyn Moore for “Translator’s Notes on the Island of Unst’s Norn Fragment, Forkortning Saga,” second place to Susan Settlemyre Williams for “KV55: Its Voices,” third place to W. F. Lantry for “Yungas Valley,” and honorable mention to Worth Summers for “Coyote, Clacier Point Winter” and Christine Eber for “Do You Want Me To Cut More Vegetables, Boss ?”

Introductions

Regna Darnell’s introduction for Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State (Fordham) by Neni Panourgiá.

Neni Panourgiá’s wonderful, complex ethnography takes seriously the multiplicity of positions within any historical context.  She is player in her own story although we learn more about stories she has heard from family and neighbours than about her personal biography.  The history of Greece from pre-World War II dictatorship to German invasion to civil war and renewed dictatorship can be and usually is told from a god’s eye view.  But this book tells the microhistory of how events and people’s reactions to them shattered the civility and openness of a society as state sponsored terror defined some citizens as outside the pale of righteous society.  The tumultuousness of living with violence emerges in both directions from conventional history – the microhistory of narrative and the metahistory of interpretation.  Exiles and prisoners were ordinary people powerless to predict what might bring state attention and its attendant violence.  Danger lurked in the eye of the beholder and separated citizens from one another.

The format and genre effectively highlight the contingency of history:  the text in the usual sense tells the history as most would agree that events occurred.  But the retrospective certainties of this narrative are disrupted by the shadow text in the margins, with longer excursions from the centre gathered as endnote essays, producing a layered reading experience that can be sampled in multiple non-consecutive and overlapping ways.  We are left to contemplate “an oblique theory of anthropological knowledge” (p. 179).  The text names the elephant in the room, the hubris that allows a reading out from humanity of whole categories of person and that underlies so much of recent Western history.
Tracey Heatherington’s introduction for Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (California) by Amira Mittermaier.

I am very honoured to present the second prize for the Turner Prize in ethnographic writing. The book that takes this award is a monograph that impressed the committee for its originality, its vivacious theoretical and interpersonal engagements, its genuinely reflexive voice, and its superb ethnographic rendering. You know you have found a really important work of ethnography when it draws you into an account of someplace utterly unrelated to your own research, when despite encroaching fatigue, despite the tasks waiting and the distractions beckoning, the author poses a question that compels you to keep reading. This is what happened when Amira Mittermaier introduced me to her Cairo and challenged me to perceive how the world might look if the mundane and anxious business of daily life were truly affected by our nightly business of dreaming.  In her beautiful ethnography, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination, Mittermaier sketches out for us the sociopolitical disruptions and possibilities made real through the sharing and interpretation of dreams in several facets of contemporary Islamic tradition. Challenging the just-so stories of Freudian and Jungian paradigms, Mittermaier shows us why anthropology should take dream culture seriously, and why the anthropology of dreaming should matter to a much broader field of serious scholarship.  I’m pleased to award the second prize for the Turner competition to Amira Mittermaier from the University of Toronto, for her book, Dreams that Matter.
Regna Darnell’s introduction for People of the Lakes: Stories of Our Van Tat Gwich’in Elders/Googwandak Nakhwach’ànjòo Van Tat Gwich’in (Alberta) by Shirleen Smith and the Gwich’in First Nation.

This extraordinary award recognizes the humanistic achievement of the Vuntut Gwitchin oral history project.  The category of collaborative research and oral history encapsulates SHA’s commitment to the ethnography part of ethnographic writing as the sine qua non disciplinary credibility.  The community’s anthropologist, Shirleen Smith, is less visible on the surface than most anthropologists as authors.  I first came to know Old Crow, Yukon Territory, through reading the Edmonton Sun columns of Edith Josie reprinted from the Whitehorse Star.  Old Crow has also been mightily visible in the world outside its boundaries through its stewardship of the porcupine caribou herd and now shares its traditional knowledge of land and community through this elegant volume of texts and photos – with well-deserved kudos to the University of Alberta Press.  Organization of the text by generation reflects the real-world mode of transmission of knowledge, a longitudinal perspective that animates the dynamism of oral tradition by linking generations through experience-based narratives of known and named persons.  “Long-ago Stories” come from the generations no longer remembered by name; the first generation of elders were first interviewed in the 1980s and speak about 19th century rapid changes.  The second generation of elders, many still active, were the last to live fully on the land.  Young people from the community are now creating an archive around the words of generations of elders.  The result is a pedagogical resource for the community and for outsiders seeking to understand the continuity of traditional ways in northern communities despite extensive consequences of recent culture change.

Please celebrate with us good writing and good ethnography in the best humanistic tradition by attending the SHA Awards Ceremony at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal on Friday November 18, 2011, from 19:45-21:00 (Session 4-1370). We shall present the winners of the 2011 Victor Turner Prize and the Ethnographic Fiction and Poetry prizes, who will read excerpts from their work. We warmly invite you to read from your own work during the open mike portion of the ceremony.

Also at the AAA meetings in Montreal are six SHA workshops, two SHA invited session, and eleven sponsored sessions.

SIX WORKSHOPS

Wednesday November 16;

“Writing Ethnography: Experimenting on Paper, Experimenting Online” (Sophia Balakian, Alma Gottlieb and Kirin Narayan) from 12 to 1:45 (Session 2-0115)

Thursday November 17

“Writing Articles for Publication” (George Fitzpatrick Mentore and Justin R. Shaffner) from 8 to 10:00 AM (Session 3-0205)

“How to Turn Your Dissertation into a Book (James M. Taggart and Alma Gottlieb) from 1 to 3:00 Pm (session 3-0620)

Saturday November 18

“On Writing Poetry” (Renato Rosaldo) from 1 to 3:00 PM, (Session 5-0545)

“Writing Fiction and Non-Fiction” (Billie Jean Isbell and Catherine J. Allen) from 3:30-5:30 (session 5-0855)

“A Writer’s Group Workshop (Renato Rosaldo) from 3:30 to 5:30 (Session 5-0860)

TWO SHA INVITED SESSIONS

Thursday November 17

“Understanding Narratives of Horror: Anthropological and Inter and Post-Disciplinary Perspectives (Nellie Hogikyan, Sima Aprahamian, Michiko Aramaki) from 10:15 to 12:00 (Session 3-0440)

Friday November 18

“Crafting Value/Valuing Craft” (Alicia A DeNicola, Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber, Frances E. Mascia-Lees) from 10:15 to 12:00 (Session 4-0450).

ELEVEN SHA SPONSORED SESSIONS

Wednesday November 16

“Writing Ethnography: Experimenting on Paper, Experimenting Online” (Sophia Balakian, Alma Gottlieb, and Kirin Narayan) from 12 to 1:45 (Session 2-0115)

Thursday November 17

“Long Term Fieldwork: A Celebration and a Critique” (Alan R. Sandstrom, James M. Taggart, Catharine L. Good, Pamela E. Sandstrom, Heidi Kelley, Kenneth A. Betsalel, Fran Markowitz, and David L. Robichaux) from 8 to 9:45 AM (Session 3-0130)

“Mutuality: Anthropology’s Changing Terms of Engagement” (Ann Fienup-Riordan and Roger Sanjek) from 8-11:45 AM (Session 3-0260)

“‘The Stubborn Particulars of Voice’: Papers in Honour of Julie Cruikshank” (Nancy Wachowich, Leslie A. Robertson, and Julie M. Cruikshank) from 1:45 to 5:30 (Session 3-0845)

Friday November 18

“Novel Approaches to Anthropology: Using 19th Century Literature as Our 21st Century Informants” (David S. Surrey, Ray McDermott, and Fadia Joseph) from 8-9:45 (Session 4-0135)

“Narratives of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora” (Dorothy Abram) from 10:15-12:00 (Session 4-0455)

“Literary Ethnography” (Renato I. Rosaldo, Melissa Cahnmann-Taylor, Kim I. Gutschow, Adrie Kusserow, Kirin Narayan, Dana Walrath, Ruth Behar and Naomi S. Stone) from 12:15-1:30 (Session 4-0630),

“Unsettling the Past: Historical Documents in Ethnographers’ Hands” (Alisse Waterston, Maria D. Vesperi, Sally Engle Merry and Lee D. Baker) from 4-5:45 PM (Session 4-0080)

Saturday November 19

“Narratives of Transformations: The Ethnography of Sex Beyond the Legacy of Foucault” (Billie Jean Isbell, Joseph R. Hawkins, Brenda Maiale, and Richard J. Martin, Jr.) from 8-9:45 AM (Session 5-0090)

“Ethnographies of Empathy” (Brian Palmer and Yana Stainova) from 1:45-3:30 (Session 5-0660)

Sunday November 20

“Traces of the Ethnographers in the Ethnography: Reflexivity, Connectivity and Relevance (Eve Danziger, Claire N. Snell-Rood, SherriLynn Colby-Bottel, Pauline Turner Strong, and Pensri Ho) from 12:15-2:00 (Session 6-0525).

Books may be entered into the competition by authors, book editors, or colleagues. No formal letter of nomination is needed. Books published in 2009 or 2010 and entered in last year’s competition may be resubmitted this year with the appropriate entry fee. Submission fee: For authors who are already SHA members, the entry fee is $25/book. For authors who are not SHA members, the entry fee is $75/book.

1. Send one copy of each book for a total of three copies separately addressed to: Victor Turner Prize, c/oTracey Heatherington, Cornell University, Society for the Humanities, A.D. White House, 27 East Avenue, Ithaca, NY 14853-1101; Victor Turner Prize, c/o Misty Bastian, Department of Anthropology, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA 17604-3003; Victor Turner Prize, c/o Regna Darnell, Department of Anthropology, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, N6A 5C2 Canada.

2. Submit the submission fee of $25 for current SHA members and $75 for nonmembers, with a check made out to the Society for Humanistic Anthropology (Publishers: for all books you submit, please check with the author first to discover whether s/he is a current SHA member) with a cover letter addressed to Victor Turner Prize, c/o James M. Taggart (jim.taggart@fandm.edu), Department of Anthropology, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA 17604-3003.

3. Include, in the cover letter accompanying the fee, four items of required information: (a) the book title and the publisher; (b) the author’s contact information including the mailing address, all telephone numbers and e-mail address; (c) the author’s biographical sketch (1-2 paragraphs) including the required highest degree awarded, in which discipline, and from which institution; (d) current affiliation (university or otherwise). Entrants may also include an optional short statement about intellectual training/orientation, and the circumstances surrounding the research/writing of the book. Biographical information will be used for presenting the winners and publicizing the results of the competition and will not be used for judging the quality of the entries.

The absolute deadline for submitting the required materials is May 1, 2011.

Three hard (printed) copies per entry should be submitted to SHA Ethnographic Fiction Prize, c/o Dr. Jessica Marie Falcone, 204 Waters Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506, by August 1, 2011. There is no entry free for this competition.

Winning entries and honorable mentions will be recognized at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal, CA, in November 2011. The winning story will be published in the Society’s journal, Anthropology and Humanism. The winner(s) will receive a certificate and award of $100.