2018 Award Winners

Browne Honored with Boas Award for Exemplary Service

Katherine E. Browne’s academic research and engaged anthropology have energized the fields of economic anthropology, disaster studies, and visual ethnography. She is currently a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Colorado State University.

In her first book, Creole Economics: Caribbean Cunning under the French Flag (2004), Browne investigated the informal economy among Afro-Creole people in Martinique. Continuing her interest in the relationship between community and economic values, Browne shifted her research focus to New Orleans to address the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast. Her NSF-funded documentary film on this work, Still Waiting: Life after Katrina, was broadcast on more than 300 PBS stations and was followed by her 2015 monograph, Standing in the Need: Culture, Comfort and Coming Home After Katrina. Subsequently, Browne presented a co-authored document to a House committee considering senior appointments to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Browne’s research and engaged anthropology extend to the classroom. She has earned Colorado State University’s two most prestigious teaching awards and is widely praised by her students.

As president of the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA), Browne led others in reimagining the association. By joining the SEA with the AAA as a new section—and recreating the SEA’s online visual and publication presence—Browne built new audiences for the field.

With tireless compassion, Browne has pursued a rigorous anthropological understanding of the lives people make under vulnerable circumstances. She is a powerful model for what can happen when imagination and commitment inform the heart of anthropology.

Jennifer Mack Honored with SfAA/AAA Margaret Mead Award

Jennifer Mack’s The Construction of Equality (2017) is an innovative foray into urban design, architecture, and anthropology, combining meticulous archival research of nation-state building and modernization in Sweden and rich ethnography of the daily life of Syriac immigrants living in Södertälje on the periphery of Stockholm. Mack illustrates how design aesthetics and urban planning principles, housing size and style imagine an ethnically homogeneous “equality” framed by Swedish “values.” These are in sharp contrast to the styles and communities of the assyrier and syrianer, enacted through cultural associations and football clubs, Syriac Orthodox and other Christian churches, theatre, and the architecture of the homes of those who have realized economic success and of those who have not. In a compelling and beautifully written account, Mack weaves together cultural intimacy, migrant enclaves, and city planning, and in doing so she demonstrates how ordinary acts and everyday life resignify space and belonging.

At a moment when ideals of multiculturalism and diversity are rapidly being replaced in Europe and elsewhere by nationalist policies, state techniques of exclusion, and border security, Mack’s monograph is timely. Her account of urban planning, its execution through the settling of Syrians within a Swedish city, and its materialization of debates over migration, belonging, and identity, would have made Margaret Mead proud.

The Margaret Mead Award is awarded jointly by the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association.

AAA/Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology Recipient

Laura Tubelle de González has been teaching anthropology for 19 years in San Diego, California, mostly at San Diego Miramar College. Through her cultural and biological anthropology courses, she’s learned that talking less and doing more in the classroom engages students in ways that makes anthropology relevant to their lived experience. Her emphasis is on inclusion, authenticity, and transformative learning. She loves a classroom filled with talking and laughter

González has an expansive whole-student focus, which compels her to advocate for students in other areas that support their retention and success. This has included building an organic garden (2010), helping create a campus food pantry (2012), initiating and running Safe Zones training workshops (2015), and starting the first campus LGBTQ+ cross-campus alliance (2017).

González seeks out fieldwork and travel opportunities when she can, especially for the enrichment of her classroom. In 2013, she took a sabbatical in Mumbai, India, to study modern, urban, arranged marriage, which translated into educational materials and an ethnographic-based card game for the classroom. In 2017, she spent three days trekking with the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, and uses her images and videos in class to illustrate primate behaviors.

Knowing that engagement in the field makes a more informed teacher, González served as president of the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges from 2011 to 2012 and counts many members among her mentors. She is co-author, with Bob Muckle, of the four-field textbook Through The Lens of Anthropology (2016) and serves on the editorial board of Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, the first peer-reviewed, open access cultural anthropology textbook.

Gina Athena Ulysse Wins Anthropology in Media Award

This year, we honor Gina Athena Ulysse, who identifies as artist-anthropologist-activist, for her powerful and effective work communicating anthropological insights to a broad general public. Through her anthropological writings, blogs, talks, and her widely shared performance pieces, Ulysse has worked to expand her reach, presence, and impact to connect with as many people as possible, both within and beyond anthropology, academia, and the United States. She presents a breathtaking list of spoken word performances across the country and the world each year, including a recent commission for the British Museum. In addition, her passionate analyses of a range of global injustices spark lively public discussion on the platforms on which she publishes (regularly for Huffington Post, Ms., Tikkun, and occasionally for a number of other outlets). Ulysse’s work is also widely available via a TED talk and other videos of performances and interviews. Her books range from ethnographic monographs to the trailblazing Why Haiti Needs New Narratives (2015), which was published in three languages, to her recently published poetry collection, Because When God Is too Busy (2017). In all of these varied venues Ulysse uses anthropology and the insights it provides, in her words “engaging the visceral with the structural,” as a means to address and work towards dismantling the racism, sexism, and other structures of inequality that cause such harm and terror in the world.

Kaufman Receives Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology

Sharon Kaufman’s two books, Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line (2015) and …And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life (2005), probe how and why the structures, ethos, and organization of our health care bureaucracy, largely hidden from public view, determine the kinds of medical treatments patients receive. The books investigate the present and future impacts of health care delivery on practitioners, patients, families, and the American public. They describe the sociopolitical and institutional sources of current US health care practice—and the disquiet that accompanies that practice—and suggest policy choices for health care reform.

Ordinary Medicine traces the ethical underpinnings of the multi-billion dollar biomedical health care enterprise, from research funding for treatments to what gets reimbursed by Medicare to what is considered standard and why to what patients and doctors talk about, agonize over, and decide to do. By providing a map to the sociocultural sources of our health care dilemmas, Kaufman offers a way to renew the goals of medicine, so it can serve as a social good in the twenty-first century. …And a Time to Die has resonated across society for a decade as greater numbers of practitioners and health consumers seek reasons for why the “technological imperative,” with its “do everything” ethos even as death approaches, continues to have such a tenacious hold on medical practice. Both volumes are taught and read widely (including internationally) among physicians, nurses, other health professionals, and scholars in many disciplines. Both pay attention to what the future will look like: ever-older patients receiving high-tech treatments, many of which prolong dying; a growing burden of dilemmas for families; and higher economic cost. As works in anticipatory anthropology, they are part of the national dialogue paving the way for preferable futures for our medical and care delivery system.

AAA President’s Awards

AAA President Alex Barker honored five incredible people with President’s Awards in 2018:

Ben Orlove was honored for his scholarship and contributions to documenting Anthropogenic Climate Change.

Vesna Vucinic, Junji Koizumi, Faye Harrison, and Chandana Mathur were honored for helping to unite global anthropology under the World Anthropological Union.

Chip Colwell, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, received an award for his creative, resourceful, and risk-taking work as founding editor-in-chief of SAPIENS, a digital magazine launched in 2016, and now a podcast series about the human world. SAPIENS is committed to bringing anthropology to a broad public audience. It explores thought-provoking ideas about being human including how we communicate with one another, why we behave kindly and badly, where and when we evolved, our laws, our ethics, our cities, the environment, and much, much more.  

Robert Lemelson, Elemental Productions and University of California, Los Angeles, is recognized for his innovative ethnographic filmmaking and his philanthropy. Lemelson pushed the boundaries of sensory ethnography that is gorgeously affecting, with rich multimedia production values. And, with his generous support, he is committed to the rising generation of promising students and early career anthropologists.

2018 Minority Dissertation Fellowship Recipient

The Minority Dissertation Fellowship Committee is pleased to award Saira Mehmood with the 2018–2019 Minority Dissertation Fellowship. Mehmood’s doctoral work, which looks at mental health services available to medically underserved racially minoritized communities in post-Katrina New Orleans, Louisiana, is needed research. Moreover, her work is situated in medical anthropology examining race and disease in the United States, which is critically important for the further development of the subfield.

Not only does Mehmood demonstrate intellectual rigor and present a clear argument that is grounded in anthropology, but her work extends to and engages with other fields of research. The methods she uses are innovative in the sense that they draw on interdisciplinary techniques, toolkits, and insights including anthropology, public health, public policy, and government. With a strong public anthropology bent, her work is positioned to potentially contribute important findings to the field of anthropology as well as public health and public policy. Mehmood demonstrates clear practical applications for her work that clearly illustrates the importance of stellar anthropological research to address social issues in context. 

Gender Equity Award

M. Gabriela Torres, Dianna Shandy, and Kathryn Clancy are recognized for their leadership and service to the profession in developing policies and procedures for addressing issues of sexual harassment and sexual assault for the American Anthropological Association. This is a critical time in our nation’s history when these issues are front and center. Their hard work in developing the AAA’s Comprehensive Policy on Sexual Harassment and Assault should be recognized, and we are proud of what they have accomplished in MPAAC’s first year.

2018 Leadership Fellows