October 2004
Rebecca Zarger, Contributing Editor
Anthropology and Environment Section
Announcing the First Biennial Lourdes Arizpe Award in Anthropology and Environment
By Pamela Puntenney
The first biennial Lourdes Arizpe Award will be presented in a ceremony and reception hosted by the A & E Section. We would like to invite you and your colleagues from other subfields to join us in San Francisco, California, on Friday the 19th of November, 6:15 - 7:00 PM, in “The Continental Parlor 2” room. The creation and naming of this award highlights the critical need for anthropological knowledge and perspective in addressing current environmental issues.
The Lourdes Arizpe Award is designed to honor individual anthropologists, teams, or organizations involving anthropologists, which have made outstanding contributions in the application of anthropology to environmental issues and discourse. Nominations are focused on the contributions and accomplishments of the individual, team or organization in the arena of practice, policy, and application beyond academia. The award includes work in international or domestic arenas across all ecological and policy applications, from community-based work to national policy to global applications. There must be evidence of impact or results of the work during the three years prior to the nomination.
Who is Lourdes Arizpe and why are we paying tribute to her? Lourdes Arizpe specializes in culture, migration, rural development and global environmental change in fieldwork research and in international academic and policy activities. Her twelve books include Parentesco y Economía en una Sociedad Nahua (1972), Antropología Breve de Mexico (1993), The Cultural Dimensions of Global Change: An Anthropological Approach (1995), and Culture and Global Change: Social Perspectives of Deforestation in the Lacandona Rain Forest (1995). She was a member of the U.N. World Commission on Culture and Development. As Assistant Director General of UNESCO for culture she was scientific director of the World Culture Reports. She was also Director of the Anthropological Research Institute of the National University of Mexico. She has served as a member of the Advisory Committee on the Environment (ACE) of ICSU (International Council of Scientific Unions). A founding member of the Academia Mexicana de Derechos Humanos, she also served as President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences from 1988 to 1993. Arizpe also served on the Joint Latin American Committee of the Social Science Research Council (1987-1990) and the Executive Committee of the Latin American Studies Association (1994-1996). In addition to being asked to join the editorial boards of seven professional journals based in Colombia, England, Mexico and the United States, her honors also include Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships (1978 and 1982), the medal for distinguished activities in the field of culture from the Ministry of Culture in Pakistan, and membership in the Royal Anthropology Institute in England. At present, she is President of the International Sociological Association and a Professor at the Regional Center for Multidisciplinary Research (National University of Mexico).
The award consists of a certificate of recognition and a handcrafted medal symbolic of the human-environment relationship. We look forward to your participation in honoring the first recipient of A & E’s Lourdes Arizpe Award.
Please send information, essays, or research updates to the section editor: Rebecca Zarger (zarger@fiu.edu),Dept. of Environmental Studies & Sociology/Anthropology, ECS 332, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199.