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Anthropology and the Environment

Prizes and Awards

Award Announcements and Call(s) for Papers:

• Announcing the 6th Annual Rappaport Prize (2004): Format, Guidelines & Deadlines
• Announcing the Third Julian Steward Award: Format, Guidelines & Deadline
• Announcing the Annual A&E Junior Scholar Award (2004): Format, Guidelines & Deadline
• Announcing the A&E Lourdes Arizpe Award(2004): Format, Guidelines & Deadline
• Call for Conference Papers
• 2003 5th Annual Rappaport Prize Award Winners
• 2003 Julian Steward Award Winners
• 2003 A&E Junior Scholar Award Winners
• Call for Papers Archive

6th Annual Rappaport Prize (2004):

The Roy A. Rappaport Graduate Student Award

In the past, the Rappaport prize has been a traditional writing competition for graduate students, with a cash award given to the winner. However, in recent years the number of entries for the competition has declined. In 2003 the A&E Executive Board opted to update the prize format to try to better serve students’ needs and interests.

The revamped Rappaport prize includes selecting 5 graduate student panelists to participate in an A&E Sponsored Session at each AAA annual meeting, and providing mentors for each of them to help them develop the paper into a publishable article. We continue to offer a cash prize to the winner, as well as some reimbursement of travel costs to all the finalists in the competition. Details of the 2004 graduate student panel are below.

Session Title: Anthropology & Environment: A New Generation
Session Chair: Tom Sheridan (University of Arizona)
Session Organizer: Wendy Weisman (Rutgers University)
Discussant: Melissa Johnson (Southwestern University)

Abstract: This session showcases exemplary work by graduate students in the field of environmental and ecological anthropology. Finalists for the Roy A. Rappaport Graduate Student Writing Award, selected through a competition held during 2004, will present their papers. Their diverse ethnographic and critical analyses include: How conservation NGOs influence indigenous knowledge in Madagascar; environmental education and transnational movements of knowledge about environment and development in Costa Rica; using shifting landscape aesthetics as a means of studying social and environmental change in the San Juan Islands, Washington; resistance by communities to notions of pristine nature in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador; and a historically-informed examination of how migration, combined with conservation and development activities, are reshaping ecology, economy and society in southern Mexico.

A panel of judges will select one of these papers to receive the prestigious Rappaport Award, sponsored annually by the Anthropology & Environment Section. In addition to offering a forum for work by up-and-coming graduate-level researchers in fields relating to environmental and ecological anthropology, the competition will provide mentorship activities to help each of the finalists develop their papers into articles suitable for publishing in refereed journals.

Competition Details for 2003-2004:

In 2003 our calls for abstracts elicited nearly 30 submissions. Four reviewers, including some A&E Executive Board members, ranked them according to four criteria: relevance to environmental anthropology, quality of scholarship, originality, and clarity of argument. The top five were selected as finalists to present at the sponsored session at AAA.

After the session is over, a winner will be chosen by a panel of judges, including the session discussant. The choice will be based on expanded versions of the conference papers that are submitted 3 weeks before the conference (not based on the presenters’ performances during the session itself). The winner receives a $250 cash prize; all finalists (including the winner) receive $100 to defray conference travel costs. A&E also reimburses all finalists for choosing to attend one of two AAA workshops on publishing, offered by American Anthropologist and American Ethnologist editorial staff.

The next deadline for Rappaport competition abstracts will be in March 2005. Watch the EANTH listserv or check this page for more details. If you are interested in becoming a mentor in connection with this award, please email wweisman@eden.rutgers.edu. We would love to hear from you!

2003-2004 Rappaport Award Finalists:
Sharon Baskind, Rutgers University. “Natural Means Beautiful”: Landscapes of the San Juans, WA
Nicole Blum, University of Sussex. "Participation, Power and Development: The Case of Environmental Education in Costa Rica"
Jill Constantino, University of Michigan. “The ‘Wild West’ of the Pacific: Peopling and Depeopling the Galápagos Islands”
Douglas Hume, University of Connecticut. “Malagasy Swidden Agriculture: The Influence of Conservation Organizations on Indigenous Knowledge”
Alison Lee, UC Riverside. “Migration, Ecology and Natural Resource Conservation: Material and ideological appropriations of the environment in the Mixteca Baja of Puebla, Mexico”

Third Julian Steward Award:

The Anthropology and the Environment Section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) is pleased to announce the Julian Steward Award for the best monograph in environmental/ecological anthropology. The first award of $500 was presented to Dr. Roberto González of San José State University for his book Zapotec Science: Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca (University of Texas Press, 2001) at the 2003 AAA meeting in Chicago November 2003. The second award will be announced at the AAA meeting in San Francisco in November 2004.

Monographs in environmental/ecological anthropology published from 1997 to 2002 were eligible for the first award. Thereafter, the award will be given to a book published within the calendar year, beginning with 2003. A press will only be allowed to nominate one book from its list. The author(s) does not have to be an anthropologist, but the monograph must employ anthropological method and theory. No edited volumes are eligible.

To nominate a monograph, please send a copy of the book along with the nomination letter to each of the three judges listed below. Also send the nomination letter to Tom Sheridan, President of the Anthropology & Environment Section. The deadline for nominations is March 31, 2005.

Judges (2004):

Please join the Anthropology and the Environment Section of the AAA in making the Julian Steward Award the leading award for cutting-edge monographs in environmental/ecological anthropology.

For questions or concerns, please contact:

Thomas E. Sheridan, Ph.D.
Professor of Anthropology
Southwest Center and Department of Anthropology
University of Arizona
President, Anthropology & the Environment Section
1052 N. Highland Ave.
PO Box 210185
Tucson AZ 85721-0185
Phone: (520) 621-5088
E-mail: tes@email.arizona.edu

A&E Annual Junior Scholar Award (2004):

An award for junior scholars (un-tenured, or within five years of obtaining a Ph.D) will be granted at the November 2004 AAA meetings in San Francisco. The purpose of this $500 award is to encourage talented junior scholars to continue working in the domain of anthropology and environment by recognizing their exemplary scholarship.

Judging will be based on refereed journal articles, which must be at least in the galley or page-proof stage of publication.

We invite all anthropologists to nominate candidates for the award based on their knowledge of the literature and the work of junior scholars. Authors are also invited to nominate their own articles. In either case, articles nominated should be sent in electronic or hard-copy form together with brief memos that nominate the author(s) and identify the key contributions made by or qualities or the work by October 22, 2004 to Michael Paolisso (mpaolisso@anth.umd.edu; 1102 Art-Sociology Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.

A&E Lourdes Arizpe Award(2004):

POLICY & ANTHROPOLOGY: THE LOURDES ARIZPE AWARD

Announcing the First Biennial Lourdes Arizpe Award in Anthropology and Environment 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 on Friday the 19th of November, 6:15 - 8:00 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 can be for 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 , Antropología Breve de Mexico, The Cultural Dimensions of Global Change: An Anthropological Approach, and Culture and Global Change: Social Perspectives of Deforestation in the Lacandona Rain Forest. 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 served on the Joint Latin American Committee of the Social Science Research Council and the Executive Committee of the Latin American Studies Association. 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, 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.

Call for Conference Papers

2003 5th Annual Rappaport Prize Award Winners

The 5th Annual Rappaport Prize for exemplary ecological/environmental scholarship by anthropology graduate students was awarded to Alison Bidwell Pearce (Anthropology Sciences, Stanford University). The abstract of the paper is below.

Abstract:
The Good, the Bad, and the Human: Confronting our True Selves in Conservation
Through an exploration of resource management beliefs and practices among the San Blas Kuna, Alison argues that cultural processes are central to the development of conservation practices. Other authors have argued that indigenous peoples have low impacts in neo-tropical forests as a secondary result of three conditions: low population density, limited technology, and subsistence rather than market production. By contrasting Kuna management of terrestrial and marine resources Alison shows that cultural forces can act to limit market production, exclude certain technologies, and mitigate the impact of population density. She argues that conservation strategies must protect and build upon human capacities for resource management - something that is not possible in completely autocratic parks.

2003 Julian Steward Award Winners

The first A&E Julian Steward Award ($500) for the best book in ecological/environmental anthropology was given to Roberto J. González, San José State University, for Zapotec Science: Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca (University of Texas Press, 2001). Competition was extremely tough because the first award covered books published between 1997 and 2002.

Honorable mentions went to three other authors whose works made the top five choices of all three judges: K. Sivaramakrishnan (Washington) for Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford University Press, 1999); Ben Orlove (University of California-Davis) for Lines in the Water: Nature and Culture at Lake Titicaca (University of California Press, 2002); and Nathan Sayre (Arizona) for Ranching, Endangered Species, and Urbanization in the Southwest: Species of Capital (University of Arizona Press, 2002).

2003 A&E Junior Scholar Award Winners

Hugh Raffles (Co-Award) for “Local Theory”: Nature and the Making of an Amazonian Place. Cultural Anthropology 14(3):323-360. (1999)
Abstract: Through a close ethnographic account of the material and discursive practices by which place- and locality-making is accomplished in the eastern Amazon, this paper offers a relational view of nature and the "local." Igarapé Guariba, a community built on translocal logging and fruit extraction, may, in many ways, be a stereotypical "small place," but it is one constituted in the midst of overlapping and multiple histories and spatialities.

David McDermott Hughes (Co-Award) for Cadastral Politics: The Making of Community-Based Resource Management in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Development and Change 32: 741-768. (2001)
Abstract: Projects promoting community-based management of natural resources frequently encourage local smallholders to share flora, fauna, or land forms with state agencies and/or private companies. Ideals of common property and moral economy have inspired this agenda and helped spread it globally. In Southern Africa, however, the general model of shared landscapes has collided with a bitter history of white colonization and land grabbing. This article recounts the rise and fall of one CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) project in eastern Zimbabwe. There, cadastral politics – struggles over the bounding and control of land – overwhelmed negotiations for joint management and eco-tourism. Across the border, in Mozambique, community-based resource management has engaged with cadastral politics in a more fruitful fashion. In the midst of latter-day Afrikaner colonization, this project mapped smallholders’ claims to land. Thus, the Zimbabwean project ignored territorial conflict and ultimately succumbed to it. The Mozambican project jumped into the fray, with some success. On past or current settler frontiers, community-based management may learn from this lesson: dispense with an ideology of sharing and join the rough-and-tumble of cadastral politics.

Nora Haenn (Runner up) for Nature Regimes in Southern Mexico: A History of Power and Environment. Ethnology 41(1): 1-26. (2002)
Abstract: This article explores the popularized history of a state-peasant conservation alliance in southern Mexico. Following poststructural calls, it treats this history as a locally constructed “regime of nature,” a story that condenses and attempts to direct the intersection of history, cultural mediation, and ecology. Using ethnographic and archival material, it examines what factors made capitalist interventions aimed at exploiting local forests possible. It compares former regimes with structures and discourses linked to conservation to comment on the relationship between protected areas and state formation. Through this exploration, I suggest compatibilities between poststructural and political-economy approaches to political ecology.

Call for Papers Archive:

• 6th Annual Rappaport Prize Announcement (2003)
• First Julian Steward Award Announcement(1997-2002)
• 2nd Annual Junior Scholar Award Announcement (2003)---deadline extended to October 17, 2003

6th Annual Rappaport Prize (2003):

Annual Rappaport Prize: Call for Submissions by September 30, 2003. The Anthropology & Environment Section of the AAA welcomes submissions for the 5th Annual Rappaport Prize. The purpose of the prize, named in honor of the distinguished ecological anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport, is to recognize exemplary ecological/environmental scholarship by anthropology graduate students. The winner will be awarded $500 and will be recognized at the A&E business meeting at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Chicago, November 19-23, 2003. For those who anticipate being on the job market soon, this is a great way to enhance your CV. You need not be a member of A&E to submit an entry, but you must be a member of AAA.

Students interested in submitting manuscripts for this year's competition should follow the style guidelines of the journal Human Ecology. Manuscripts should be of publishable quality, based on original research, and should not exceed 25 double-spaced pages of text (not including references). Manuscripts should be submitted as an attachment in either Word or WordPerfect and sent to the Chair of the Prize Committee, Ms. Crystal Fortwangler (crystalf@umich.edu). Alternatively, you may send three hard copies of the manuscript to her at the Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan,Room 1020 LS&A Building, 500 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-1382, Attn: Rappaport Prize.

Announcing the First Julian Steward Award (1997-2002):

2nd Annual Junior Scholar Award (2003):

An award for junior scholars (un-tenured, or within five years of obtaining a Ph.D) will be granted for the second time at the November 2003 AAA meetings in New Orleans. The purpose of this $500 award is to encourage talented junior scholars to continue working in the domain of anthropology and environment by recognizing their exemplary scholarship. Judging will be based on refereed journal articles, which must be at least in the galley or page-proof stage of publication.

We invite all anthropologists to nominate candidates for the award based on their knowledge of the literature and the work of junior scholars. Authors are also invited to nominate their own articles. In either case, articles nominated should be sent in electronic or hard-copy form together with brief memos that nominate the author(s) and identify the key contributions made by or qualities or the work by October 17, 2003 to Michael Paolisso (mpaolisso@anth.umd.edu; 1102 Art-Sociology Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. Please note, the deadline was extended from September 15, 2003 to current deadline of October 17, 2003.