SMA awards: Polgar, Hughes, and Rivers Awards Recipients
2006 Society for Medical Anthropology Paper Prize Competition Winners Announced
The 2006 SMA paper prize winners have been selected. There are three prizes, including the Rivers Undergraduate Prize and the Charles Hughes Prize for graduate students. Both carry a $250 award, and the journal Medical Anthropology Quarterly (MAQ) has the right of first refusal on winning manuscripts.
The Steven Polgar Prize is awarded to a professional medical anthropologist for the best paper published in the SMA’s journal MAQ during the most recent complete volume year. The prize carries a $500 cash award. No nominations are needed: articles published in MAQ by eligible recipients are automatically considered for this prize (unless the article previously won the Rivers or Hughes award).
Polgar Prize. This year's Polgar prize is awarded to Vincanne Adams (UCSF) and co-authors Suellen Miller, Sienna Craig, Nyima, Sonam, Droyoung, Lhakpen, & Michael Varner for "The Challenge of Cross-Cultural Clinical Trials Research: Case Report from the Tibetan Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China" (v.19, no.3, pp.267-289). The paper centers on an account of a clinical trial feasibility study for comparing a Tibetan medicine (ZB11) with a biomedicine (misoprostol) in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Using translation as a broad theme, the authors explore some of the challenges that arise in this collaborative project, attending to differences in contexts and meanings that require flexibility and processes of negotiation if such cross-cultural collaboration is to work. The paper clearly illustrates how cultural differences can operate in cognition relating to etiology, treatment efficacy, and symptoms, while simultaneously addressing broader issues of transnational ethics and biomedical knowledge production. The theoretically innovative paper is also valuable from an applied perspective. It addresses an important issue in research methodology as well as the essential epistemological differences that undergird cultural variations in explanatory models of disease and healing. Adams and colleagues have given us an eloquent and well-grounded account of great theoretical and applied significance for studies of cross-cultural science and medicine.
Charles Hughes Prize. The winner of this year’s Hughes Prize is Elise Andaya (NYU) for her essay entitled “The Gift of Health: Cuban Medical Practice, Socialist Morality and the Post-Soviet Economy”. This paper is based on field research focused on the role of medical doctors and examines the ways they have harnessed socialist ideology and internalized what Andaya calls "socialist morality" to explain their role. Andaya argues that recent changes in the basis for the material reproduction of Cuban socialism are also threatening the meaning of the gift (including gifts as such, given by patients to providers) as the central metaphor of Cuban medical practice. Concurrent to divergences in the moral and material economy of medicine within Cuba is the Cuban state’s largest-ever mobilization of doctors as part of an emergent socialist alliance with the government of Venezuela. The essay, which was exceptional in style, content, originality, and clarity, keenly demonstrates how (to borrow a phrase from Susan Gal and Gail Kligman) politics makes medicine and medicine makes politics. Andaya’s advisor on the project was Rayna Rapp.
Rivers Undergraduate Prize. This year’s Rivers Prize goes to Hayder Al-Mohammad (SOAS/UCL) for his essay, “Excremental Encounters: The Case of Basra and the Anthropology of Excrement,” in which Al-Mohammad persuasively argues that anthropologists take on the issue of excrement as a site where power and order, the state and its absence, and everyday moral order and its erasure become painfully evident. Ethnographically, this paper offers a unique portrait of social life and its ruptures, as well as its decay, in the context of Iraq— providing us a glimpse beyond US news headlines. In the first piece of ethnography he presents, Al-Mohammad recounts daily walks taken with his cousin through the war-torn streets of Basra (Iraq). Basra has no functioning sewage system; human excrement fills the streets. The author details the devastation of an urban center besieged with feces, and explores some of the ways residents attempt to cope with the sickening smells, breakdown of sanitation, and moral disorder. A second part of the paper pursues the same theme in the context of a prison, where the lack of toilet facilities becomes a physical and symbolic means of torture. The essay ends with a description of the disappearance and murder of the author’s relative from this humanly created hell. Al-Mohammad’s advisors on the project were Andrew Irving and Kostas Retsikas.
The designation of Honorable Mention was extended to Emily Ng (UCLA) for her essay “Madness after Mao: Generationality and Bipolar Disorder in Urban China.” The essay addresses theoretical concerns central to psychiatric anthropology and connects the ways in which groups of patients locate responsibility for their illness to sociopolitical shifts in post-Mao China.
Judging. For all prizes, judges’ decisions were made on the basis of originality, theoretical importance, methodology, and clarity of writing, including clear articulation of the purpose and significance of the study. The judging committee, which included
Catherine Benoit (Connecticut Col), Bambi Chapin (UMBC), Pamela Erickson (U CONN), Jean Gilbert (CSULB), Donald Joralemon (Smith Col), Jennifer A. Liu (UCSF-UC Berkeley), Lenore Manderson (Monash U, AU), Michele Rivkin-Fish (U KY), and Amy Saltzman (Princeton), commends all applicants for their fine efforts and encourages submissions for next year. The prizes committee chair, EJ Sobo (SDSU) commends the committee members for putting in many long hard hours of voluntary service to SMA, and to medical anthropology as a whole, in judging the competition.Next Year’s Competition. The deadline for next year’s competition is June 1, 2007. Student papers must have been written while a student, in this or the preceding academic year only. Papers should not exceed 20 double-spaced 8.5 x 11” (standard US letter-sized) pages, not including bibliography. Further details will be posted on the SMA website and disseminated through other media in early Spring. Queries should be directed to esobo@mail.sdsu.edu.