University of California Press Blog

A Problem of Presence Wins Victor Turner Prize

Matthew Engelke's A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church has been awarded the 2009 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the Society of Humanistic Anthropology (SHA).

A Problem of Presence is a historical ethnography of the Friday Masowe apostolics of Zimbabwe. Members of this Christian movement do not read the Bible, and instead embrace a live and direct faith in which God's presence is immediate and not mediated by a church, written text, or any other material thing. Exploring wider issues of textual authority and material culture, Engelke examines how the Friday Masowe construct a relationship with the divine.

The SHA awards this prize annually in honor of the anthropologist Victor Turner. “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,” says the SHA. Engelke is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the editor of Prickly Paradigm Press. In 2008, A Problem of Presence won the Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion.

Health Care and Human Rights

Paul Farmer, author of the forthcoming Partner to the Poor, among other books, is committed to restoring health, hope, and social justice to people in the world's poorest areas. His work as a physician and co-founder of the organization Partners in Health (PIH) is rooted in the conviction that good health is not a privilege, but a basic human right that is often denied to the very poor.

To ensure this essential freedom, PIH addresses poverty as well as illness. In destitute areas from rural Haiti to Russia and Rwanda, PIH’s community-based model provides medical care, employs community health workers, and targets poverty as a main cause of poor health. By working to meet people's basic needs as well as treating the sick, this approach saves lives while improving the overall level of health and opportunity in the area.

NOW on PBS recently profiled health care in Rwanda, where PIH, the Rwandan government, and community health workers are working to restore health, vitality, and the right to a healthy life. This partnership is based in solidarity: "Whatever it takes," says the PIH vision, "Just as we would do if a member of our own family—or we ourselves—were ill."

Nina Jablonski's TED Talk

Nina Jablonski, author of Skin: A Natural History, says that differing skin colors are simply our bodies' adaptation to varied climates and levels of UV exposure. Charles Darwin disagreed with this theory, but she explains, that's because he did not have access to NASA.



Rate this video on the TED site.

UC Press Podcast Featuring Jonathan Marks

We are pleased to announce that Episode 17 of the UC Press podcast series is now available. In this episode, Chris Gondek of Heron and Crane Productions interviews Jonathan Marks as he talks about the authority of anthropology in science in his new book, Why I Am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge.

You may subscribe to the monthly podcast feed that contains the individual episodes using your RSS aggregator or directly via the iTunes store.  You can listen to individual author interviews from the episodes at our podcast page.

Listen to an interview with Jonathan Marks, author of Why I Am Not a Scientist.

David Meltzer, Melvyn Goldstein, and Anne Salmond Elected to National Academy of Sciences

UC Press authors David Meltzer, Melvyn Goldstein, and Anne Salmond were elected to the National Academy of Sciences on April 28. Meltzer and Goldstein were elected as members, and Salmond was elected as a foreign associate. They join a distinguished group of scholars who advise the government on scientific and technological issues, and advance knowledge in these areas as a public service. Members of the Academy are selected on the basis of exceptional, consistent achievement in original research, and election is one of the highest honors in any area of science or engineering.

David Meltzer is Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory and director of the QUEST archaeological research program at Southern Methodist University. In Folsom, Meltzer tells the story of the famous archaeological site in New Mexico, and the pivotal discovery that proved humans lived in Ice Age America. His most recent book, First Peoples in a New World, follows  North America's first inhabitants as they trekked across the icy continent more than 12,000 years ago. Tracking their elusive footprints with archaeological  and scientific tools, he reconstructs the landscapes and experiences of the first North Americans. 

Melvyn Goldstein is co-director of the Center for Research on Tibet, John Reynolds Harkness Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, and the author of many books on Tibet. He is noted for his balanced approach to controversial issues, and Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times called his book The Snow Lion and the Dragon "the best introduction to Tibet". In the first and second volumes of A History of Modern Tibet, he presents a detailed account of Tibet from 1913 to the present. Most recently, Goldstein co-authored (with Ben Jiao and Tanzen Lhundrup) On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet, which reexamines the Nyemo Incident of 1969.

Anne Salmond is Distinguished Professor of Maori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her forthcoming book Aphrodite's Island returns to the day the first European ships landed at Tahiti. Exploring both Tahitian and European perspectives, Salmond chronicles how these early encounters shaped the future of the island and its visitors. Aphrodite's Island will be available in January 2010.

National Day of Silence

On April 17th, Kate Harding of Salon.com wrote an article called "No One Will Miss You," highlighting the 13th Annual National Day of Silence "to bring attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment and effective responses." In the article, Harding mentions a few teens who took their lives after being repeatedly taunted and ridiculed by their peers and even school adminstrators.

Harding also quotes The New York Times blogger, Judith Warner and C.J. Pascoe, author of Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (UC Press, June 2007). Harding writes:

"Judith Warner wrote about both Carl Walker-Hoover and Eric Mohat, a 17-year-old who shot himself after a bully flat-out suggested he should, adding 'no one will miss you.' And once again, the tormenters were focused on the victim's failure to conform to gender norms, so the bullying manifested as vicious homophobia. 'Eric liked theater, played the piano and wore bright clothing, a lawyer for his family told ABC news, and so had long been subject to taunts of "'gay,' 'fag,' 'queer' and 'homo.'" As Warner puts it, 'The message to the most vulnerable, to the victims of today's poisonous boy culture, is being heard loud and clear: to be something other than the narrowest, stupidest sort of guy's guy, is to be unworthy of even being alive.' She quotes one teenage boy who told author C.J. Pascoe, ' To call someone gay or fag is like the lowest thing you can call someone. Because that's like saying that you're nothing.' Pascoe herself, who spent 18 months studying the culture in a Northern California high school, says that the boys there 'have the sense that to be a man means something and is incredibly important ... To not be a man is to not be fully human and that's terrifying.' To not be a man is to not be fully human. To be gay is to be nothing. In case anyone was unclear on the connection between homophobia and misogyny, there you go."

Read the article "No One Will Miss You" in it's entirety.

Read the article "Dude You've Got Problems."

Jonathan Marks Wins 2009 J.I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research

The School for Advanced Research (SAR) has awarded its 2009 J.I. Staley Prize to Jonathan Marks, for his book What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee. The annual prize honors authors who expand the realm of anthropology through outstanding scholarship and writing. Past UC Press winners have included Charles L. Briggs and Carla Mantini-Briggs, for Stories in the Time of Cholera, and Paul Farmer, for Pathologies of Power.
    What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee is scientific, witty, provocative, and enthusiastically critical of scientific fallacies. Examining genetic data through the dual lens of molecular anthropology, Marks clarifies the scientific and cultural implications of our genetic similarity to apes. 
    Marks will receive his award  at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in December. His forthcoming book, Why I Am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge, will be published in June.

2009 Guggenheim Fellowships Fund Creativity, Scholarship, Innovation

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 180 Guggenheim Fellowships this year. Among the recipients are several UC Press authors, honored for their outstanding achievements in Poetry, Film, Classics, Folklore/Popular Culture, and Anthropology/Cultural Studies. The winners, selected from around 3,000 applicants, will receive grants to fund ongoing projects or take their work in new directions.

By funding innovation, creativity, and scholarship, Guggenheim Fellowships contribute to the world's cultural and educational wealth. Fellowships are awarded to exceptionally accomplished and promising individuals working in any area of the arts, sciences, or academics—from fiction and film to chemistry and statistics. Grant amounts are tailored to the Fellow, and as there are no spending restrictions, Fellows may use the grants to further their work any way they choose. Congratulations to all the 2009 Guggenheim Fellows!

The 2009 Guggenheim Fellows and UC Press Authors are:

Poetry

Lyn Hejinian, author of The Language of Inquiry (2000)

Classics

Denis Feeney, author of Caesar's Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (2007)

Folklore and Popular Culture

Joshua Gamson, author of Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (1994)

 

Anthropology and Cultural Studies

Veena Das, author of Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2006); and coeditor, with Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, of Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery (2001); Violence and Subjectivity (2000); and Social Suffering (1997)

Kathryn Linn Geurts, author of Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community (2003)

Film

Lynn Hershman Leeson, subject of The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I (2005), edited by Meredith Tromble

 

 

The Business of Being Born

 

While going over the marketing plan for, Birth Models that Work, I came across a website recommended by one of the authors. The website was the official homepage for the documentary, The Business of Being Born, which was produced by actress and former talk show host, Ricki Lake and directed by Abby Epstein. The documentary explores the history of midwifery and shows a contrasting perspective from the delivering at a hospital birth model we are so accustomed to today. The film also shows how health care and insurance companies helped to increase the use of maternity wards while ostracizing midwives.

Little did I know, another author from Birth Models that Work, Robbie Davis-Floyd makes a few appearances throughout the film. It was a pleasant surprise! As a medical anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and an expert in child birth and midwifery, Davis-Floyd examines the different players in the medical field that make a difference with regard to U.S. birth models.

The stats were clear: in 2006, 99% of all births in the U.S. were delivered by doctors in hospitals, while nearly 1 in every 3 births are delivered by cesarean section. However, the U.S. still has one of the highest death rates in births compared to other industrialized countries where midwives are more prominent. If you want more information about birth models or would like to watch this film, go to The Business of Being Born. If you would like to read the latest scientific evidence about birth models that work, go to http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10482.php.

By: Lindsay Wong, E-Marketing Coordinator, UC Press

Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity

Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity

By: Alan C. Braddock

I am an Assistant Professor of Art History at Temple University in Philadelphia (on leave, academic year 2008-09).  I teach a variety of courses in American art history from the colonial period to the present.  As a scholar, my work strives to produce new ways of seeing and understanding art through interdisciplinary exploration of its historical contexts.  Much of my research so far has focused on realism and the history of anthropology, as embodied in my book Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, just released by UC Press.  In addition, I am now branching into two new areas.  One is ecocriticism, a form of ethical inquiry into the relationship between art and environmental history.  For several years, I have taught an undergraduate course called "Art and Environment in America since 1800," for which I always struggled to find appropriate reading assignments.  Fortunately, that problem is about to be solved, because I've put together my own textbook for the course.  In December, the University of Alabama Press will release A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, a collection of essays by authors from various disciplines that I have co-edited with Christoph Irmscher, Professor of English at Indiana University.  Another new area of interest for me is the impact of modern warfare on American artists, particularly in altering their ways of seeing and addressing the beholder, from the Civil War to World War I.  With that in mind, I'm working on another book titled Gun Vision: The Ballistic Imagination in American Art from Homer to O'Keeffe, which I expect to complete later this year.

My book, Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, is the first to examine a major American artist in relation to the pluralist concept of 'cultures,' which began to emerge consistently in the writings of anthropologist Franz Boas and his students after 1900.  It was only after Eakins died (in 1916) that the 'culture concept' acquired wide currency.  My book demonstrates that Eakins was "premodern" in the sense that he never encountered or comprehended that concept, meaning that recent scholarly claims about his 'cultural' perspective are imprecise and anachronistic.  Eakins understood human diversity in terms of race, nation, gender, class, and religion, not 'cultural' behavior.  Consequently, my book implicitly demands that we use the word 'cultural' more carefully and historically when describing other past artists.  With that in mind, given the focus of my book on one painter from Philadelphia (albeit a very important one), I would be interested to learn from readers of this blog what other artists - American or not - might provide interesting case studies along these lines.  Winslow Homer?  Mary Cassatt?  Paul Gauguin?  Aaron Douglas?