This week, four members of staff from the Department of Anthropology each won a prize at the distinguished American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Conference, which was held in Washington.

Professor Victoria Goddard was awarded AAA Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize 2017 for Work and Livelihoods. History, Ethnography and Models in Times of Crisis (co-edited by Victoria Goddard & Susana Narozky), Abingdon OXON and New York: Routledge. This edited volume presents a global range of ethnographic case studies to explore the ways in which local and global actors respond to the effects of industrial restructuring, the global crisis, growing unemployment and precarity in the workplace. The reorganization and resignification of work is understood within broader processes of capital flows and their localized effects, reflected in the shifting value attached to place and space and reflected in notions of personal and collective worth. The chapters show how multi-scalar processes shape lives and livelihoods, while at also generating different conditions of possibility for individual resistance and collective action. The edited collection draws on research funded by an EU FP7 collaborative project led by Goldsmiths (“MEDEA – Models and their Effects on Development paths: an Ethnographic and Comparative Approach to Knowledge Transmission and Livelihood Strategies”), and on the contributions presented at the project conference, which was also the basis for an earlier volume (Industry and work in contemporary capitalism.  Global models, local lives?, Abingdon OXON and New York, 2015).

Professor Emma Tarlo was awarded Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing 2017  by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology for Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair, Oneworld 2016. The book is about the intimate and international life of human hair which forms part of a billion dollar global industry. Tracking the journeys of hair across India, China, Myanmar, Senegal, the United States and Europe, Tarlo meets the many people whose livelihoods, hopes and desires are bound up in hair.  Hair is no respector of boundaries. It weaves unashamedly between public and private and across continents, becoming entangled in religion, politics, economics, aesthetics and even food. This all too human fibre acts as a conduit for addressing the vicissitudes of human life. For more information about the book, see review by Aotcpress or interview with Emma on Infringe.

Dr Adom Philogene Heron was awarded the AAA Society for Medical Anthropology Council on Anthropology and Reproduction (CAR), Graduate Student Paper Prize (submitted in 2017 before Adom graduated) for “When Blood Speaks”: Naming the Father and the ‘mystics’ of Kinship in Dominica, Lesser Antilles. Adom’s essay explores the ‘problem’ of ambiguous paternity in Dominica, by examining the ways in which ‘blood speaks’ (as the local aphorism puts it) through children and father’s bodies, to mystically reveal or deny relatedness throughout their lives. Adom would like to thank Sussex’s anthropology department for comments on a draft given at their departmental seminar in early 2017.

Sarah Howard was awarded AAA Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN) – Christine Wilson Award (Graduate Student) for Coffee and the State in Rural Ethiopia. Coffee drinking is fundamental to social life in Ethiopia. Based on research in eastern Amhara Region between 2011 and 2015, this paper explores the omnipresent buna ceremony during which coffee is prepared and served, and its role in the lives of rural government workers as an occasion for building group solidarity as protection against the hardships they face. While Ethiopian society is commonly portrayed as highly authoritarian and hierarchical, this ethnographic account of the social lives of low-level officials complicates the picture of a strict divide between state and society, and is a contribution to calls for attention to the ways in which material practices continually constitute the state as a reality. Coffee and the State in Rural will be published in Anthropology Matters 18/1, 2018 and in the meantime is on Academia.edu 

Photos from AAA Annual Conference

Emma Tarlo

Far right Victoria Goddard & second on left Susana Narotzky

Sarah Howard