AfAA Announces Winners of Paper Awards - Anthropology News

This year, the AfAA Graduate and Undergraduate Award Committees received a number of strong submissions for both the Bennetta Jules-Rosette Graduate Paper Award and the Nancy (?Penny?) Schwartz Undergraduate Paper Award.?Many of the papers were excellent.

Bennetta Jules-Rosette Graduate Paper Award

The graduate award winner is George Paul Meiu (Department of Anthropology, U Chicago) for ?Beach-Boy Elders and Young Big Men: Queering the Temporalities of Aging in Kenya?s Ethno-Erotic Economies.? Meiu is an accomplished young scholar, who has already published a number of articles during his graduate career.?His innovative award submission uses an African example to tackle global issues of sexuality, ethnicity and aging.?Meiu sheds ethnographic light on issues that often remain hidden within Africanist discourse. He emphasizes the role of African masculinity within colonial and postcolonial imaginations, and he insightfully analyzes the ways in which these discourses shape contemporary networks of tourism and sexual trafficking. Case studies are drawn from the Maasai ?Mombasa Morans? and their participation in sexual tourism. The paper comes highly recommended by Professor Jean Comaraff (U Chicago).?Meiu will receive the $500 award stipend and travel funds to attend the Annual AAA Meetings.

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Maasai and Samburu men, adorned in red shukas, are common sights along Kenya?s coast. Many are hired for security for private homes and hotels, others for entertainment in tourist facilities, and some engage in sexual tourism. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Coffman.

Honorable Mention goes to Mohamed Abumaye (Department of Sociology, UC San Diego), who has written a highly original paper on the role of oral history in cultural change entitled ?Silenced into Non-Existence: Living History of Somali Orality.??His paper examines the myths and oral history accounts surrounding the story of Empress Arrawelo in Somalia. The paper demonstrates the permutation of the Arrawelo account from its traditional format to contemporary, postmodern rap versions.??The paper contains a critique of the work of IM Lewis on the Arrawelo myth, as well as theoretical discussions based on the work of Michel Foucault, VY Mudimbe, and Jacques Depelchin.?Supplemental funds from UC San Diego?s African and African-American Studies Research Center will provide for Mohamed Abumaye?s attendance of the AAA meetings in San Francisco.

Nancy (?Penny?) Schwartz Undergraduate Paper Award

The winner by unanimous acclaim is Divya Bhat (International Studies, UC San Diego) for her senior honors thesis entitled ?Survival Strategies as Islands of Security: Social Change and Development in the Congo.??The thesis addresses theories of governance and development in Congo DRC in relationship to survival strategies adopted by communities and individuals throughout the country.??A focus is placed on case studies of family units, religious movements, the informal sector and the diamond trade, and youth culture.??Each of these case studies is employed to demonstrate the resiliency of the Congolese people in the face of the disintegration of the national government and formal institutional and social networks.?The thesis was awarded highest honors at the UC San Diego.?This is Divya?s second award submission to the AfAA.??In 2011, she received an honorable mention for her research on child witches in the Congo.?Divya relies on the research of Rene Devisch and Filip De Boeck in scaffolding her argument.?Divya will be unable to attend the San Francisco meetings as she has recently entered the graduate program in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.?Divya will receive a $100 award stipend.

Courtney Dehn-Gurbacki (International Studies, McGill U) receives an honorable mention for ?The Mediation of Large-Scale Farmland Deals: A Tanzanian Case Study.??This excellent senior honors thesis in International Development Studies incorporates anthropology within a wider interdisciplinary and applied framework. Dehn-Gurbacki examines the process of land acquisition in Tanzania and the development of large-scale commercial agriculture.??She effectively balances global and local concerns by focusing on the cultural practices and processes of land acquisition and allocation. The thesis presents a number of Tanzanian case studies and builds upon primary fieldwork in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda.??She bases her research on the work of Olivier De Schutter as well as a number of reports from international agencies, including the World Bank and various nongovernmental organizations.?Long-term AfAA members John Galaty and Karen McAllister served as advisors for the project.

To learn more about AfAA and to find more details about the annual awards, please visit our website at http://www.aaanet.org/sections/afaa/.

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Please send photos and column ideas to Jennifer Coffman, James Madison University, coffmaje@jmu.edu.

Source: http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2012/10/31/afaa-announces-winners-of-paper-awards/

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