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Winners of the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, 1994
THE 1994 VICTOR TURNER PRIZE
The Precious Space
The Society for Humanistic Anthropology continued to use the precious space
of the Annual Meeting to recognize, support and encourage proficient and
readable writing in anthropology. This year, the Victor Turner Award
committee considered 31 ethnographies from 17 presses. First prize was
awarded jointly to Lila Abu-Lughod for Writing Women’s Worlds, and Mary
Margaret Steedly for Hanging without a Rope. Three honorable mentions were
also given. In describing the winning entries, Paul Friedrich notes that:
"In Writing Women’s Worlds, Lila Abu-Lughod had achieved a tour de force by
turning things inside out, making the literate use of her prose not only
dominate over, but also enhance and inform some of the basic categories of
our ethnographic enterprise. Thus, the contrast between the ostensible
content signaled by her chapter headings- patrilineality, polygyny,
patrilateral parallel cousin marriage and honor and shame- and the
underlying content, a women’s view of these matters, results in a massive,
skillfully controlled inversion and a methodological irony, with the reader
traveling along several paths of a labyrinth… Also striking is the way the
author interweaves a realized exposition of a traditional culture (some of
it already largely a memory culture) with rich data and insights on the
connections with a larger Arabic world.
Mary Margaret Steedly, in Hanging without a Rope, had given anthropology in
the larger sense a work that comes through as an instant classic for many
reasons, particularly, the emergent interaction of several distinct models,
or points of view. Perhaps the most obvious is that of the elderly spirit
medium, whose life story, attitudes, feelings and ideas constitute one
organic thread in the rich tapestry… we are led to see colonial and
postcolonial Karoland through the eyes of someone who has lived through it.
Intersecting with this is a fairly comprehensive exposition of the economic,
social and religious culture in which items such as local barter, clan
structure and the role of adat law are described and analyzed."
Also awarded at the SHA’s business meeting was the prize for short fiction,
which went to Loretta Orion, with Kirin Narayan as runner-up. The prize for
poetry honored Charles Underwood for his poem, "Oral History." With this
poem, Underwood not only took us with him into the field, but also
illustrated how those pages and pages of hastily jotted field notes can
sometimes be read as powerful poetry.
Anthropology Newsletter. 36(2): 32-33.
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