Winners

The Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing for 1999 was shared by two outstanding works: Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old, by Jean L. Briggs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), and Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless, by Robert Desjarlais (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). Each author received a check for $250 and a certificate.

Jean Briggs has guided readers of ethnography into the inner world of the Inuit person in society since her classic Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1970). Her present tour de force examines Inuit culture through socialization strategies employed in the moral education of a single child on the verge of leaving behind the cuteness and unqualified affection of babyhood. Inuit adults, replaying their own psychic dramas, enact staged dramas and interrogations geared to make the child think about and defend the social Inuit community. The child must learn that affection underlies what seem to be threatening attacks, centering around such questions as, "Are you a baby?" (emotional security with few demands), "Want to come live with me?" (an adoptee must give up the security of family, especially mother), and "Who do you like?" (adults must appear to dislike no one). The ambiguity of Chubby Maata’s relations to Briggs as outsider and guest exemplifies the treacherous choices that she must learn to make consistently. People depend on other people; reciprocally, their own actions elicit support from others.

This ethnography reaches beneath the surface of everyday life in another community to the dynamics that create sheer difference across cultures. Strategies of socialization impose on the child parameters of moral order within which social agency can be constructed and exercised in a given community. It takes a long time to come to the point of interpreting forms of culture not arising from one’s own socialization; this book is the culmination of such an ethnographic commitment. Its detail for a single case allows generalization of pattern or form rather than content.

Robert Desjarlais in Shelter Blues has created a sophisticated text with and about marginalized people, moving through an urban built environment, a building, and a bureaucracy within which homelessness and mental illness are confined, performed, and restricted in their interface with a wider mainstream. The text scrolls through a series of linked vignettes, each focusing on someone’s standpoint toward something about these or their circumstances, with an ebb and flow of energies that evokes a whole from the kaleidoscopic specifics of particular phenomenological worlds. Desjarlais’s patience to listen elicits considerable reflexivity about the needs and aspirations of ethnographic subjects who are too often dismissed as "disposable," unnamed, and unproblematically assumed incapable of speaking for themselves. Subjects who at first seem isolated or alienated from the surrounding social order in fact interact with other people and cannily observe the regularities of the worlds around the shelter, its routines. They are rarely asked, nonjudgmentally, what they think about the shelter or its denizens. The presence of the anthropologist releases the expression of commentary on the shelter as understood by residents and users of its services. Stigma aside, there is a safety in the known that permits many of the shelter's transients to take increasing control over parts of their lives.

Paradoxically, the ethnography of an urban center for marginal transients, nomads with few ties to people or places outside the moment, leads readers to recognize that the boundaries of individual experience are permeable and that yearning toward community is deep seated in human persons. There is a culture of the shelter and a society of its inhabitants at any given moment; these are storied, producing in sum a larger story of place and person. Desjarlais goes beyond evocation of the experimental to analyst’s explanation, his writing strategy well suited to marginalized communities in which the very definition of individuality is called into question as an unintended consequence of contemporary noncompassionate social policies: "These considerations call for a way of writing that moves nomadically from one theme to another, grounding everyday events in cultural forms and political realities, and ragpicking through a crowd of objects, surfaces, voices, bodies, images, and stances to detail their makings" (p. 6).

Honorable Mentions

Honorable Mention was awarded to Angel’s Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life and the Rhetorics of the Everyday, by Ralph Cintron (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), and The Time of the Gypsies, by Michael Stewart (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997). The authors received certificates.

Ralph Cintron has created a sophisticated ethnographic critique of the public culture of everyday life in the Mexican American segment of a small city near Chicago. "Angeltown," both pseudonym and trope for the two Angels whose understandings are documented, is a troubled place of ambivalence, danger, and conflict. Cultural relativism sometimes comes painfully to the ethnographer when cycles of violence fail to break through the cycles of trust. This is reflexive ethnography in which the reader is invited to explore Angeltown peering over the shoulder of the anthropologist (a self-styled curmudgeon as fieldworker and, as interpreter, puzzling over field site date for a long time).

The social hierarchy of Angeltown moves from chero (country bumpkin, in the remembered traditional style of Mexico) to white (equated with modernity). Don Angel represents the chero world, disguising itself from visibility to bureaucracy and retaining strong performative traces of older ways. Images on the decorated bedroom wall of a 14-year-old boy protect him from negative labels of chero (by peers), learning disable (by the school), and stupid (by his mother). Valerio learns to "feel strong" so that he can work and control his life. Other young people choose street gangs to gain control and respect in their lives, in part by decorating public walls with graffiti. The book begins and ends with the discourse of measurement whereby mainstream public culture (largely unsuccessfully) attempts to order its disparate parts. The deep structure of these interlocking stories is one of aspiration to respect, in a world in which the intractable realities of socioeconomic power guarantee that respect will be hard to come by.

Michael Stewart explores the distinctions that sustain social order among Romany-speaking Hungarian Gypsies living under Communist rule in the 1980s. He combines traditional ethnographic fieldwork in a single village community with wider sociological analysis of the society in which contemporary Hungarian Gypsies continuously strive to "reinvent" their world of grinding poverty and intense discrimination, through symbolic forms of horse trade, speech and song, and management of shame centered on the body. Symbolic forms and daily encounters alike frame the Rom culture in contrast to the surrounding cultures; centuries of assimilative pressure have failed to destroy the Gypsy conviction of inherent difference and superiority. Stewart emphasizes the limitations of reflexivity: Gypsy rhetoric misrepresents or ignores the unpalatable circumstances of everyday life. Horse trading may not be economically profitable, but it maintains a convoluted male autonomy from market commodification, women’s control and the peasant work ethic; "luck" resides in the ver y making of deals. The ritual equality of brothers stands at the center of Gypsy identity and is performed both in ritual and in everyday life.

The analyst seeks a wider frame for the apparent contradiction of becoming a factory-employed proletariat and remaining Rom. Communist theory about Gypsies suggested that they were products of exclusion from society and that removing barriers would incorporate them into the mainstream; determined resistance to such reform came from Gypsies and peasants alike. Moreover, Communist ideology in practice maintained a long-established marginalization of the Gypsy as the antithesis of peasant virtue. Gypsies saw the Communists as agents of oppression little different from their predecessors, while peasants deemed the Communists to be lazy and shiftless, much life Gypsies.

The prize committee, chaired by James Fernandez and including Ruth Behar and Paul Stoller, has requested an additional category of "Commendation for Excellence." Making a decision is always difficult give the quality of contemporary ethnographic writing, but this year’s task was particularly challenging. The Society for Humanistic Anthropology thus commends Abraham on Trail: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth, by Carol Delaney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City, by Roger Sanjek (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); and African Art, Western Eyes, by Susan Mullen Vogel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

-Regna Darnell

[Anthropology and Humanism 25(1): 3-5]