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This year the Society for Humanistic Anthropology received 58 entries for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing competition, which was judged by past SHA President Barbara Babcock (Regents Professor, Arizona) [chair], past AAA President James Peacock (Kenan Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill), and Mary Margaret Steedly (Chair of Social Anthropology, Harvard) and [Victor Turner Prize winner, 1994]. The Turner Prize this year goes to John M. Chernoff for Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl ( University of Chicago Press, 2003), and the Honorable Mention goes to William Mazzarella for Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Duke University Press, 2003). John Chernoff earned his PhD. in social science and religion at the Hartford Seminary Foundation in 1974 and is an independent scholar living in Pittsburgh. Hustling Is Not Stealing is his second groundbreaking book. In 1979, he published African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms, based on a decade studying music in social life in Ghana and training to achieve performance proficiency in several African musical idioms. The research for Hustling Is Not Stealing grew out of his interest in young people whose musical tastes he followed in urban nightclubs. In the stories of Hawa, an African bar girl who moves between city and village, we are captivated by the experience of culture as a personal challenge, by “a radically alternative approach to life and living.” William Mazzarella is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from UC-Berkeley in 2000. Shoveling Smoke is based on his doctoral research on the cultural politics of advertising, globalization, and mass consumerism in Bombay. In this pioneering and imaginative ethnographic study of advertising as “public cultural production,” one comes to know the contemporary culture industry of Indian advertising, the changes that have occurred in recent decades, and the people who both produce and consume it. It is fascinating and ironically revealing to follow Mazzarrella’s descriptions of advertising professionals becoming “custodians of cultural integrity,” in their practice of marketing foreign brands by “Indianizing” them, of engaging in “auto-Orientalism.” The winner of the Turner Prize will receive $500, and both the winner and honorable mention will receive a certificate. The prizes will be presented at the SHA session, “AWARD-WINNING WORK IN HUMANISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY: READINGS FROM THIS YEAR'S PRIZE WINNERS FROM THE VICTOR TURNER, FICTION, POETRY, AND STUDENT PAPER PRIZE COMPETITIONS,” on Fri., 4:00 - 5:45 PM. All are welcome to attend. The SHA invites submissions for the 2005 Turner competition (deadline: June 1, 2005)—watch upcoming SHA columns for details.
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