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THE 1998 VICTOR TURNER PRIZE The Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing has been presented annually since 1990 by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Over the intervening decade, anthropological commitment to the writing of ethnography as the core of thinking like an anthropologist has grown dramatically both in theoretical sophistication and in aesthetic quality. There were a record-breaking 61 entries in 1998, each uniquely combining the ethnographic and expressive parameters of anthropological writing. Comparing apples and oranges is always a difficult task, especially when so many of the entries were and are worthy of singling out for their particular kinds of excellence. It is clear that there is no single way of writing ethnography well. Winner The 1998 winner is Lawrence Cohen, for No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things. Reflecting over a decade of fieldwork in India and North America, this complex book strikes a richly shifting balance between theory and ethnography. Cohen uses cross-cultural juxtaposition to disentangle culture from biology, universal determinants from historical contingencies. The reader is left to make connections and moral comparison within the framework of a "juxtapositional ethnography of sorts" (p. 8), by "interrogating… naturalized categories" (p. 292) through variable cultural constructions. The Western master narrative of old age as inevitable debility contrasts sharply with India’s historically situated rhetoric of the breakdown of the traditional extended family. In India, in an ideal world, the elderly are cared for within a circle of family; their aging is neither publicly visible nor destructive of dignity and self-respect. Alzheimer’s, then, is understood as a disease of modernity rather than as an unfairness that "happens to good people" and contrasts with "normal" old age (p. 63). Even in India, however, the metanarrative absence of aging does not apply equally to Muslim, old women, or the very poor; rather familial support is provided for "elite and urban middle class elderly men" (p. 89). Intergenerational conflict and deferral of a son’s replacement of his father’s authority in the family are the crucial issues in India. It is social more than biological. Weakness, not aging, resolves the transition. Honorable Mention Two books share the Honorable Mention award. In A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America, Kathleen Stewart turns to the "real and imagined hinterlands of America" to provide a "back talk" to the nation’s obsession with "realism, progress, and order: (p.3). The hills of Appalachia simultaneously open a space on the margins of the contemporary United States and "a gap in the theory of culture itself" (p. 5), a need to transcend conventional anthropological relativism (p. 24). Stewart quotes the words of storytellers in transcriptional conventions that convey the cadence of their often dissonant voices, providing "a surreal space of intensification" (p. 21), "an intense synaesthesia of person, sociality, and landscape" (p. 16). The poetic form of ordinary talk sidelines realism and referentiality, as story mediates events and culture emerges as "what people say" (p. 38). Textual genres meander among the "romantic, realist, historical, fantastic, sociological, surreal’ (p. 210), while wild ducks and old cars and well-used buildings weave through recollection in a manner reminiscent of Charles Dickens at his phantasmagoric best. Stewart is an engaged character in her stories. "Imagine," she says, "how finding oneself on the side of the road could be come an epistemological stance" (p. 34). Theorizing of storytellers is a little different from the theorizing of anthropologists. The local poetic of the hills has an "anecdotal flow" (p. 108) even as the author/scribe transcends conventional pretense that critique can be formulated only in the language of reason. And the anecdotes in their turn become "graphic theoretical models" (p. 206). The stories of anthropology flow into the stories of the "camps in the hollers" (p.8). Blessing for a Long Time: The Sacred Pole of the Omaha Tribe results from long-term collaboration of anthropologist Robin Ridington, who wrote the text, and Omaha tribal historical Dennis Hastings (In'aska), who provided illustrations and documentation. Anthropologists, especially in the Americanist tradition, often speak about the importance of collaboration, but we have all too few examples of its successful practice. The text attempts to replicate some of the conventions of storytelling in Omaha oral tradition, which is holographic, with successive repetitions adding layers of familiarity and expanded contexts of meaning. Ridington characterizes Omaha stories as moving through times in circles, stopping and restarting at significant points where stories intersect and overlap. This central character is the sacred pole of the Omaha tribe, named Umon’hon’ti, in English the "Venerable Man" or "Real Omaha." Umon’hon’ti accompanied the Omaha through their years of prosperity, loss of the buffalo, and pressures of the white man’s civilization. In 1888, the sacred pole was transferred to the Peabody Museum at Harvard, where Ridington first made his acquaintance in 1962. In 1989, after just a century away from home, the Venerable Man returned to Nebraska and the safekeeping of his people. Ridington and Hastings have documented that homecoming and its consequences for the contemporary Omaha community. The story moves back and forth between the present collaboration and that of Omaha Francis LaFlesche and anthropologist Alice C. Fletcher a century earlier. Much ritual knowledge has been lost and must be retrieved from the old ethnographies; but Umon'hon’ti is now welcomed by many as the proper symbol of Omaha identity. The prize confers a $500 award and a certificate, and the Honorable Mention confers a certificate. Regna Darnell (Western Ontario), was the judging committee chair for the awards, and the other judges were Jean-Paul Dumont (George Mason) and Barbara Babcock (Arizona). -- Regna Darnell [Anthropology and Humanism 24(1): 3-4] Return to Society for Humanistic Anthropology Page
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