Erin P. Finley

The Boards of Directors of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) have selected Dr. Erin P. Finley to receive the Margaret Mead Award for 2012. Dr. Finley was selected for her book, “Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD Among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan,” published by Cornell University Press in 2011. Dr. Finley is currently an Investigator with the Veterans Evidence-based Research Dissemination and Implementation Center (VERDICT) at the South Texas Veterans Health Care System. She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor with the division of Clinical Epidemiology in the Department of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio.

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Allan F. Burns

President Merrill Eisenberg announced today that Prof. Allan F. Burns had been selected to receive the Sol Tax Distinguished Service Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). The Award will be presented on March 22, 2013, at the 73^rd Annual Meeting of the Society in Denver, Colorado.

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The American Anthropological Association awarded the 2012 Robert B. Textor and Family in Anticipatory Anthropology Award to Elizabeth K. Briody, Tracy L. Meerwarth and Robert T. Trotter II for their work on “The Ideal Plant Culture Project.”  According to AN Online, “Working collaboratively and in cooperation with the General Motors’ community, the Ideal Culture Project helped bring about organizational change in General Motors, and in the course of this work developed an approach that can be used by others seeking organizational change. The Ideal Plant Culture project used a cultural models perspective to help the GM community understand their own culture, identify areas that the community wished to change, and devised tools to assist the community as its members pursued desired changes.”

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Stan Hyland

Stanley E. Hyland, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Memphis and Head of the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, won the 2012 Solon T Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology. “The award recognizes his contributions to the development of public policy aimed at issues of poverty and social inequalities in Memphis, TN and the mid-South, and his intertwined contributions to the development of anthropology as an applied science through what Hyland calls “an ecological approach to policy change. The Solon T Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology was initiated by royalties from Applied Anthropology in America (Elizabeth M Eddy and William L Partridge, eds, 1978), a volume dedicated to Solon Kimball. The award honors outstanding achievements in the development of anthropology as an applied science. The award has been presented every other year since 1984 at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting. It offers an opportunity to honor exemplary anthropologists for outstanding achievements in applied science that have also had important impacts on public policy.”

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Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs (Rutgers University Press, September 2012)

Set in Haiti during the 2004 coup and aftermath and enhanced by research conducted after the 2010 earthquake, Mark Schuller has published Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs (Rutgers University Press, September 2012). This book analyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, Killing with Kindness offers ethnographic comparisons of two Haitian women’s NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs’ roles as intermediaries in “gluing” the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain—a process Schuller calls “trickle-down imperialism.”