Royal Anthropological Institute

Annual General Meeting 2009. The AGM will be held on Thursday 17 September at 4.30 pm in the Stevenson Lecture Theatre, Clore Education Centre, British Museum, London WC1. All are welcome; only RAI Fellows may vote. We hope that as many Fellows as possible will attend the AGM and participate in the affairs of the Institute. For the detailed AGM agenda and programme, please see the insert included with this issue of AT and posted on the RAI website.

The AGM will be followed at approximately 5.30 by the 2009 Curl Lecture, which will be given by Dr Joost Fontein of Edinburgh University. Dr Fontein’s title is ‘Graves, ruins and belonging in southern Zimbabwe: Towards an anthropology of proximity’. An abstract is posted on the RAI website. The Curl Lecture will be followed by a reception for all present.

The Annual Report for 2008 has been published and is being sent to all Fellows with this issue of AT.

The Huxley Memorial Lecturer and Medallist for 2009 is Professor Ian Hodder of Stanford University. Professor Hodder’s Huxley Lecture, entitled ‘Human-thing entanglement: Towards an integrated archaeological perspective’, will be given on Monday 2 November in the Stevenson Lecture Theatre, British Museum, London WC1 (start time tba). An abstract is posted on the RAI website.

We are pleased to announce the following awards:

The Curl Essay Prize for 2008 is awarded to Mark Mosko (ANU, Canberra) for his essay ‘Partible penitents: Dividual personhood and Christian practice in Melanesia and the West’. The judges commented that this was ‘an ingenious and well-constructed essay which places Melanesian Christianity into the context of ethnographies of personhood and non-western modernities’.

The Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology (2007) has been awarded to David Pratten (St Antony’s College, Oxford) for his book The man-leopard murders: History and society in colonial Nigeria, published by Edinburgh University Press.

The AM Hocart Essay Prize and RAI Student Essay Prize for 2008 have been awarded, respectively, jointly to Farrah Folami-Carrer (Lampeter; ‘Separate communities, separate lives: Bangladeshi integration in Tower Hamlets’) and Amy McLennan (Oxford; ‘What the nose knows: The role of odour in ritually-induced bodily transformations and implications for obesity research in the Pacific Islands’); and jointly to James McMurray (Kent; ‘The mechanics of syncretism: An anthropological study of religious change in early modern Haiti and classical Japan’) and Francesca Mezzenzana (UCL; ‘Anthropology meets history: Some reflections on post-modernism, identity and the Other’).

The 2009-10 RAI Fellowship in Urgent Anthropology has been awarded to Dr Simron Jit Singh (University of Klagenfurt, Austria) for a project relating to the people of the Nicobar Islands affected by the 2004 tsunami.

Medical Anthropology in Europe: Shaping the field. The RAI plans to organize a conference on this theme on 1-2 July 2010, in association with the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and St Antony’s College, Oxford. A call for panel papers appears in this issue of AT, and further details are posted on the RAI website.

Readers are reminded that the deadline for proposals for the Special Issue of the JRAI for publication in 2012 is 30 October 2009; see announcement in this issue of AT.

RAI Film Prizes. The following Film Prizes were awarded at the 11th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film in Leeds in July (for images see right and back cover):

RAI Film Prize: Bury the hatchet. Aaron Walker (USA) 2009, 84 mins.

Basil Wright Film Prize: Balkan rhapsodies. Jeff Silva (USA) 2008, 55 mins.

Wiley-Blackwell Student Film Prize: Sermiligaaq 65º54’N, 36º22’W. Anni Seitz, Sophie Elixhauser (Germany) 2008, 64 mins, (Commendations: Enet Yapai: An Ambonwari girl. Daniela Vávrová (Slovenia) 2008, 25 mins; Black mountain. Charlotte Whitby-Coles, Amin Hajee (UK/India) 2008, 84 mins,

Material Culture and Archaeology Film Prize:

Umiaq skin boat. Jobie Weetaluktuk (Canada) 2008, 32 mins; Je ne suis pas moi-même. Alba Mora, Ana Santamaria (Spain) 2009 50 mins.

Intangible Culture Film Prize (Music – Dance – Performance): Bury the hatchet. Aaron Walker (USA) 2009, 84 mins. (Commended: Firekeepers. Rosella Ragazzi, Britt Kramvig (Norway) 2007, 57 mins; Vasile Nedea. Sjoerd van Grootheest (the Netherlands) 2009, 43 mins.

Wallflower Press Audience Film Prize: The meaning of life. Hugh Brody (Canada) 2008, 82 mins.

For further information please contact: Susanne Hammacher, Film Officer.

Library opening hours. The Anthropology Library at the Centre for Anthropology, British Museum, is now open from 10.00 am to 5.00 pm on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and 12.00 to 5.00 on Thursdays. Fellows are reminded that they can obtain an Athens password enabling online access to journals held electronically in the library (for details please email Gary Steele).

Membership subscriptions for 2010. We are pleased to announce that individual fees for Fellows, Members and Student Associates in 2010 will be frozen at the 2009 level. The fees for 2010 will therefore be as shown below (£ sterling rates; for Euro and $US equivalents and details of variations due to currency fluctuations and VAT, please see the 2010 membership leaflet and RAI website):

We regret to announce the death on 22 June of Mrs Joan Burridge, a former member of the RAI’s staff working with the (then) Anthropological Index.

Summer closure. The RAI office will be closed from Monday 24 to Monday 31 August, reopening on Tuesday 1 September.

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