RAI news 2008

Annual General Meeting 2008. The AGM will be held on Thursday 25 September at 4.30 pm, in the Stevenson Lecture Theatre, British Museum, London WC1. It will be followed at approximately 5.30 by the 2008 Henry Myers Lecture, which will be given by Professor Bruno Latour, Professor and Vice-President for Research at Sciences Po, Paris. Professor Latour’s title is ‘What good is it for a man to gain his soul, yet forfeit the whole world?’ The full programme for the event will be advertised in the August issue of AT.

The Huxley Lecturer and Medallist for 2008 will be Professor Maurice Godelier, Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (details tba).

Dr James Staples of Brunel University has been appointed as Honorary Reviews Editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute for a three-year term from September 2008. He succeeds Dr Massimiliano Mollona (outgoing Reviews Editor) and Dr Maureen Bloom who has been Acting Reviews Editor over the intervening period. We thank both for their valuable contributions to the JRAI.

We are delighted to announce that the Curl Essay Prize for 2007 has been awarded to Professor Deborah Winslow of the University of New Hampshire for her essay ‘The village clay: Recursive innovations and self-fashioning among Sinhalese potters’. The judges comment that this was ‘a beautifully written contribution, grounded in attentive ethnographic observation, which demonstrated the way in which the existence of a moral community can confound expectations regarding the impact of industrialisation on societies practising traditional crafts’.

RAI Fellows should now have received their copy of the 2008 Special Issue of the JRAI: The objects of evidence: Anthropological approaches to the production of knowledge, edited by Matthew Engelke. The 2009 Special Issue, edited by Filippo Osella and Benjamin Soares and provisionally entitled Islam, politics and modernity: Anthropological perspectives, will be published by Wiley-Blackwell in early 2009. We expect to announce the Special Issue for 2010 towards the end of this year. A call for proposals for the 2011 Special Issue appears in this issue of AT (submission deadline 31 October 2008).

Library news. Now available to RAI Fellows: an ATHENS password which will enable online access to such journals as are held electronically at the Anthropology Library, Centre for Anthropology, British Museum. Anyone interested please email Jan Ayres, Senior Librarian at the Centre for Anthropology (JAyres@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk).

Anthropological Index Online. The RAI intends to launch a new customised bibliographic service based on the Index; please see separate announcement in this issue of AT.

Summer closure. The RAI office will be closed from Monday 18 to Monday 25 August inclusive, reopening on Tuesday 26 August.

April 2008

The 2008 AGM will take place on Thursday 25 September in the Stevenson Lecture Theatre, British Museum, London WC1. It will be followed by the 2008 Henry Myers Lecture, which will be given by Professor Bruno Latour (title and timetable tba). The Huxley Lecturer and Medallist for 2008 will be Professor Maurice Godelier (details tba).

Education Programme. The Education Committee is now working intensively with the AQA awarding body to develop and submit the proposed anthropology A-level for possible accreditation by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in the early summer of 2008. If the A-level is accredited, teaching is expected to begin in autumn 2009. The RAI has agreed, for the present, to take lead responsibility for the annual London Anthropology Day for Schools, which this year will take place on Thursday 10 July at the British Museum. For details please contact the Education Officer on education@therai.org.uk. The RAI contributed to the 2008 ESRC Festival of Social Science in March by organizing ‘Street fictions and realities: Childhood experiences on film’, an evening of documentary short film screenings held at the Foundling Museum, to whom thanks are due. This was followed by a series of evening screenings at the RAI of films relating to childhood.

Publication programme. The 2008 Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute will be published shortly and distributed free of charge to current RAI Fellows and to institutional subscribers to the JRAI. This Special Issue, the third in the series, is edited by Matthew Engelke and entitled The objects of evidence: Anthropological approaches to the production of knowledge. The Special Issue for 2009, edited by Benjamin Soares and Filippo Osella and (provisionally) entitled Islam, politics and modernity: Anthropological perspectives, is in preparation. A call for proposals for the 2011 Special Issue will be published in the summer of 2008, and we expect to announce the winning submission for 2010 towards the end of this year. Further publication initiatives are being developed by the Publications Committee.

Preliminary work is getting under way for the 11th RAI Festival of Ethnographic Film, expected to take place in 2009. We hope to announce the venue and partner(s) in a forthcoming issue of AT.

The application deadline for the 2008-9 RAI Fellowship in Urgent Anthropology at the University of Kent has been extended to 1 May 2008 (see advertisement in this issue of AT).

We have now opened our attractive new research facility in the rear annexe of 50 Fitzroy St, made possible by the generosity of the W.B. Fagg Charitable Trust and by the decision of Council in 2007 to pay off the building mortgage, thus releasing resources for developing our activities on site. We can now welcome research visitors by appointment to the dedicated research area, while holding meetings, screenings and other small-scale events in the upstairs space now renamed the Council Room.

We are delighted to welcome Ted Goodliffe, who joins us on a consultancy contract until November to develop the RAI’s operations at the Anthropology Library, British Museum.

We are also delighted to announce the following awards. The 2007 Hocart Essay Prize is awarded to Paul Anderson (University of Edinburgh) whose essay ‘Is altruism possible?’ in the judges’ opinion ‘clearly derives from productive exchange between anthropology and philosophy’. The 2007 RAI Student Essay Prize is awarded to Anna Ruddock (University of Sussex) whose essay ‘ “Sorry”: an anthropological study of performative apology and its potential for collective healing’ was adjudged ‘a highly articulate essay on an unusual and important subject’. An honourable mention goes to Sukhpal S. Gill (Department of Primary Care & General Practice, University of Birmingham) for his essay ‘The journey from diagnosis to post-bereavement of a spouse in old age: social perspective’. We thank the departments which submitted student essays in 2007, and wish to encourage further submissions by Departments for the 2008 round (see announcement in this issue of AT).

February 2008

The Huxley Memorial Lecture for 2007 was delivered by Professor Adam Kuper (Brunel University) at the British Museum on 14 December, under the title ‘Changing the subject’. The vote of thanks was proposed by Dr Deborah James (LSE).

We are delighted to announce the award of the 2006 Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology to Harri Englund for his book Prisoners of freedom: Human rights and the African poor, published by University of California Press. The 2006 Wellcome Medal for research in anthropology as applied to medical problems has been awarded to Professor Sophie Day for sustained research over many years, culminating in her book On the game: Women and sex work.

Following the successful 10th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film held at the University of Manchester last June, the Film Committee is now embarking on preparations for the 11th Festival, expected to take place in 2009. A call for offers to host the Festival appears in this issue of AT.

AT readers will be aware of the Education Committee’s sustained work over the last few years to create a programme of education in anthropology at pre-university level, funded initially by HEFCE and currently by the Economic and Social Research Council. Central to this programme is the proposal to establish an A-level qualification in anthropology. The AQA awarding body has now agreed to work with the RAI to develop the A-level and submit it for accreditation to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. A separate announcement appears in this issue of AT, and is posted on the RAI website.

Staff news. Janice Archer, since 2002 the RAI’s Library officer based at the Anthropology Library, will depart at the end of February. She will be greatly missed by RAI Fellows and all users of the Library. Gemma Jones, the RAI’s Education Officer since 2005, will also leave us at the end of February to take up a research post with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The post of Education Officer was advertised in November and attracted a large number of strong applications. Nafisa Fera has been appointed and will join us in mid-February.