The Boyer Prize

Nominations Due by:

May 15, 2024

2024 SPA Boyer Prize: Call for Submissions

The Society for Psychological Anthropology awards the Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology annually to a published book and/or an article that addresses the psychodynamic process in cultural context. Because the Boyer Prize was not awarded in 2023**, please note the expanded publication time frame eligibility. The 2024 Boyer Prize will be awarded to a book and/or article published between June 1, 2022 and May 15, 2024. The deadline for submission is May 15, 2024.

By “psychodynamic process” we mean the implicit and often unconscious assumptions that shape emotions, relationships, dreams, and other aspects of subjective experience. By “cultural context” we mean the social world in which individuals are embedded and which is the usual focus of anthropological work. The Boyer Prize seeks to encourage and to reward work that takes a psychodynamic approach to a cultural phenomenon, an anthropological perspective on the psychodynamically oriented clinical context, or in some way integrates the theoretical or clinical insights of psychoanalysis with the traditional methods or subject matter of anthropology. Winners of the Boyer Prize are members of future selection committees on a three-year rotation.

The Boyer Prize is named for Dr. L. Bryce Boyer (1916-2000), a psychoanalyst who advanced the concept of countertransference and who, with his anthropologist wife, Ruth Boyer, conducted long-term research with the Mescalero Apache.

Nominations may be made by any active member of the American Anthropological Association, including the author. There is a preference for the award to be given to those who are members of the SPA, although this is not a requirement of the award. Two separate awards may be issued (one for a book and one for an article), depending on submissions.

The winner(s) of the Boyer Prize will be announced at the SPA Biennial meetings in Spring 2025. The prize comes with a $500 award.

All nominations, including self-nominations, must be accompanied by a cover letter discussing the significance of the work’s contribution to psychodynamic anthropology.

Submissions must be received by May 15, 2024, following the below guidelines:

If you are submitting a paper, all nomination materials (article PDF, cover letters) should be emailed to all the three prize committee members (email addresses below), cc’ing SPA Secretary Bridget M. Haas (bmh7@case.edu) with the email subject line “SPA Boyer Prize submission.”

If you are submitting a book, please email the nomination cover letter and, if possible, a PDF of the book to committee Chair, Andrea Chiovenda at chiovendaa@duq.edu, cc’ing SPA Secretary Bridget M. Haas (bmh7@case.edu) with the email subject line “SPA Boyer Prize submission.”  We will then supply you with the mailing address for the three Boyer Prize committee members to which hard copies of the book must be sent (postmarked no later than May 31, 2024).

Please direct any questions to SPA Secretary Bridget M. Haas at bmh7@case.edu

 All award and selection committees abide by the SPA’s Conflict of Interest Statement and Recusal Policy

** Please note that due to technical issues, submissions responding to last year’s (2023) Boyer Prize announcement were likely not received by the Boyer Prize committee. It has come to our attention that the 2023 Boyer Prize solicitation of submissions contained an incorrect email address for the prize committee chair, Dr. Chiovenda. Therefore, if you submitted an article or book for the 2023 Boyer Prize, we ask that you please re-submit the work for consideration for the 2024 Boyer Prize, which includes an expanded eligibility time frame, to include publications between June 1, 2022 and May 15, 2024.

Dr. Andrea Chiovenda (Chair)

Department of Psychology

Duquesne University

chiovendaa@duq.edu

Dr. Michael D’Arcy

Department of Anthropology

Haverford College

mdarcy@haverford.edu

Dr. Emily Ng  

Department of Anthropology

University of Pennsylvania

emily.ng@sas.upenn.edu

Past Boyer Prize Recipients:

2023

no prize awarded

2022

Jeannette Mageo: “The Mimetic Nature of Dream Mentation: American Selves in Reformation”

2021

Emily Ng: “A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao”; Andrea Chiovenda: “Crafting Masculine Selves: Culture, War, and Psychodynamics in Afghanistan.

2020

David Eng, PhD; Shinhee Han, PhD: “Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans” (2018, Duke University Press)

2019

Stefania Pandolfo, PhD: “Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (2018, University of Chicago Press)

2017

Christiana Girodino: “Migrants in Translation” (2014, University of California)

2016

Aaron Denim: “A Psychodynamic Phenomenology of Nankani Interpretive Divination and the Formation of Meaning,” (Ethos 43(2):109-134)

2015

P. Steven Sangren: “The Chinese Family as Instituted Family: Or, Rescuing Kinship Imaginaries from the ‘Symbolic,’” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 279-299, 2013.

2014

Tine Gammeltoft: “Toward an Anthropology of the Imaginary: Specters of Disability in Vietnam,” (Ethos 42(4): 153-174, 2014)

2013

John Borneman: “Daydreaming, Intimacy, and the Intersubjective Third in Fieldwork Encounters in Syria,” (American Ethnologist, 38(2): 234-248, 2011)

2012

Douglas Hollan: “On the Varieties and Particularities of Cultural Experience,” (Ethos, 40(1): 37-53, 2012)

2011

Kevin P. Groark:  “Discourses of the Soul: The Negotiation of Personal Agency in Tzotzil Maya dream narrative,” (American Ethnologist 36(4): 705-721, 2009)

2010

Steven Parish: “Subjectivity and Suffering in American Culture: Possible Selves” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

2009

Bambi Chapin: Transforming Possession: Josephine and the Work of Culture,” (Ethos 36(2):220-245, 2008); Naomi Quin: “Universals of Child Rearing,” (Anthropological Theory 6(4): 387-405, 2005)

2008

Rebecca Lester: “Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent,” (University of California Press, 2005)

2007

Vincent Crapanzano: “The Scene: Shadowing the Real,” (Anthropological Theory 6(4): 387-405, 2006)

2004

Patricia Gherovici: “The Puerto Rican Syndrome, Other Press, 2003”

2003

Brian Keith Axel: “The Diasporic Imaginary,” (Public Culture 14(2): 411-428, 2002)

2002

Drew Westen: “Beyond the Binary Opposition in Psychological Anthropology: Integrating Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science,” in Carmella C. Moore and Holly F. Mathews, eds., The Psychology of Cultural Experience, pp. 21-47, Cambridge, 2001

2001

Tanya M. Lurhmann: “Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry,” (Knopf, 2000)

2000

Nancy Chodorow: “The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture,” (Yale, 1999)

1999

Jean Briggs: “Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old,” (Yale, 1998)

1998

Melford Spiro: Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality, (Yale, 1997)

1997

Allan Johnson and Douglas Price-Williams: “Oedipus Ubiquitous: The Family Complex in World Folk Literature,” (Stanford, 1996); Robert A. Paul: “Moses and Civilization:The Meaning Behind Freud’s Myth,” (Yale, 1996)

1996

Vamik D. Volkan: “Totem and Taboo in Romania: A Psychopolitical Diagnosis.” Journal of Mind and Human Interaction, 6(2), 1995. (Journal of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction); Yoram Bilu: “The Taming of the Deviants and Beyond: an Analysis of Dybbuk Possession and Exorcism in Judaism” (Psychoanalytic Study of Society 11:1-32, 1985)

1995

Suzette Heald: “Every Man a Hero: Oedipal Themes in Gisu Circumcision.” In S. Heald and A. Deluz, eds., Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: An Encounter Through Culture, pp. 184-209, Routledge, 1994

1994

Anne Allison: “Nightwork, Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club.” (Chicago, 1994)

1992

Suzanne R. Kirshner: “Anglo-American Values in Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis.” In David Spain, ed., Psychoanalytic Anthropology Fifty Years After Freud: Essays Marking the Fiftieth Anniversary of Freud’s Death, pp. 162-197, Psyche Press, 1992

1991

Dan Forsyth: “Sibling Rivalry, Aesthetic Sensibility, and Social Structure in Genesis.” (Ethos 19(4):453-510, 1991)

1990

Katherine T. Ewing: “The Illusion of Wholeness: ‘Culture,’ ‘Self,’ and the Experience of Inconsistency.” (Ethos 18(3):251-278 1990)

1988

Waud Kracke: “Kagwahiv Mourning II: Ghosts, Grief, and Reminiscences.” (Ethos 16(2):209-222 1988)

1987

Sudhir Kakar: “Psychotherapy and Culture: Healing in the Indian Tradition,” in Merry I. White and Susan Pollack, eds., The Cultural Transition: Human Experience and Social Transformation in the Third World and Japan, pp. 9-23, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986