Richard G. Condon Prize

Submission Deadline:
May 15, 2024

2024 SPA Condon Prize: Call for Submissions

The Society for Psychological Anthropology solicits entries for the Richard G. Condon Prize for the best student essay in psychological anthropology. The winner will be awarded $500 and a one-year membership in the Society for Psychological Anthropology. The winning essay will be published in Ethos after working with the Editor for final preparation of the manuscript.

The prize is named for the late Richard G. Condon, whose work included the study of adolescence, family, and change among the Canadian Inuit. Psychological anthropology is defined broadly to include interrelationships among psychological, social and cultural phenomena. Essays will be judged on their relevance to psychological anthropology, organization and clarity, and their theoretical and methodological strengths. The author must have been an undergraduate or graduate student during academic year 2023-2024. The author need not be a current member of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. The winner will be recognized at the SPA Business Meeting at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

Papers submitted for consideration must follow these guidelines:

  1. The submitted paper must not be published in any form, or currently under review for publication in any outlet in the U.S. or abroad.
  • Papers must not exceed 9,000 words inclusive of all references, endnotes and acknowledgements.
  • Papers must follow the American Anthropological Association style guide.
  • Submitted papers must be emailed as a single Microsoft Word document to the SPA Secretary, Bridget M. Haas at bmh7@case.edu. Do not submit papers directly to the committee members. The deadline to submit is May 15, 2024.
  • To submit, please include in the email to Dr. Haas:
  1. Subject line of the email should read “Condon Prize Submission.”
  2. In the body of the email, provide the author’s name, permanent (not institutional) mailing address, email address, student affiliation (university and department), and the title of the paper that is attached.
  3. Confirm student status in the body of the email and provide an estimated date of graduation.
  4. Ensure that no evidence of the author’s identity is evident in the text of the Word document or by reference in the paper.

Please send your submissions to Bridget M. Haas at bmh7@case.edu by May 15, 2024.

Any questions about the Condon Prize can also be directed to Dr. Haas.

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

Condon Prize Committee Members:

Dr. Sonya Pritzker (Chair)

University of Alabama

Dr. Lawrence Monocello

Washington University

Dr. Pablo Seward Delaporte (former prize winner!)

St. Louis University


Previous Condon Prize Recipients:

2023Maija-Eliina Sequeira: “Learning about time: Reflections on the
Socialisation of Time-thinking among Children in Colombia and Finland.”
2022Pablo Seward Delaporte: “‘Life Started Hitting Her Like This, This, This’: Vulnerability,
Relationality, and the Makin got Hard Corporeal Selves.”
2021Audrey (AJ) Jones: “Improvising Care: A Theatrical Exploration of Turner Syndrome
Subjectivities”
2020Parsa Bastani. “Feeling at Home in the Clinic: Therapeutics and Dwelling in an Addiction Rehabilitation Center in Tehran, Iran.”
2019No prize awarded
2018Courtney Cecale, “Moral Modes of Attention: From Addict to Ultramarathon Runner”
2017Matthew McCoy, “I Will Not Die On This Street:” Thinking Things Over in Conflicted Belfast”
2016Amir Hampel, “Equal Temperament: Autonomy and Identity in Chinese Speaking Clubs”
2015Suma Ikeuchi, “A case for the fantasy of an audience: Debating Christian selfhood in multicultural Japan”
2014Nofit Itzhak, “Making Selves and Meeting Others in Neo-Shamanic Healing”
2013Jing Xu, “Becoming a Moral Child amidst China’s Moral Crisis”
2012Sara Lewis, “Trauma and the Making of Flexible Minds in the Tibetan Exile Community”
2011Saiba Varma, “The Silent Bio in Psychosocial: Counselors and Psychiatrists in Indian-administered Kashmir”
2010Sonya E. Pritzker, “The Part of Me that Wants to Grab: Embodied Experience and Living Translation in U.S. Chinese Medical Education”
2009Kristin Yarris, “The pain of ‘thinking too much’: Dolor de cerebro and social hardship among rural Nicaraguan women”
2008no prize awarded
2007Sarah Henning David, “What’s Not to Know? A Critique of Pascal Boyer’s theory of religion through a reexamination of Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life”
2006Michael Baran, “Girl, you are not Morena”
Merav Shohet, “Narrating anorexia: ‘Full’ and ‘struggling’ genres of recovery”
2005no prize awarded
2004Julia Cassiniti, “Cultural Psychology of Buddhism in Thailand”
2003no prize awarded
2002Eileen Anderson-Fye, “Never Leave Yourself: Ethnopsychology as Mediator of Psychological Globalization among Belizean Schoolgirls”
2001Diana Smay, “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD): The Disease of Ritual.”
2000no prize awarded
1999Chris McCollum, “The Cultural Patterning of Self Understanding: Evidence from Middle-Class Americans’ Stories of Falling in Love.”
1998no prize awarded
1997Keith McNeal, “Queens in America: An Exploration of Cultural Models, Gay Drag,and Gender Ambivalence”