Nominations Due by:
July 15, 2025
2025 SPA Boyer Prize: Call for Submissions
The Society for Psychological Anthropology awards the Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology annually to a published work that addresses the psychodynamic process in cultural context. This year, the Boyer Prize will be awarded to a book with an original publication date between May 2024 and June 2025. The deadline for submission is July 15, 2025.
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.
The winner of the Boyer Prize will be announced at the SPA Business Meeting during the 2025 American Anthropological Association annual meeting in November. 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 July 15, 2025, following the below guidelines:
Please email the nomination cover letter and, if possible, a PDF of the book to SPA Secretary Dr. 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 June 15, 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.
Dr. Julia Fierman
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University
Dr. Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Emory University
Previous Prize Recipients
| 2024 | Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires. Duke University Press, 2022. Julia Fierman: “Femme Populism: Vulnerability and Desire in Argentine Political Aesthetics” Ethos 51(2): 166-182; 2023. |
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2023 | No prize awarded |
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2022 |
Jeannette Mageo: “The Mimetic Nature of Dream Mentation: American Selves in Reformation” |
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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. |
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2020 |
David Eng, PhD; Shinhee Han, PhD: “Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans” (2018, Duke University Press) |
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2019 |
Stefania Pandolfo, PhD: “Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (2018, University of Chicago Press) |
| 2018 | Kevin P. Groark: “Specters of Social Antagonism: The Cultural Psychodynamics of Dream Agression among the Tzotzil Maya of San Juan Chamula (Chiapas, Mexico)” Ethos 45(3): 314-341,2017. |
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2017 |
Christiana Girodino: “Migrants in Translation” (2014, University of California) |
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2016 | Aaron Denham: “A Psychodynamic Phenomenology of Nankani Interpretive Divination and the Formation of Meaning,” (Ethos 43(2):109-134) |
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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. |
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2014 |
Tine Gammeltoft: “Toward an Anthropology of the Imaginary: Specters of Disability in Vietnam,” (Ethos 42(4): 153-174, 2014) |
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2013 |
John Borneman: “Daydreaming, Intimacy, and the Intersubjective Third in Fieldwork Encounters in Syria,” (American Ethnologist, 38(2): 234-248, 2011) |
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2012 |
Douglas Hollan: “On the Varieties and Particularities of Cultural Experience,” (Ethos, 40(1): 37-53, 2012) |
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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) |
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2010 |
Steven Parish: “Subjectivity and Suffering in American Culture: Possible Selves” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) |
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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) |
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2008 |
Rebecca Lester: “Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent,” (University of California Press, 2005) |
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2007 |
Vincent Crapanzano: “The Scene: Shadowing the Real,” (Anthropological Theory 6(4): 387-405, 2006) |
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2004 |
Patricia Gherovici: “The Puerto Rican Syndrome, Other Press, 2003” |
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2003 |
Brian Keith Axel: “The Diasporic Imaginary,” (Public Culture 14(2): 411-428, 2002) |
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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 |
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2001 |
Tanya M. Lurhmann: “Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry,” (Knopf, 2000) |
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2000 |
Nancy Chodorow: “The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture,” (Yale, 1999) |
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1999 |
Jean Briggs: “Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old,” (Yale, 1998) |
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1998 |
Melford Spiro: Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality, (Yale, 1997) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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 |
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1994 |
Anne Allison: “Nightwork, Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club.” (Chicago, 1994) |
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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 |
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1991 |
Dan Forsyth: “Sibling Rivalry, Aesthetic Sensibility, and Social Structure in Genesis.” (Ethos 19(4):453-510, 1991) |
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1990 |
Katherine T. Ewing: “The Illusion of Wholeness: ‘Culture,’ ‘Self,’ and the Experience of Inconsistency.” (Ethos 18(3):251-278 1990) |
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1988 |
Waud Kracke: “Kagwahiv Mourning II: Ghosts, Grief, and Reminiscences.” (Ethos 16(2):209-222 1988) |
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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 |