2026 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 an article with an original publication date between June 1, 2024 and May 31, 2026. The deadline for submission is June 15, 2026.
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 Biennial Meetings in May 2027. 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.
To nominate an eligible article, please send a pdf of the published article, along with a cover letter, to SPA Secretary Devin Flaherty (devin.flaherty@utsa.edu) with the subject line “SPA Boyer Prize submission” by June 15, 2026. Submissions that do not include a nomination letter will not be reviewed.
Please direct any questions to SPA Secretary Devin Flaherty at devin.flaherty@utsa.edu
All award and selection committees abide by the SPA’s Conflict of Interest Statement and Recusal Policy.
| 2025 | Joshua Burraway: Becoming Somebody Else: Blackouts, Addiction and Agency amongst London’s Homeless. University of Chicago Press, 2025. |
| 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. |
| 2023 | No prize awarded |
| 2022 | Jeannette Mageo: The Mimetic Nature of Dream Mentation: American Selves in Reformation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. |
| 2021 | Emily Ng: A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao. University of California Press, 2020. Andrea Chiovenda: Crafting Masculine Selves: Culture, War, and Psychodynamics in Afghanistan. Oxford University Press, 2019. |
| 2020 | David Eng and Shinhee Han: Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans. Duke University Press, 2019. |
| 2019 | Stefania Pandolfo: Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam. University of Chicago Press, 2018. |
| 2018 | Kevin P. Groark: “Specters of Social Antagonism: The Cultural Psychodynamics of Dream Aggression among the Tzotzil Maya of San Juan Chamula (Chiapas, Mexico).” Ethos 45(3): 314-341, 2017. |
| 2017 | Cristiana Girodano: Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy. University of California Press, 2014. |
| 2016 | Aaron Denham: “A Psychodynamic Phenomenology of Nankani Interpretive Divination and the Formation of Meaning.” Ethos 43(2): 109-134, 2015. |
| 2015 | P. Steven Sangren: “The Chinese Family as Instituted Family: Or, Rescuing Kinship Imaginaries from the ‘Symbolic’.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(2): 279-299, 2013. |
| 2014 | Tine Gammeltoft: “Toward an Anthropology of the Imaginary: Specters of Disability in Vietnam.” Ethos 42(2): 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 5(4): 477-516, 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 University Press, 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 University Press, 1999. |
| 1999 | Jean Briggs: Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old. Yale University Press, 1998. |
| 1998 | Melford Spiro: Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality: An Essay on Cultural Reproduction. Yale University Press, 1997. |
| 1997 | Allan Johnson and Douglas Price-Williams: Oedipus Ubiquitous: The Family Complex in World Folk Literature. Stanford University Press, 1996. Robert A. Paul: Moses and Civilization: The Meaning Behind Freud’s Myth. Yale University Press, 1996. |
| 1996 | Vamik D. Volkan: “Totem and Taboo in Romania: A Psychopolitical Diagnosis.” Mind and Human Interaction 6(2): 66-83, 1995. Yoram Bilu: “The Taming of the Deviants and Beyond: an Analysis of Dybbuk Possession and Exorcism in Judaism.” The 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 University Press, 1994. |
| 1992 | Suzanne R. Kirshner: “Anglo-American Values in Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis.” In D. 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 P. 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. |