Nominations Due by:
June 15, 2025
2025 SPA Stirling Prize: Call for Submissions
The Stirling Prize is awarded to a previously published work (this year, it will be awarded for an article) that makes an outstanding contribution to any area of psychological anthropology.
The Stirling Award was originally established in 1968 by Rebecca and Gene Stirling. Winners of this prestigious award recognizing the best published work in psychological anthropology become members of the selection committee for a three-year rotation.
Articles published between July 15, 2023 and June 15, 2025 are eligible for consideration. Unpublished manuscripts, dissertations, and web publications are not eligible. Edited volumes are not eligible for the book prize. The deadline for submission is June 15, 2025.
The winner will be announced at the SPA Business Meeting during the 2025 American Anthropological Association annual meeting in New Orleans and will receive a $500 cash prize.
Nominations may be made by any active member of the American Anthropological Association, including the author. To nominate an eligible article, please send a pdf of the published article, along with a cover letter outlining the article’s contribution to the field of psychological anthropology to SPA Secretary Dr. Bridget M. Haas (bmh7@case.edu) with the subject line “Stirling Prize submission” by June 15, 2025. Submissions that do not include a nomination letter will not be reviewed.
Any questions regarding the prize can be directed to SPA Secretary, Dr. Bridget Haas at bmh7@case.edu.
All award and selection committees abide by the SPA’s Conflict of Interest and Recusal Policy
Dr. Jonathan Yahalom (Chair)
Department of Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles
Dr. Nicholas Long
Department of Anthropology
London School of Economics
Dr. Allen Tran
Department of Anthropology
Bucknell University
| Year | Published Work |
| 2024 | Allen Tran: A Life of Worry: Politics, Mental Health, and Vietnam’s Age of Anxiety. University of California Press, 2023. |
| 2023 | Yahalom, J., Frankfurt, S., & Hamilton, A. B. (2023). Between Moral Injury and Moral Agency: Exploring Treatment for Men with Histories of Military Sexual Trauma. Medicine Anthropology Theory, 10(1), 1-21. |
| 2022 | Merav Shohet. Silence and Sacrifice: Family stories of care and the limits of love in Vietnam (UC Press, 2021) |
| 2022 | Chikako Ozawa-De Silva. The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan (UC Press, 2021) |
| 2021 | von Poser, Anita & Edda Willamowski. The Power of Shared Embodiment. Renegotiating Non/belonging and In/exclusion in an Ephemeral Community of Care. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 44 (4): 610-828, 2020. |
| 2020 | Sarah WIllen. Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. |
| 2019 | Nicholas Long. Suggestions of Power: Searching for Efficacy in Indonesia’s Hypnosis Boom. Suggestions of Power: Searching for Efficacy in Indonesia’s Hypnosis Boom. Ethos, 46(1), 70-94. |
| 2018 | Naomi Leite, Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging, UC Press, 2017. |
| 2017 | Rebecca Lester. Self-governance, psychotherapy, and the subject of managed care: Internal Family Systems therapy and the multiple self in a US eating-disorders treatment center. American Ethnologist, 44: 23–35. |
| 2016 | Julia Cassaniti. Living Buddhism: Mind, Self and Emotion in a Thai Community. Cornell University Press 2019. |
| 2015 | Kristin Yarris, “‘Pensado mucho’ (‘Thinking too much’)”: Embodied distress among grandmothers in Nicaraguan transnational families,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 38: 473-498, 2014. |
| 2014 | Geoffrey Saxe, Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas: Papua New Guinea Studies. University of Cambridge Press |
| 2013 | Talia Weiner, “The (Un)managed Self: Paradoxical Forms of Agency in Self-Management of Bipolar Disorder,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 35(4): 448-483, 2011. |
| 2012 | Cheryl Mattingly, The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland (University of California Press) |
| 2011 | Anand Pandian, “Interior Horizons: An Ethical Space of Selfhood in South India,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16(1): 64-83, 2010. |
| 2010 | Elly Teman, Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self. University of California Press |
| 2009 | Rebecca Lester “Brokering Authenticity: Borderline Personality Disorder and the Ethics of Care at an American Eating Disorder Clinic,” Current Anthropology 50(3), 2009. |
| 2009 | Angela Garcia, “The Elegiac Addict: History, Chronicity, and the Melancholic Subject,” Cultural Anthropology 23(4): 718-746, 2008. |
| 2008 | Alex Hinton, Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide, University of California Press, 2005 |
| 2007 | Everett Yuehong Zhang, “Rethinking Sexual Repression in Maoist China: Ideology, Structure, and the Ownership of the Body,” Body and Society 11(3): 1-25, 2005. |
| 2006 | Joao Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, University of California Press, 2005 |
| 2005 | Susan Seymour, “Multiple Caretaking of Infants and Young Children: An Area in Critical Need of a Feminist Psychological Anthropology,” Ethos 32 (4:) 416-413, 2004. |
| 2003* | Carmella Moore, Kim Romney, and Ti-Lien Hsia, “Cultural, Gender, and Individual Differences in Perceptual and Semantic Structures of Basic Colors in Chinese and English,” Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2(1): 1-28, 2002 |
| 1999 | Linda Garro, “Remembering what one knows and the construction of the past: a comparison of cultural consensus theory and cultural schema theory,”Ethos 28: 275-319, 2000. |
| 1997 | Yoram Bilu and Yehuda C. Goodman. “What does the soul say?: Metaphysical uses of facilitated communication in the Jewish ultraorthodox community. “Ethos, 25(4), 375-407. 1997 |
| 1995 (after ’95 award on biennial basis) | Christopher Boehm, “Egalitarian behavior and reverse dominance hierarchy” Current Anthropology 34: 227-254, 1993 |
| 1993 | Begoña Aretxaga. “Dirty Protest: Symbolic Overdetermination and Gender in Northern” Ireland Ethnic ViolenceEthos, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 123-148 |
| 1992 | Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, “Immanuel Kant among the Tenejapans: anthropology as empirical philosophy,” Ethos 22(1):3-41 1994 |
| 1991 | Steve Derné, “Beyond institutional and impulsive conceptions of self: family structure and the socially anchored real self,” Ethos 20(3):259-88 |
| 1990 | Janis Jenkins, “Anthropology, Expressed Emotion, and Schizophrenia,” Ethos 19: 387-431, 1991 |
| 1989 | Charles W. Nuckolls, “Culture and Causal Thinking: Diagnosis and Prediction in a South Indian Fishing Village,” Ethos 19(1):3-51, 1991 |
| 1988 | Thomas J. Csordas and Thomas Gregor |
| 1987 | Dennis B. McGilvray |
| 1986 | T. M. Luhrmann, The magic of secrecy,” Ethos 17(2):131-166, 1989 |
| 1985 | Nancy Scheper-Hughes |
| 1984 | Lila Abu-Lughod |
| 1983 | Claudia Strauss, “Beyond ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’ education: Uses of psychological theory in anthropological research,” Ethos 12(3):195-222, 1984 |
| 1980 | Catherine Lutz |
| 1979 | William W. Dressler |
| 1978 | Susan Abbot and Ruben Klein, “Depression and Anxiety among Rural Kikuyu in Kenya” |
| 1977 | Geoffrey White |
| 1976 | Lorraine Kirk and Michael Burton |
| 1975 | Nancy G. Graves and Theodore D. Graves |
| 1974 | Charlene Bolton, Ralph Bolton, Carol Michelson and Jeffrey Wilde |
| 1972 | Ralph Bolton |
| 1971 | Theodore Graves |
| 1970 | Carolyn Henning Brown |
| 1969 | James P. Spradley |
| 1968 | Victor Barnouw |