Catherine Lutz and Patricia Zavella

Drs. Catherine Lutz and Patricia Zavella awarded the 2010 Distinguished Achievement prize.

Professors Lutz and Zavella have made outstanding contributions as scholars, public anthropologists and serve the discipline and the communities they represent. They are both outstanding choices for the SANA Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America, as co-prize winners.

Cathy Lutz is Professor of Anthropology at Brown University and is affiliated with Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies. She has come to distinguish herself as one of the most pathbreaking, original and politically engaged cultural anthropologists of our generation. In her book, Unnatural Emotions her portrait of life on the atoll provided a deeply humanistic understanding of a way of life too often exoticized by the west. Her co-authored book with Jane Collins, Reading National Geographic has sold over 25,000 copies, was reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker and other prominent venues, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Homefront provided a deeply moving account of the impacts of militarization on a North Carolina community. This brave and provocative book won the Anthony Leeds Prize of the American Anthropological Association as well as an honorable mention for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. A follow-up co-edited collection, Local Democracy under Siege, drew together similar studies of other towns whose fate was linked to large military or corporate operations.

Most recently Dr. Lutz is researching the role of the automobile in U.S. culture in a project tentatively entitled Full Metal Jacket: The Car, U.S. Cultures and their Contradictions. It explores the cultural centrality of the automobile in American life and the ways in which it is embedded in core normative discourses of individuality, freedom, technology, and family. She provides an ethnographic lens on the way Americans use and experience and live with their cars makes clear that these are practices with significance for fuel consumption and global warming, highways deaths and maiming, and for consumer debt.

Professor Lutz has distinguished herself as a public intellectual continuing to write and speak about legacy of U.S. bases in the South Pacific for the popular media (e.g. the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Southern Exposure, Women’s Review of Books, the New York Times). She has posted on-line articles on non-combatant death in Iraq and Afghanistan, contributed to ROTC newsletters and been interviewed by many news venues, providing tremendous amount to publicize anthropological approaches to militarism, imperialism and war.

Pat Zavella, UC Santa Cruz is a very distinguished scholar who has shaped the field of Anthropology in the arenas of gender, race, political economy, and Chicano and Latino/Studies. She has provided significant service to the profession of Anthropology in her work as president of ALLA, as a Member-at-Large for SANA, as an elected member of the AAA Executive Board, and as an organizer of many outstanding panels. She served as chair of the Feminist Studies track for the Latin American Studies Association.

The seven co-edited books she has produced have been foundational to the study of gender in Anthropology in general and in Latino/a Anthropology in particular. Her first monograph, Women’s Work and Chicano Families (now in its sixth printing), was a pioneering book that examines the relationship between Chicano family life and gender inequality in the workplace, specifically among cannery workers in the Santa Clara Valley. It was the first single-authored book written by a Chicana about Chicanas in any field, let alone in anthropology and brought feminist theories of political economy together with ethnography and actor-centered narratives.

Dr. Zavella’s forthcoming co-edited volume is truly outstanding. In the project of extending the borderlands concept to include both metaphorical spaces as well as actual geographical spaces beyond the physical U.S.-Mexico border, the optic of gender is a crucial tool in bringing U.S.-Mexico integration to light. Denise A. Segura’s and Patricia Zavella’s rich and expansive edited volume, Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, is crucial in connecting historical and contemporary policies and political economies of Mexico and the U.S. It is important not only because it positions gender front and center, but because it also adds flesh and bone to the borderlands concept by bringing in cultural representations, identity construction and reconstruction, structural, personal and symbolic violence, sexuality, popular culture, transnational social networks, marriage and motherhood into the discussion. Of particular importance in this volume are the ways in which race and difference by class, sexuality, ethnic group, generation and locality relate to women’s shifting identity formation through time and in the space of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Professor Zavella’s single-authored forthcoming book with Duke University Press, I’m Neither Here nor There: Negotiating Mexican Identity through Migration, promises to be an important intellectual contribution which touches on a topic of vital intellectual and political importance: the complexity of the growing Mexican migrant and Mexican-American population in the United States.

In 2003, Professor Zavella was named “NACCS Scholar of the Year,” an award given by the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies. Her book, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, co-authored with the Latina Feminist Group, was winner for the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Outstanding Book Award of 2002. Most recently, Professor Zavella was honored in September of 2008 at Founder’s Day as one of three prominent individuals recognized at UC Santa Cruz.