Lee Baker

The 2013 SANA Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America was given to Dr. Lee Baker.

Lee Baker’s pioneering scholarship deploys historical and contemporary analysis to trace the history and politics of racial formation. By tying the development of anthropological constructions of race to the social and political contexts that they both draw upon and alter, Dr. Baker has provided new understandings of both the dangers and possibilities of anthropology’s engagement with public discourse on race in the United States. In doing so, Dr. Baker has reconstructed our understandings of both the anthropology of race and racism and of American history overall: showing how social scientific debates over race, culture, biology, and racial assimilation impacted the civil rights movement, Dr. Baker has shed new light on both this chapter of American history and the development of contemporary discourses and debates. While this scholarly agenda on its own represents an important contribution to public discourse, Dr. Baker has served a public intellectual in other ways, as demonstrated by his work on the African Burial Ground Interpretative Center and his record of publication in mainstream media outlets like NPR, PBS, The New York Times, and the Durham Herald Sun. The purview, political relevance and intellectual acuity of Dr. Baker’s work makes him an especially apt recipient the Society for the Anthropology of North America’s Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America.

Currently, Dr. Blakey is Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Dean of Academic Affairs of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Anthropology and African and African America Studies at Duke University. Dr. Baker received his BA from Portland State University, a PhD in Anthropology from Temple University in 1994, and a Certificate in Africana Studies from the University of Ghana-Legon in 1995. Before coming to Duke in 2000, Dr. Baker taught at Columbia University for several years; he also did a short initial stint at Duke after receiving his doctorate.

Dr. Baker has received a number of prestigious grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Ford Foundation, the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institute and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University. He’s also received a number of awards and honors, among them the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Award for Teaching Excellence from Duke University. Indeed, the authors of Dr. Baker’s nomination letter stressed his devotion to his students, his skill as a teacher, and his role as a graduate student mentor, as well as his role as a leader on campus before and after becoming an administrator.

Dr. Baker is the author of numerous publications. His several dozen book chapters and articles have appeared in journals as varied as North American Dialogue, Souls, Transforming Anthropology (which he also edited from 2005–2007), The American Philosophical Society Proceedings, and the Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences, as well as in edited volumes on American Insecurity, Anthropological Writing, Anthropological Theory, African American Intellectuals, and the Anthropology of the United States. He’s the author of two books, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954, published by UC Berkeley Press in 1998 and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Duke University Press, 2010), and the editor of Life in America: Identity in Everyday Experience (Blackwell Publishing, 2003). In From Savage to Negro, using two key court cases, Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education as bookends, Dr. Baker demonstrates the role that intertwined developments in law, politics, and the constitution and meaning of racial categories played during this transformative period in American history. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, he demonstrates the social and political impact of distinct ethnological treatments of Native American and African Americans around the turn of the 20th century. In these two book Dr. Baker succeeds spectacularly in accomplishing something many anthropologists have attempted: elucidating in great specificity the ways in which anthropological analysis both produces and reflects the broader social, political, and cultural context.

In conclusion, I want to mention Dr. Baker’s record of service to the discipline. He has served on the AAA Executive Board, as well as in other AAA and section leadership roles. And of course, he has been a longtime leader and supporter of SANA, serving as president from 2003–2005. During this period he drew on his political savvy and strong principles to shepherd SANA through a number of challenges, including changes to the AAA governance structure and the development and implementation of AnthroSource, that posed significant threats to role and health of sections, particularly smaller ones like SANA. In doing so, he solidified and strengthened bonds between SANA and other section like ABA, ALLA, AFA, SUNTA and so on which have been and still are vital to SANA’s growth and health. This commitment to our section continues to this day: our fantastic spring 2013 conference was hosted by Duke University, and Dr. Baker not only provided help in securing space and support but was an active and involved presence during the conference itself.

For all of these reasons, it is a great honor to present the 2013 SANA Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America to Dr. Lee Baker.