2016 Annual Report.Pub
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Annual Report For 2016 “Supporting worldwide research in all branches of Anthropology” Table of Contents Chair’s Introduction ..................................................................................... 3 President’s Report ....................................................................................... 4 Program Highlights SAPIENS & Institutional Development Grants ..................................... 6 Wenner-Gren Symposia Overview ...................................................... 10 Current Anthropology Supplementary Issues .................................... 11 Historical Archives Program ................................................................ 12 International Symposia Reports .......................................................... 14 Meetings of the Anthropology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences ....................................................................................... 18 Hunt Postdoctoral Fellows ................................................................... 19 Fejos Postdoctoral Fellows .................................................................. 23 Wadsworth Fellows .............................................................................. 26 2016 Grantees Dissertation Fieldwork Grants ............................................................. 32 Post-Ph.D. Research Grants ................................................................ 41 Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowships ........................................................... 46 Fejos Postdoctal Fellowships in Ethnographic Film ......................... 47 Conference and Workshop Grants ...................................................... 48 New and Continuing Wadsworth Fellowships .................................... 51 Engaged Anthropology Grants ............................................................ 53 Initiatives in Public Awareness of Anthropology ............................... 55 Initiatives ............................................................................................... 56 Historical Archives Program ................................................................ 57 Major Grant Program Statistics ................................................................ 58 Financial Statements ................................................................................. 67 Leadership .................................................................................................. 81 Reviewers during 2016 .............................................................................. 82 Staff ............................................................................................................. 84 2 Chairman’s Introduction Lorraine Sciarra Chair, Board of Trustees Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc. This year has been a significant year for the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The Foundation celebrated its 75th anniversary with a host of special events and programs while also undergoing a major shift in its leadership. 2016 was Dr. Leslie Aiello’s last full year as Foundation President and in May 2016 Seth Masters stepped down as Chair of the Board. Leslie became President in 2005 and Seth became Board Chair in 2008. Together they secured the foundation’s finances and invigorated its work. Nothing illustrates this better than this past year’s accomplishments including Leslie’s written history of the Foundation and the establishment of SAPIENS, the online news magazine for Anthropology sponsored by Wenner-Gren. I would like to acknowledge and to thank Leslie and Seth for their extraordinary service and leadership. I would also like to welcome the Foundation’s new President, the eminent scholar, Dr. Danilyn Rutherford, who is uniquely qualified to lead the Foundation at this time. We eagerly look forward to the Foundation’s future, including embarking on a formal strategic planning process this year. Lorraine Sciarra Chair, Board of Trustees Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc. 3 President’s Report Leslie C. Aiello President Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc. 2016 was a special year for the Wenner-Gren Foundation—our 75th anniversary. The anniversary pro- vided a welcome opportunity to reflect on the Foundation’s significance to the growth and development of Anthropology and also to give serious thought to its future role in support for the field. One of the most rewarding anniversary initiatives for me was the publication of the official history of the Wenner- Gren Foundation as a special open-access issue of the Foundation’s journal, Current Anthropology. Throughout the research for this issue we discovered interesting new facts and stories about the Foun- dation and the people associated with it, were forced to reject some Foundation legends as no more than myths, and came away with a better understanding of its fortuitous establishment and not always smooth road to the present day. The history makes interesting reading for all Anthropologists. The second major anniversary initiative was the establishment of SAPIENS, the Foundation-sponsored online news magazine for Anthropology. The public profile of Anthropology could be better, and SAPENS is designed to meet this challenge and popularize the field to a wider lay audience. SAPIENS was launched in January 2016 and we are thrilled that in its first year it has been accessed over one million times and individual articles have been syndicated by major established publications, mentioned in the popular press, and received awards for excellent public engagement. Much of this success is down to the efforts of Chip Colwell (Editor-in-Chief) and his dedicated editorial team. They are doing a wonderful job. Other anniversary initiatives include the Innovations in the Public Awareness of Anthropology grant, launched as a temporary program for the anniversary year, and the Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ethnographic Film, established to honor the Foundation’s first Director of Research and pioneer ethno- graphic film maker, Paul Fejos. The Foundation also held an anniversary Board of Trustees meeting in Sintra, Portugal (May 2016) and an anniversary reception at the 115th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November 2016. These and other Foundation events are discussed more fully in the report that follows. Together with the anniversary events, we continued with our regular funding and symposium programs. Two Wenner-Gren Symposia were held in Sintra, Portugal, one on “The Colonization of Asia: Interdisci- plinary Studies and Re-evaluation of the Late Pleistocene Human Evolutionary Record,” and the second on “The Anthropology of Corruption.” Both were great successes. 4 President’s Report, continued Across our funding programs the Foundation received 1525 applications and funded 241 projects, with a grant expenditure of over $4,700,000. Our largest funding programs continue to be the Dissertation Fieldwork grant with 116 grantees and the Post-Ph.D. Research Grant with 41 grantees. I would like to congratulate all of our grantees, and particularly our Hunt and Fejos Postdoctoral Fellows, our Wadsworth Fellows, and our Wadsworth Fellows who have completed their doctorates in 2016. These programs are for early-career scholars, and we wish our Fellows success in their new roles as profes- sional anthropologists. 2016 was a busy and rewarding year and was particularly significant to me because it is my last full year at Wenner-Gren. I retire in June 2017 after twelve enjoyable and fulfilling years at the Foundation. This is my last Annual Report and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the entire Wenner-Gren com- munity -- the staff, the Board of Trustees, the Advisory Council, and our reviewers -- for the support I have received. It has been a pleasure to work with you. The new Wenner-Gren President, Danilyn Rutherford, will take up her position at the beginning of July. I wish her success and know that the Foun- dation will be in good hands as it moves forward. Leslie C. Aiello President (2005-2017) Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc. 5 Program Highlights for 2016 Program highlights include: updates on the SAPIENS news portal; progress reports from Institutional Development Grant recipients; organizers’ statements from two Wenner-Gren Symposia held during the year; descriptions of this year’s Historical Archives Program grants, Hunt and Fejos Postdoctoral Fellow- ships, and new awards made to international scholars to train under our Wadsworth African and International Fellowship programs. SAPIENS: Anthropology/Everything Human SAPIENS, the Wenner-Gren news portal for anthropology, was launched on January 28, 2016. First year highlights include: 1) a total of 154 articles published in 2016; 2) 37,578 Facebook followers, 5,268 Twitter followers, and 4,518 subscribers; 3) over one million reads by SAPIENS’ first anniversary; 4) twenty-two partnerships with other publications; and 5) public recognition of the excellence of SAPIENS articles as exemplified by the Society for American Archaeology’s Gene Stuart Award for Excellence in the public understanding of archaeology, for Elizabeth Svoboda’s piece, “The Darkest Truths” (http:// www.sapiens.org/archaeology/the-darkest-truths/) as well as Medium’s inclusion of “A Flower and A Way of Life in Peril” by Brendan Borrell (http:// www.sapiens.org/culture/a-flower-and-a-way-of-life-in-peril/) among its Best Plant Stories of 2016 listing. SAPIENS continues to