Annual Report for 2018

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Annual Report for 2018 Annual Report For 2018 “Supporting worldwide research in all branches of Anthropology” Table of Contents President’s Report ....................................................................................... 3 Program Highlights SAPIENS .................................................................................................. 4 Institutional Development Grants .......................................................... 4 Current Anthropology ............................................................................ 7 Wenner-Gren Symposia Overview & Current Anthropology Supplementary Issues ............................. 8 Historical Archives Program .................................................................. 9 International Symposia Reports .......................................................... 10 Hunt Postdoctoral Fellows ................................................................... 16 Fejos Postdoctoral Fellows............................................................... ... 21 Wadsworth Fellows .............................................................................. 24 2018 Grantees Dissertation Fieldwork Grants ............................................................. 31 Post-Ph.D. Research Grants ................................................................ 42 Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowships ........................................................... 47 Fejos Postdoctal Fellowships in Ethnographic Film ......................... 48 Conference and Workshop Grants ...................................................... 49 New and Continuing Wadsworth Fellowships .................................... 52 Engaged Anthropology Grants ............................................................ 54 Initiatives ............................................................................................... 56 Historical Archives Program ................................................................ 57 Major Grant Program Statistics ................................................................ 58 Financial Statements ................................................................................. 67 Leadership .................................................................................................. 84 Reviewers during 2018 .............................................................................. 85 Staff ............................................................................................................. 87 2 This year has been a significant year for the President’s Report Wenner-Gren Foundation. Danilyn Rutherford President Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc. Lorraine Sciarra Chair, Board of Trustees Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc. This was quite a year for the Wenner-Gren Foundation. We moved from our long-time offices on Park Avenue to a sundrenched aerie that occupies an entire floor of a building near the corner of 42nd and Third. We transitioned to a new grant management system, which will make it easier to track the how well we are doing at supporting anthropology world-wide. And we went through a strategic planning process, which culminated in a Board and Advisory Council meeting in Puerto Rico, where we updated the Foundation’s vision of its role in the world. We ended the year with a new mission statement and a set of proposals for new programs. And throughout it all, we continued to support the most interesting anthropological research we could find. In the following pages, you’ll find information on the initiatives we funded over the course of 2018: our grants to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, our fellowships for writing and ethnographic film, the conferences and workshops we funded, the symposia we hosted, and our historical archive grants, designed to safeguard the legacy of senior members of our field. You’ll also find news from SAPIENS, our award-winning magazine for non-anthropologists, which made a splash with the first season of its new podcast. You’ll hear about exciting changes that are afoot at our flagship journal, Current Anthropology, under the leadership of its new editor, Laurence Ralph. What you’ll hear less about, but which is worth emphasizing, is the degree to which we owe these achievements to a wide community of supporters: board members, reviewers, advisory council members, our hard working staff, and the long list of anthropologists, from all around the world, who shared their wisdom to help us chart our course. Next year, there will be new programs to report on: the SAPIENS Public Fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Seminar Program, the Wadsworth Public Fellowship, the Global Initiatives Grant, and the Engaged Research Grant. We are pleased by what we accomplished in 2018. It is providing us with a strong foundation to do even more. Danilyn Rutherford President Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc. 3 Program Highlights for 2018 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 continues to play a key role in Wenner-Gren’s efforts to increase the impact of anthropology on public discussion and debate. The magazine’s achievements in 2018 continue to be impressive. Over its three-year history, SAPIENS has reached over 5 million readers and, again, garnered awards and honors. A SAPIENS column appeared under the category of “Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2017” in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2019 anthology (an extraordinary honor in the world of professional science writing), and Chip Colwell received the Executive Director’s Award from the American Anthropological Association for his work as SAPIENS Editor-in-Chief. SAPIENS, has more than 66,000 Facebook likes and over 13,000 Twitter followers, with Partners including Slate, the Atlantic, and the Pacific Standard publishing syndicated SAPIENS articles, increasing their reach. In 2018, SAPIENS launched a podcast, which was enormously successful. In collaboration with House of Pod, Chip Colwell and his colleagues drew on the wealth of topics addressed by anthropologists to produce a lively series of 10 episodes on topics ranging from immigration to care for the dead to the worldwide market in quinoa. Attracting tens of thousands of downloads from around the world it quickly made Apple’s list of the top five science podcasts. Podcasting provides a wonderful medium for reaching audiences of all kinds, and we are looking forward to carrying forward this experiment in the future. Institutional Development Grant—Progress Reports While the Foundation suspended its Institutional Development Grants in 2018 as it investigates new paths to pursue its long-standing interest in the international development of anthropology, IDG funding — renewable for a maximum of five years — continues and was reported on by the following recipients. 2017 IDG Recipient: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago In 2018, the anthropology faculty at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC Chile) worked with partners from Stanford, University College London, and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Peru to make significant progress toward creating a PhD program. They completed construction of the ethnographic laboratory. They held the first workshop of the international Advisory Council for the PhD program and submitted doctoral program proposal to the university administration. They developed an agreement with the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Anthropology to create a dual- degree PhD program and host the department’s first PhD exchange student from Edinburgh. They established a continuing education program focused on visual anthropology. Their plans for 2019 include equipping the ethnographic laboratory, promoting the PhD program through the creation of a website, launching of a social media campaign, and tabling at regional and international conferences. PUC Chile faculty visits to partner institutions will be scheduled and will include presentations on the PUC Chile PhD program, one-on-one meetings with department chairs and directors of graduate studies, and lunch sessions with graduate students . 4 Program Highlights, continued 2016 IDG Recipient: Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Senegal It’s been a busy year for the leaders of this collaboration, with many important accomplishments. In addition to the Slave Wreck Project and the Global Curatorial Project, they’ve taken part in several innovative global north-south collaborative research projects, all of which are contributing to the training of their students. These include: “The Freedom Villages of Senegal: Examining the Intersections of Heritage, Arts, and Contemporary Antislavery Campaigning” with Cambridge University and Goldsmiths University. “One Hundred Years of Hajj Memories in West Africa and the Maghreb” with Matrix-Michigan State University, the University Mouhmaed V (Rabat-Morocco) and the University Alassane Ouattara (Côte d’Ivoire). “Global Humanities Institute 2020: Chronic Conditions: Childhood and Social Suffering in Global Africa” with the
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