Tine Gammeltoft Receives 2015 Basker Memorial Prize

Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox WilcoxW at wcsu.edu

Thu Dec 17 08:12:52 PST 2015

Dear All:

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming of Monday announcements to share with you this wonderful news that Ann Marie Leshkowich has brought to our attention. Tine Gammeltoft has won the 2015 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize! Ann Marie's announcement to us is below:

I am pleased to share with the list the wonderful news that Tine M. Gammeltoft’s book, Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2014), has received the 2015 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. The Eileen Basker Memorial Prize is “awarded annually for a significant contribution to anthropological scholarship on gender and health by a scholar (or scholars) from any discipline or nation for a specific book, article, film, or exceptional PhD thesis produced within the preceding three years. The Prize is awarded to the work judged to be the most courageous, significant, and potentially influential contribution to this area of scholarship” (http://www.medanthro.net/about/sma-awards/ileen-basker-memorial-prize/).

This is the second major book award that Tine has received for Haunting Images. The first was the 2014 American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize. The prize committee had this to say about the book:

“The 2014 AES Senior Book Prize is awarded to Tine M. Gammeltoft (U Copenhagen) for her book Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (2014, University of California Press). A beautifully written and extraordinarily powerful ethnography, Haunting Images is based on over ten years of fieldwork in Vietnam. It introduces readers to the use of sonography as a selective technology of prenatal diagnosis in a context marked by the realities of Vietnamese socialism; a heterogeneous cosmology that includes Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism; the ongoing effects of Agent Orange use during the ‘American War;’ and the hard choices that characterize daily life in a resource-poor context. While dealing with very contemporary issues, the book offers a fresh take on such longstanding anthropological concerns as personhood and belonging. It is an ethnography that asks big, difficult questions – e.g., what constitutes a human being? – and provides fascinating, sometimes troubling answers. Gammeltoft makes Vietnam global and makes all of us, whatever our nationality or area of research, care about the women and families about whom she writes. As the book’s nominator, Rayna Rapp, put it, ‘Haunting Images makes for haunting reading.’ We are pleased to award it the 2014 AES Senior Book Prize” (http://aesonline.org/awards/senior-book-prize/2014-winner-haunting-images-vietnam/).

More information about the book is available from the University of California Press website: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520278431.

Congratulations, Tine, on this well-deserved recognition!

Sincerely,

Wynn

Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox

Professor of History and Non-Western Cultures

Western Connecticut State University

181 White Street

Danbury, CT 06810

Phone (203) 837-8565

Fax: (203) 837-3968

Diane Fox dnfox70 at gmail.com

Thu Dec 17 08:23:22 PST 2015

Wonderful book!!!

Congratulations, Tine!! Great news!

Diane

Bennett, Trude A trude_bennett at unc.edu

Thu Dec 17 08:29:58 PST 2015

Congratulations! A terrific book, and an excellent choice! Trude