The Society for Anthropological Sciences Carol R. Ember Book Prize 2025 was awarded to Manvir Singh for Shamanism: The Timeless Religion.
Manvir Singh combines ethnography with cross-cultural analysis and insights from the cognitive sciences to explain why shamanic practices reliably emerge across human societies. He shows that shamanism endures as a powerful, recurrent cultural form because it taps into universal psychological mechanisms while adapting to diverse historical and social contexts.
The University Medal is awarded for excellence in undergraduate studies, outstanding community service, and the promise of future scholarship and contributions to society.
The Department is honored to have won awards from the California State Senate and Legislature for fostering and maintaining a family friendly workplace environment
Professor Joseph has won the 2024 Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award for her copious and influential research and service post-retirement. Only one person in the 10 campus UC system receives this award each year.
Professor Kahn will lead a five-day Advanced Seminar (with Professor Sharad Chari, UC Berkeley Geography) entitled "An Oceanic Anthropology for the Near Future", with additional support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Professor Kahn is co-winner of the 2024 article prize from the Latin American Studies Association for his 2023 Current Anthropology article, "Racializing Aesthetics: 'Boat People,' Maritime Worlds, and the Metonymy of the Haitian Sloop."
Chelsea Cataldo-Ramirez won the AABA (American Academy of Biological Anthropologists) Outstanding Student Presentations Award for her talk titled: "The use and misuse of proxy phenotypes in genotype-phenotype research." Her talk was presented in the "Undermining the production of race science" symposium
Tim Choy and his collaborators Joseph Masco (Chicago), Jake Kosek (Berkeley), and M. Murphy (Toronto) are celebrating after submitting their collaboratively written book manuscript on alternative concepts and methods for addressing multiscalar environmental violence. The book is the outgrowth of Engineered Worlds, a four-campus research and teaching collaboration.
Li Zhang’s book, Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (University of California Press, 2020), won Honorable Mention for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing (2021), presented by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.
