1. Interested individuals should submit a 3-4,000 word overview of their proposed manuscript – detailing (a) the problem to be addressed, (b) the manner in which the problem will be approached, and (c) the style of writing to be used in writing the manuscript. We would discourage the submission of CV’s. A short summary of your preparation for writing the book with any personal background you deem relevant to your submission is sufficient.

2. Individuals interested in the mid-career award should also submit one or more publications which demonstrate the ability to write for a public audience.

3. Individuals interested in the graduate student award should also submit (a) a signed statement from their doctoral committee or doctoral supervisors confirming their support for the applicant writing his or her doctoral dissertation in a form readable by a broad, public audience as well as (b) a paper, published or unpublished, that demonstrates the applicant’s ability to write for a broad, public audience.

The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2009.

Submissions should be emailed to: bookseries@publicanthropology.org with the relevant material enclosed as attachments. Questions regarding the competitions should be also directed to Dr. Rob Borofsky at: competitions@publicanthropology.org.

The Three Criteria Used for Judging Proposals
(with examples drawn from the 2008 competition)

The 2008 Winning Proposal
for the Professional Category

The first criterion involves a set of questions: Does the submission address a problem that goes beyond anthropology? Is the problem defined in terms that will immediately draw broad public’s interest? Numerous submissions in the 2008 competition positively addressed problems beyond the discipline. As a result, we focused on how authors framed their problems Was a problem framed in a way that would likely attract a broad range of readers? Succinctly phrased, this criterion involves defining public problems in publicly relevant ways. For example, the winning 2008 proposal in the Professional Category goes beyond Sierra Leone to discuss the human potential for resilience – something that attracts public attention in these difficult times. A runner-up in the Graduate Student category's work with PTSD among returning veterans is of immediate interest to families and officials striving to cope with the massive influx of veterans trying to readjust to American society.

The second criterion involves the “fit” between the problem and the data. Is there a natural fit between the problem and the ethnographic locale? Or do readers have to stretch to see how addressing a problem in an unfamiliar locale might be relevant and interesting to them? Concerns with the environment, for example, are of broad interest today. But most readers are not interested in comprehending how an environmental problem in Africa or Asia is addressed unless they see an immediate connection to their own environmental concerns. The winning 2008 submission in the Graduate Student Category deals with a distant locale that most readers have only the vaguest awareness of or interest in. Still, the idea of child abuse – and how being a child solider or a child sex worker may be viable means for staying alive under horrific conditions – attracts readers to delve deeper into the issue. What is meant by child protection in violent conflicts? How might child protection be made effective under such conditions? The mental and physical distance of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from most readers is not an impediment. Readers can see, by comparison and contrast, underlying problems in child abuse and how one might effectively cope with them in different contexts. A runner-up proposal in the Professional Category involves the merging of what, on the surface, appear to be two distinct health care systems – one Mexican, one American. She demonstrates that they, in fact, constitute a single system with people coping with the dysfunctions in one by using the other (not unlike indigenous and Western medicine in Third World settings). It is a provocative, powerful point given the current concern with health care and health care reform.

The easiest way to evaluate how your proposal stands in respect to the first two criteria is to discuss your proposal with a non-academic family member, relative or friend. Are they puzzled when you explain your proposal to them? Do they try to change the topic? Or do they find it intriguing and keep asking questions? A critical test is listening to how the person with whom you discussed your research then describes your research to someone else. What gets emphasized? What drops out of the discussion? The distilled statement that your non-academic friend passes on to another non-academic person is perhaps the best test of whether your proposal effectively addresses a public concern in a readily understood public way.

The third criterion involves writing style. Some submissions attracted immediate interest while others plodded along in heavy, disciplinary prose. Writing for the broader public means writing in ways that keep a reader’s attention. Students have to read certain material to pass a test. The general public is not such a captive audience. One needs to write in ways that intrigue, that attract them. Here is an example from the winning submission in the Professional Category (that resonates with Anne Fadiman’s writing in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down):

The people who color this book are remarkable in that they are all too imperfectly human. They were able to survive the civil war through their imperfections, their willingness to bend their standards and sacrifice appearances to cope with the brutal situation at hand. Many of them made what seem at first glance to be appalling choices and alliances in the heat of the moment. However, steeped in these tales of horror and compromise are the seeds of human perfections. The clarity of a few years’ distance from the war shows us that the sheer will to survive creates coping mechanisms that allow ordinary, flawed human beings to endure unimaginable circumstances. Brute survival—a seemingly animal instinct that we often see as a reflection of human frailty—was shaped in this instance by a foundational moral code, a need to create and maintain fundamental connections with other people. It is a grain of perfection we can grip tightly during our quest to understand what it means to be human: the mere fact that we are complex, interdependent social beings, and our survival is predicated on us retaining this basic feature. Coping, in whatever desperate ways it manifests itself, is not a flaw of the all-too-human. It is a complex act of social and physical survival, and must be understood and respected as such.

Or take a submission by a runner-up in the Graduate Student Category (that resonates with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed):

In the middle of a lazy late morning conversation in the basti (slum), the woman I was talking to furrowed her brows, halted mid-sentence, cocked her ears and looked over the homes to her right, and ran. Over there, the large blue Delhi Development Authority water tanker truck was surfing the potholes to slow amidst a swarm of frenzied people running toward it with containers of all sizes. You can never know when the water truck will come—or when it will return. In this settlement in the Okhla Industrial Area, many things are under predictable control: women wash laundry on time, steel dishes are always neatly stacked, and floors are swept like clockwork. And for those things that are out of control, locals have developed their own predictable habits. It’s “hamara aadat,” our nature, they explain to me, to weave their way through morasses of mud on neglected roads, to spin hand fans when the electricity is regularly cut, and to deal with discomfort. But still, outside of nature and outside of control is talk of the future. “When you return,” they tell me, “we might not be here.” No matter how much life is settled here, rumors are that the Delhi Development Authority will clear this settlement—any day, any month, any year, according to whom you ask. This is the daily life that has emerged under Delhi’s urban planning, a practice that has historically pushed the poor to the edges of the city, left them out of public services, and cleared their settlements whenever new visions for redevelopment arise.

A week later, across town in an air-conditioned room, researchers from a well-respected Delhi NGO presented their conclusions about living conditions in North Delhi resettlement colony, the sort of fate those in Okhla feared. It was grim. Since the government had resettled slum dwellers from different parts of the city to this one colony, residents now drank water resembling “black tea,” had almost no sewage facilities, the employed now traveled hours across the city to retain their jobs, and health was at extreme risk. As the audience posed questions, the research team stood firm in their critique of the Delhi Development Authority. Afterwards, outside the wooden-walled presentation room, different organizations passed out pamphlets and hot samosas were served. Only two or three people from the colony itself were actually there. I ran into a friend I had last seen at this resettlement colony in the context of activism. When I asked him what he thought, he shrugged, “It was what it was. Just don’t think that presentation is all that the colony is.”

In searching for models to emulate, you might look at Fadiman’s and Ehrenreich’s books. (One of anthropology’s current ironies is that the best selling anthropology books are all written by non-anthropologists.) You might show your submission to non-academic relatives or friends – asking whether they honestly enjoyed reading what you wrote. Does the writing engage them? You might ask your students – particularly when they are in an open, critical mood (so you know they are not simply trying to compliment you). Please remember, you are not writing for a small coterie of anthropologists. You are writing for a broad non-academic audience. If you are unsure whether your writing is effective, ask your non-academic friends. Try it out on them.

You might keep in mind the series strives for “investigative ethnography plus.” It leans toward investigative journalism in describing important social concerns in readable ways through the lens of specific people, contexts, and stories. At the same time, it seeks to place these specifics within broader frameworks that allow a wide range of readers to understand the larger dynamics at work.

The deadline for this year’s University of California Press / Center for Public Anthropology International Competition is October 1, 2009. To those who submitted proposals in 2008, we would encourage you to resubmit your proposal taking the above comments into consideration. And to those thinking of submitting a proposal for the first time this year, might we encourage you to consider the above evaluation standards as well?

Thank you for your interest in the California Series in Public Anthropology and in the UC Press/Public Anthropology International Competitions.

All entries will be judged by
the Co-Editors of the California Series in Public Anthropology :
Rob Borofsky (Center for a Public Anthropology & Hawaii Pacific University)
and Naomi Schneider (University of California Press)