For the
Robert F. Heizer Award
Presented by the
AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR ETHNOHISTORY
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THE AWARD
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This prize is awarded for recognition of the best article in the field
of ethnohistory. The award was established in 1980 to honor Dr. Robert
F. Heizer, ethnohistorian and archaeologist noted for his research in
California and Mesoamerica.
This prize applies to journal articles or essays in books published in
2008, and will be judged by a committee appointed by the President of
the American Society for Ethnohistory.
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NOMINATIONS
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To nominate an article or book essay published in 2008:
By MAY 15, 2008, send a PDF of the article to
Larry Nesper lnesper@wisc.edu
Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
5240 Sewell Social Science Bld.
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, Wisconsin 53706
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PLEASE NOTE:
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All articles published in the Society's journal Ethnohistory are
automatically nominated for the prize.
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Recent winners of the Robert F. Heizer Award
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2008 Brian Delay for his article, "The Wider World of the Handsome
Man: Southern Plains Indians Invade Mexico, 1830-1848." Journal of
the Early Republic 27, no.1 (Spring 2007): 83-113.
2007 Heidi Bohaker, "Nindoodemag: The Significance of Algonquian
Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600-1701," The
William and Mary Quarterly 63.1 (2006), 23-52.
2006 Miranda Warburton and Richard M. Begay, "An Exploration of Navajo-
Anasazi Relationships" Ethnohistory 52: 3 (Summer 2005), 533-61.
2005 Peter M. Whiteley, "Bartering Pahos with the President"
Ethnohistory 51:2 (Spring 2004), 359-414.
2004 Lisa Sousa and Kevin Terraciano, "The 'Original Conquest' of
Oaxaca: Nahua and Mixtec Accounts of the Spanish Conquest"
Ethnohistory 50(2) (Spring, 2003)
2003 Linea Sundstrom, "Steel Awls for Stone Age Plainswomen: Rock Art,
Religion, and the Hide Trade on the Northern Plains." Plains
Anthropologist 47 (2002): 99-119.
2002 Jeffrey C. Kaufmann, ""La Question des Raketa: Colonial Struggles
with Prickly Pear Cactus in Southern Madagascar, 1900-1923."
Ethnohistory 48, 87-121 (2001).
2001 Paige Raibmon, "Theatres of Contact: The Kwakwaka'wakw Meet
Colonialism in British Columbia and at the Chicago World's Fair."
Canadian Historical Review 82(2): 157-90 (2000).
2000 Meredith McKittrick, "Faithful Daughter, Murdering Mother:
Transgression and Social Control in Colonial Namibia." Journal of
African History 40: 265-283 (1999).
1999 Kevin Terraciano, "Crime and Culture in Colonial Mexico: The
Case of the Mixtec Murder Note." Ethnohistory 45(3): 709-745
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SAMPLE CITATIONS USED IN THE PAST FOR THE PRIZE PRESENTATIONS
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2008
"In the spirit of the Robert F. Heizer Prize award, Brian DeLay deftly
combines ethnography, history and ethnohistory with an engaging
writing style and the use of a wide range of primary and secondary
sources. DeLay weaves a complex and compelling Texan-Mexican-Comanche
history into a gripping story of international politics over a period
during which Mexico gained independence and lost a sizeable portion of
its territory, and Texas became both independent and a new U.S. state.
Establishing what might otherwise be construed as a "periphery" as its
own area, DeLay centers the Comanche in the processes he describes. As
DeLay shows how "northern Mexicans were bound together with southern
plains Indians" he also makes important contributions to borderlands
scholarship. Through these contributions, DeLay links what appears to
be a small slice of the past to multifaceted and broad changes that
had consequences for Native American, Texan and Mexican peoples, as
well as for governments. As DeLay crosses borders in "The Wider World"
by following the Comanche into Mexico while simultaneously attending
to their story in the U.S., he also complicates the academy's area
studies model, thus encouraging cross-area as well as cross-
disciplinary dialogues."
1996
Examining the oral histories of migration told to her by the people of
Palau Langkaw, Malaysia, Janet Carsten finds villagers' accounts to be
fragmentary and vague. Many have forgotten where their immediate
ancestors came from or even who they were. Rather than viewing this
in negative terms, as a kind of "genealogical amnesia" (reported in
the literature for many Southeast Asian societies), Carsten argues
that even though the process of what people forget and how they forget
it is implicit, gradual and unmarked – as when grandchildren are told
little about their grandparents – it is nonetheless collective,
systematic and vital to the acquisition of attributes and relationship
in the present and future. For ethnohistorians, her work raises
important questions about the relationship between narrative and
memory, and how people, like the villagers she works with, may,
through their efforts at constructing an identity in the particular
political and historical context they find themselves, transform the
one into the other.
