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Oct. 29, 2005
MU Professor Receives Margaret Mead Anthropology Award
By HNN Staff
Huntington, WV (HNN) – Dr. Luke Eric Lassiter, director of the Graduate
Humanities Program at the Marshall University Graduate College and professor
of humanities and anthropology, has received the 2006 Margaret Mead Award
from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied
Anthropology.
The Margaret Mead Award, initiated by the Society for Applied Anthropology
in 1979, and awarded jointly with the American Anthropological Society since
1983, celebrates the tradition of bringing anthropology to bear on wider
social and cultural issues.
The Margaret Mead Award is presented to a younger scholar for a particular
accomplishment such as a book, film, monograph, or service that interprets
anthropological data and principles in a way that makes it meaningful and
accessible to a broadly concerned public.
Dr. Lassiter received the Margaret Mead Award in part for his book, The
Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie’s African American Community,
which was published in 2004, as well as for his continuing explorations of
race relations and collaborative, community-based research and writing.
“I am extremely honored to be named the recipient of the 2006 Margaret Mead
Award,” Lassiter said. “As Margaret Mead was recognized widely for her
commitment to both anthropology and, more importantly, to our larger
society, I am especially honored that the awards committee singled out The
Other Side of Middletown as representative of the kind of work that Mead
championed.”
Lassiter, 37, came to Marshall this year from Ball State University in
Muncie, Ind., where he had been an associate professor of anthropology.
Lassiter received his B.S. in anthropology and social science from Radford
(Va.) University in 1990, and his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995.
The Mead award is designed to recognize a person clearly associated with
research and/or practice in anthropology. The awardee’s activity exemplifies
skills in broadening the impact of anthropology – skills for which Margaret
Mead was admired widely.
“This is a wonderful honor for Dr. Lassiter, the College of Liberal Arts,
and Marshall University, and certainly has broad implications for us in
continuing to build the profile and the interdisciplinary contributions of
the Graduate Humanities Program to our state and region,” Dr. Christina
Murphy, dean of MU’s College of Liberal Arts, said. “It’s really exciting,
too, to see our COLA faculty receive the type of national recognition that
continues to put Marshall University on the map as an exciting and
innovative place to be.”
Lassiter said The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie’s African
American Community (AltaMira Press, 2004) was a joint writing project among
groups of faculty, students, and members of the African American community
of Muncie, Ind. – site of the famous “Middletown” studies, first initiated
by Robert and Helen Lynd in their 1929 book, Middletown: A Study in Modern
American Culture.
“As a collaboration of community and campus, this book recounts the largely
unrecorded history of Muncie’s black community (which the Lynds and
subsequent researchers downplayed), and details the efforts of community and
campus to rectify the representation of “small town America” as exclusively
white,” Lassiter said. “Exploring issues of race, power, and inequity,
faculty, students, and community members together designed and implemented a
collaborative ethnographic field project that involved intensive interviews,
research, and writing between community organizations, local experts,
ethnographers, and teams of college students.
“That the Margaret Mead awards committee decided to bestow recognition on
The Other Side of Middletown is tremendously gratifying, especially because
it is a significant endorsement of the hard work put forth by the students,
Muncie community members, and faculty who together worked on this project,”
Lassiter said. “I am indeed pleased that the award pays tribute to this kind
of community-centered and collaboratively conceived work.”
More information about the book can be found at
http://www.altamirapress.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=%5EDB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0759104840.
More information about the project can be found on the sponsor’s Web site
(The Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry):
http://www.bsu.edu/vbc/sem_20022003_sprg_lassiter.htm.
Lassiter may be reached by calling (304) 746-1923, or via email at
lassiter@marshall.edu.
