This year's doctoral student jury, consisting of Betsey Brada (U Chicago), Noah Tamarkin (UC- Santa Cruz), and Eugenia Tsao (Toronto), writes:
At once moving and methodical, this essay exemplifies both the virtues of theoretical ecumenism in ethnography and the merits of applying a literary sensibility to interpretive work. Ries embarks upon an ambitious project with unusual clarity and creativity, and succeeds not only in revealing the irreducible significance of the potato in Russian survival narratives, but in destabilizing the classical distinction between materialities and their representations. Meanings, Ries suggests, do not merely inhabit their signifiers, but are identical to them; indeed, the polysemy of Solanum tuberosum emerges under her pen as a fraught tapestry of parables, allegories, riddles, and moral tropes whose poignancy and intelligibility rely utterly on the banal, backbreaking practices that sustain them. Gliding artfully from one ethnographic vignette to another, weaving biographies into political and economic histories, Ries furnishes her readers with a refreshingly intimate portrait of all of the activities involved in negotiating a potato crop—tilling, seeding, weeding, guarding, harvesting, sorting, peeling, slicing, cooking, consuming—and enumerates the ways in which such undertakings have come to acquire talismanic qualities amid the depredations of a swiftly neoliberalizing society. In so doing, she restores historical depth and political breadth to a startlingly diverse array of seemingly mundane incidents, and unearths the semiotic equivalences between frugality, morality, and rationality that nest in collective memories of war, famine, crisis and tragedy. An aunt’s painstaking redemption of a platter of soiled potato skin pancakes, a family’s polite declination to make use of ergonomic but wasteful peelers: an entire ethical landscape has arisen around household horticulture, relentlessly condensed into a national oeuvre of potato stories told and retold to both kin and anthropologists. As Ries discloses, anxieties about food security underwrite the biographic narratives of even people who have plenty to eat, and a battery of studies demonstrating that “the costs of domestic food production far outweigh the benefits” (p. 190) does not curb widespread valorizations of the household potato garden.
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This year the jury also designated an honorable mention:
Julie Livingston
(Rutgers University)
for her article
“Suicide, Risk, and Investment in the Heart of the African Miracle”
(Cultural
Anthropology
24, no. 4 (November 2009): 652-680).
Read the entire 2010 commendation here.
Nancy Reis