This list of anthropology awards is an index to articles about notable awards given for contributions to anthropology, the scientific study of humans, human behavior and societies in the past and present. The list gives the country of the sponsoring organization, but awards may be given to people from other countries.
| Country | Award | Sponsor | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | Nadel Essay Prize | Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Australian National University | Excellence in ethnographic writing relating to the Asia Pacific region, including Australia [1] |
| Guatemala | Orden del Pop | Museo Popol Vuh | Individuals who have made significant contributions towards the protection, study and research of Guatemala's cultural heritage [2] |
| Sweden | Anders Retzius medal | Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography | Geographer or anthropologist. Renamed the SSAG medal [3] |
| Spain, Portugal and America | AIBR Award | AIBR. Asociación de Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red | Best annual article in Iberoamerican Anthropology. |
| United Kingdom | Huxley Memorial Medal | Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland | Identify and acknowledge the work of scientists, British or foreign, distinguished in any field of anthropological research [4] [5] |
| United Kingdom | Rivers Memorial Medal | Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland | Significant contribution to social, physical or cultural anthropology or archaeology [6] [7] |
| United States | Bronislaw Malinowski Award | Society for Applied Anthropology | Social scientist for lifetime efforts to understand and serve the needs of the world's societies, and trying to solve human problems using the concepts and tools of social science [8] |
| United States | Margaret Mead Award | Society for Applied Anthropology, American Anthropological Association | Younger scholar for a particular accomplishment such as a book, film, monograph, or service, which interprets anthropological data and principles in ways that make them meaningful and accessible to a broadly concerned public [9] |
| United States | Sol Tax Distinguished Service Award | Society for Applied Anthropology | A member of the Society for Applied Anthropology, in recognition of long-term and truly distinguished service [10] |
| United States | Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize | The Association for Feminist Anthropology | First book by an author that makes a significant contribution to feminist anthropology [11] |
| United States | Rudolf Virchow Award | Society for Medical Anthropology | Paper written in the spirit of Rudolf Virchow that best reflects, extends or advances critical perspectives in medical anthropology [12] |
| United States | Ruth Benedict Prize | American Anthropological Association | Excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective about a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic [13] [14] |
| United States | Stirling Prize in Psychological Anthropology | Society for Psychological Anthropology | Awarded to a previously published work (article or book, in alternate years) that makes an outstanding contribution to any area of psychological anthropology. [15] [16] |
| United States | Viking Fund Medal | Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research | Distinguishing research or publication in the field of Anthropology [17] [18] |
The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is a learned society in the United Kingdom with the goal of "advancing the chemical sciences". It was formed in 1980 from the amalgamation of the Chemical Society, the Royal Institute of Chemistry, the Faraday Society, and the Society for Analytical Chemistry with a new Royal Charter and the dual role of learned society and professional body. At its inception, the Society had a combined membership of 34,000 in the UK and a further 8,000 abroad. The headquarters of the Society are at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London. It also has offices in Thomas Graham House in Cambridge where RSC Publishing is based. The Society has offices in the United States, on the campuses of The University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University, at the University City Science Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in both Beijing and Shanghai, China and in Bangalore, India.
The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI) is a long-established anthropological organisation, and Learned Society, with a global membership. Its remit includes all the component fields of anthropology, such as biological anthropology, evolutionary anthropology, social anthropology, cultural anthropology, visual anthropology and medical anthropology, as well as sub-specialisms within these, and interests shared with neighbouring disciplines such as human genetics, archaeology and linguistics. It seeks to combine a tradition of scholarship with services to anthropologists, including students.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where she focuses on affective science. She is a director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory. Along with James Russell, she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review. Along with James Gross, she founded the Society for Affective Science.
Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah was a social anthropologist and Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor (Emeritus) of Anthropology at Harvard University. He specialised in studies of Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Tamils, as well as the anthropology of religion and politics.
Sally Falk Moore was a legal anthropologist and professor emerita at Harvard University. She did her major fieldwork in Tanzania and published extensively on cross-cultural, comparative legal theory.
Kantilal Vardichand "Kanti" Mardia is an Indian-British statistician specialising in directional statistics, multivariate analysis, geostatistics, statistical bioinformatics and statistical shape analysis. He was born in Sirohi, Rajasthan, India in a Jain family and now resides and works in Leeds. He is known for his series of tests of multivariate normality based measures of multivariate skewness and kurtosis as well as work on the statistical measures of shape.
Cato T. Laurencin, M.D., Ph.D., FREng SLMH, is an American engineer, physician, scientist, innovator and a University Professor of the University of Connecticut.
William Oliver Baker was president of Bell Labs from 1973 to 1979 and advisor on scientific matters to five United States presidents.
Omar M. Yaghi is the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, the Founding Director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, and an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, the college, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She is the principal investigator of a 10-year program project grant, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on language growth. She is also a co-PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation to explore learning in an interdisciplinary framework with an eye toward theory and application. She is the founding editor of Language Learning and Development, the official journal of the Society for Language Development. She was President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2007–2012.
The Royal Society Milner Award, formally the Royal Society Milner Award and Lecture, is awarded annually by the Royal Society, a London-based learned society, for "outstanding achievement in computer science by a European researcher". The award is supported by Microsoft Research and is named in honour of Robin Milner, a prolific pioneer in computer science who, among other contributions, designed LCF and the programming language ML.
Margaret Lock is a distinguished Canadian medical anthropologist, known for her publications in connection with an anthropology of the body and embodiment, comparative epistemologies of medical knowledge and practice, and the global impact of emerging biomedical technologies.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is an American anthropologist. She is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2018, she was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Geoffrey Ainsworth Harrison FRAI was an English biological anthropologist who taught at the University of Oxford.
Howard Morphy is a British anthropologist who has conducted extensive fieldwork in northern Australia, mainly among the Yolngu people. He was founding director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University and is currently a distinguished professor of anthropology.
The Huxley Memorial Medal and Lecture is a lecture and associated medal that was created in 1900 by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland to honour the anthropologist Thomas Henry Huxley. The lecture and medal are awarded annually to any scientist who distinguishes themselves in any field of anthropological research. Thomas Huxley was fortunate to have another memorial lecture named his honour, The Huxley Lecture that was instituted by the members of Charing Cross Hospital Medical School in 1896.