Awards & Grants
Behrouz Boochani Award
The Behrouz Boochani Award recognizes and celebrates exceptional work that contributes to public and critical understandings of Australian society in the spirit of the discipline of anthropology. It is an occasional award of the AAS and includes a prize of AU$1,000.
The award has its origin in one such extraordinary endeavour to witness, record and interpret social worlds that are suppressed and misunderstood in Australian public discourse: the award-winning book No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish-Iranian sholar, writer, poet, journalist, filmmaker, cultural advocate, and Associate Professor at UNSW. In 2013, he fled Iran and became a political prisoner of the Australian Government incarcerated in the Manus Regional Processing Centre (Papua New Guinea). In November 2019 Behrouz escaped to New Zealand where he now resides. Dr Omid Tofighian, a philosophy scholar and community advocate based at the American University of Cairo and University of Sydney, played a critical role in the translation of No Friend But the Mountains; a collaboration that matured into "a shared philosophical activity" as described in his introduction to the book.
For an anthropological review of No Friend But the Mountains see Ethnography of a nightmare: Public anthropology, indefinite detention, and innovative writing by Dr Mahnaz Alimardanian, published in American Ethnologist.
Nomination Guidelines
The Behrouz Boochani Award is an occasional award of the Australian Anthropological Society.
The criteria for the award are:
Recipients can be working in and across a variety of fields within the arts, humanities, social sciences, Indigenous studies, education and health; they need not have formal training in, or any official affiliation with, anthropology.
Recipients can be nominated for a particular work, or a body of work, including fiction, non-fiction, film and other art forms.
The recipient’s work must have achieved significant public impact within Australia.
The work must be “in the spirit of anthropology” as elaborated in a statement by a primary nominating Fellow.
Nominations must be submitted by a Fellow of the Society in the form of a formal statement of nomination that addresses the above criteria (no more than three pages). The submission must also include short supporting statements from an additional ten Fellows (50-100 words each).
Submissions must be at least three months prior to the annual AAS conference to be eligible for consideration for the current year.
The AAS Executive Committee will evaluate all nominations and determine an outcome. When a nomination is successful the award will be presented at the AAS annual conference.