International award for distinguished Cambridge Social Anthropologist

Caroline Humphrey, F.B.A., Sigrid Rausing Professor of Collaborative Anthropology in the University’s Department of Social Anthropology, has been awarded the Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities by the American Philosophical Society.

Professor Humphrey received the award for her paper ‘Alternative Freedoms’, which explores the complexities of the many meanings that Russians attach to the ideas for which English-speakers use the deceptively simple word ‘freedom’.

The paper tries to answer this question: if you were a Russian and tuned in to a speech by Bush or Blair about ‘freedom’ – what would this word bring to your mind? Using the English word ‘freedom’ to elicit a range of sometimes conflicting ideas held in Russia by ordinary people, the article explains why Russians are ambivalent about certain concepts of freedom and which kinds of freedom they particularly cherish.

The Henry Allen Moe Prize, which is awarded annually to the author of a paper read at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society, is the latest in a long line of prizes for Professor Humphrey, who has also won the Staley Prize in Anthropology (1990), the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Rivers Memorial Medal (1999) and the Heldt Prize (2002). She was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2004 and is also a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Professor Humphrey is known particularly for her wide-ranging scholarship on Mongol shamanism. Assisted by her fluency in Russian and Mongolian, she has also published extensively on nomadic life in East Asia, on Russia’s new criminal class, on the politics of landscape, and on the political imagination in East Asia. She also has a long-standing interest in the religion and social life of India’s Jain community.

She co-founded the University’s Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, and is a Fellow of King’s College. Her books include Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (1983); Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Daur Mongols (1996); The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism (2002); and she is co-author with her Cambridge colleague Dr. David Sneath of The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia (1999).

The American Philosophical Society is one of the world's most eminent scholarly organisations. It was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, and has counted among its members some of the world’s finest minds. It presents 10 annual or semi-annual awards for outstanding achievement in the sciences, humanities, arts, professions, and public service.