Anthropology Association Honors Richard Handler

Anthropology professor Richard Handler is the 2023 recipient of the American Anthropological Association’s Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology.

The award is presented annually to “members whose careers demonstrate extraordinary achievements that have well served the anthropological profession.”

As a cultural anthropologist who studies modern Western societies, his initial field work was in Quebec (1976-1984), where he studied the Québécois nationalist movement, which led to an enduring interest in nationalism, ethnicity and the politics of culture.

Upon coming to UVA in 1986, he pursued the latter topic by looking at history museums. Beginning in 1990, he led an ethnographic study of Colonial Williamsburg as both an outdoor museum and a mid-sized nonprofit corporation. In addition to examining the invention of history and tradition, the study focused on corporate culture, class, race and gender.

Later, he came to focus on the intersection of early 20th-century artistic modernism and the literary bent of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, leading to a broader interest in the history of anthropology – in particular, in anthropologists as critics of modernity, and the relationship of the discipline’s critical discourses to other intellectual trends.

He has published essays on Jules Henry, Richard Hoggart, Dorothy Lee, Erving Goffman, Thorstein Veblen and Alexis de Tocqueville, as well as a 1995 book-length interview with David Schneider, “Schneider on Schneider.”

Handler’s most recent scholarship concerns U.S. postage stamps – their iconographic content and indexical functioning – in relation to democratic citizenship. In 2023, with Laura Goldblatt, he published “The American Stamp: Postal Iconography, Democratic Citizenship, and Consumerism in the United States.”