Opportunities for 2013-2014
The Nancy "Penny" Schwartz Funding Opportunity for Smith Anthropology Majors:
The Anthropology Department is pleased to announce the Nancy “Penny” Schwartz (Class of 1974) Fund (see below) to support the efforts of current anthropology majors to acquire competence in non-Western languages. Modest grants, not to exceed $500, will be made to help cover expenses associated with international or national travel and study that include language instruction. Domestic funding is for language classes only; no support is provided for other academic coursework, internships, or research conducted in the United States. Domestic funding for tutors, commercial services and/or self-study guides will not be provided.
Application requests for 2014 (see link below) should be submitted to the department’s administrative assistant, Lea Ahlen, Wright Hall 226 or (lahlen@smith.edu), no later than March 8, 2014. The request must include specific information on the study program and the language to be studied, as well as a clear statement of the importance of the language to the student’s anthropological interests. Any additional sources of funding to which applications have been made must be identified.
2013 Schwartz Application Form
Nancy Linda ‘Penny” Schwartz, PhD. (1952-2009)
B.A. Smith College (1974), PhD Princeton University (1989). Dissertation title: "World Without End: the Meanings and Movements in the History, Narratives and 'Tongue-Speech' of Legio Maria of African Church Mission Among Luo of Kenya"
Faculty member College of Southern Nevada, Anthropology Program, Department of Human Behavior;
Treasurer and Board Member, Association for Africanist Anthropology, American Anthropology Association (2004-2009)
“Penny Schwartz received her PhD from Princeton University in 1989 after writing a magisterial study of the glossolalia practices in Legio Maria, an African independent church founded by Luo of Kenya. During her peripatetic teaching career Penny Schwartz dazzled and inspired colleagues and students in many parts of the U.S. with her shrewd wit and unbridled enthusiasm for anthropology and Africa. Equally dazzling was a series of papers in which Penny, with an appreciation of metaphors and metacommunication and the expressive politics of gender and the marginalized, took Princeton-style symbolic anthropology out to the very edges of its human ethnographic possibilities—and then stepped over into other domains of human and animal interaction. She wrote of “magical and mundane powers of African birds,” dealt with African snakes as “charismatic and non-phallic megafauna,” and found “something fishy in Lake Victoria” in regard to water abuse and political ecology. Her papers tickled funny bones and poked holes in what she felt were anthropology’s “anthropocentric” and “logocentric” pretensions. In one paper Penny documented ways that Kenya Luo and Luyia women have both pre- and post-mortem agency. This celebration of her life will confirm that Penny also remains “active dead or alive.” By Maria G. Cattell in Anthropology and Aging Quarterly
