Lutz Wins Leeds Prize
From Anthropology News

Catherine Lutz (U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) won the 2002 Anthony Leeds Award for Urban Anthropology, presented annually by the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA). The prize, including a $500 check and plaque, affirms the continuing relevance of urban anthropology to the social sciences. Lutz won the award for her book Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century, published by Beacon Press. Homefront offers an original investigation of urban life in the contemporary US by examining a “military city.” In a rich and complex analysis, Lutz paints a sensitive portrait of Fayetteville, NC, host city to the army base Fort Bragg. The book reveals a community formed (and deformed) by the demands of 20th-century militarization. In tracing the hidden and not-so-hidden wounds inflicted by militarization on Fayetteville and its residents, Lutz illuminates practices of racial, class, and gender discrimination and conflict that reflect and reproduce broader divisions and tensions within American society as a whole. This study makes clear that the costs of US military might and global power are borne not only on overseas battlefields, but also, and in significant ways, by people “at home.” Homefront combines ethnographic, ethnohistorical and documentary research in an innovative way. It also focuses the attention of a potentially wide readership on the role of the US in the world as the 21st century begins, and on the consequences of foreign military operations for those within this “superpower’s” own borders.