Didier Fassin Awarded Huxley Medal
Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, has received the Huxley Memorial Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the highest British distinction in anthropology. Fassin, who will also deliver the Huxley Memorial Lecture, was recognized “for his outstanding contribution and conceptual leadership in Medical Anthropology, including global inequalities in health in the context of HIV and AIDS politics, the Anthropology of the State (police, justice and prisons), Humanitarian and Critical Moral Anthropology.”
An anthropologist, sociologist, and medical doctor, Fassin has devoted most of his research to political and moral themes, conducting ethnographic work in Senegal, Congo, South Africa, Ecuador, and France. A student of the public presence of the social sciences, he addresses multiple professional and lay audiences, and occasionally writes on questions related to his research for Le Monde, The New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books.
He has recently authored The Worlds of Public Health: Anthropological Excursions (2023), Death of a Traveller: A Counter Investigation (2021), Life: A Critical User's Manual (2018), and The Will to Punish (2018), as well as L’Exil, toujours recommencé. Chronique de la frontière (2024), with Anne-Claire Defossez, Visitor in the School of Social Science. He has also coedited The Social Sciences in the Looking-Glass. Studies in the Production of Knowledge (2023), Crisis Under Critique: How People Assess, Transform, and Respond to Critical Situations (2022), Pandemic Exposures: Economy and Society in the Time of Coronavirus (2021), and Deepening Divides: How Territorial Borders and Social Boundaries Delineate Our World (2019).
A recipient of the gold medal of anthropology at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Fassin was the first social scientist to be granted the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award for his work on crisis. A member of the Academy of Europe and of the American Philosophical Society, he was elected as professor to the chair “Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies” at the Collège de France in 2022.
The Huxley Memorial Medal and Lecture, established in 1900, is the highest honor bestowed by the Royal Anthropological Institute, a scholarly association dedicated to anthropology in all its many fields and applications. In 1983, Clifford Geertz, the Founding Professor of the School of Social Science (1970–2000, Emeritus 2000–06), was awarded the medal. Several past Members in the School have also received the award, including Jack Goody (2011), Adam Kuper (1994–95), George Stocking (1992–93), Pierre Bourdieu (1972–73), and Louis Dumont (1971). In addition to Fassin, five other French social scientists have received the medal since its creation in 1900: besides Dumont, in 1985, and Bourdieu, in 2000, they are Marcel Mauss, in 1938, Claude Lévi-Strauss, in 1965, and Maurice Godelier, in 2008.
