Friday, December 3, 1999
WRITER: Phil Williams, 706/542-8501, [email protected]
CONTACT: Brent Berlin, 706/542-1452, [email protected]
UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PROFESSOR BRENT BERLIN HONORED WITH FYSSEN FOUNDATION INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
ATHENS, Ga. -- The Fyssen Foundation has selected Brent Berlin, Graham Perdue Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Georgia, to receive its International Prize during a ceremony in Paris, France, in March 2000.
The Fyssen Foundation aims to encourage scientific inquiry into cognitive mechanisms, including thought and reasoning, that underlie animal and human behavior, their biological and cultural bases, and their phylogenic and ontogenetic development.
The organization's International Prize, which includes a monetary grant of 200,000 French francs--approximately $30,000-is awarded annually to a scientist who has conducted distinguished research in ethology, human paleontology, anthropology, psychology, epistemology, logic, or the neurosciences. Berlin was selected for his distinguished contributions to knowledge in the field of cognitive and linguistic anthropology, especially the subfield of ethnobiological classification.
"I plan to contribute the award to the group called PROMAYA [Promotion of the Intellectual Property Rights of the Highland Maya of Chapas, Mexico], the non-profit organization formed to make certain that any financial benefits resulting from the current research on drug discovery will be distributed equitably among the Maya with whom we are working," said Berlin. "It goes without saying that I feel extremely honored by the Fyssen Award."
Berlin is co-author, with Paul Kay, of Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969), a work that established the empirical generalization that human languages reflect the classification of color sensations in essentially the same ways universally, regardless of historical and cultural differences.
Berlin's research in ethnobiology includes Principles of Tzeltal Plant Classification (1974), written in collaboration with botanists D. E. Breedlove and P. H. Raven, demonstrating the scientific basis of folk classification of the plant world. In 1992, he published a broad survey of universal principles underlying the cognitive organization of nature in Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies. Recently, he has been involved in the long-term study of natural products-based ethnomedical systems as seen in Medical Ethnobiology of the Highland Maya (1996, co-authored with E. A. Berlin).
In 1998 on the basis of this work, Berlin and an interdisciplinary group of scientists was awarded a five-year multi-million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research on drug discovery, medical ethnobiology and sustained economic growth among the Highland Maya of Chiapas, Mexico.
From 1966 to 1994, Berlin was a member of the department of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, joining the University of Georgia faculty in 1994. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1980 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1981. Berlin has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1968-69) and held a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1988-89. He was awarded the Janaki-Ammal Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Ethnobotany by the Indian Society of Ethnobotanists in 1994.
Some previous recipients of this prestigious award are Roger Brown, George Miller, David Premack, William D. Hamilton, and Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Anthropologists honored by the prize include Harold C. Conklin, Jack Goody, Colin Renfew, David Pilbeam, and Allan Walker.
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