The Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG; ) is a scientific learned society founded in December 1877. It was established after a rearrangement of various sections of the Anthropological Society, which was formed in 1873 by Hjalmar Stolpe, Hans Hildebrand, Oscar Montelius, and Gustaf Retzius.
The society functions as a link between science and the public, especially in the subjects of anthropology and geography. It awards research fellowships, organizes excursions and lectures, and hands out awards including the Vega Medal and Retzius Medal. In 1880, the society published the first edition of the Swedish yearbook Ymer, and it has published the international journal Geografiska Annaler since 1919, a publication that is divided between physical geography and human geography.
In 2018, it established Kritisk Etnografi, an academic journal of ethnography.
Society awards The society created the Vega Medal in 1881, on the occasion of Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld's return to Stockholm after the Vega expedition – his discovery of the Northeast Passage. Since then, the Vega Medal has been awarded to an outstanding physical geographer roughly every three years. In the intervening years, the society has awarded the Anders Retzius Medal to a geographer or anthropologist.
In 2015, the Society decided that awarding a medal named after Retzius was inappropriate; his racial studies—including a collection of skulls of indigenous peoples—are viewed with disapproval by modern anthropologists. Thereafter, the Retzius Medal was renamed the SSAG medal, and it was given to Didier Fassin in 2016. The society's awards are handed out by the King of Sweden on 24 April, the anniversary of Nordenskiöld's return to Stockholm.
Recipients The following people are among the recipients of the society's awards:
Vega Medal
1881: Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld 1882: Louis Palander 1883: Henry Morton Stanley 1884: Nikolai Przhevalsky 1888: Wilhelm Junker 1889: Fridtjof Nansen 1890: Emin Pasha 1892: Louis Gustave Binger 1897: Otto Sverdrup 1898: Sven Hedin 1899: Georg August Schweinfurth 1900: Alfred Gabriel Nathorst 1901: Prince Luigi Amedeo 1903: Ferdinand von Richthofen 1904: Otto Nordenskiöld Johan G. Andersson 1905: Robert Falcon Scott 1907: Otto Pettersson 1909: Johan Peter Koch 1910: Ernest Shackleton 1912: John Murray 1913: Roald Amundsen 1915: Gerard De Geer 1919: Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen 1920: William Morris Davis 1922: Albert I, Prince of Monaco 1923: Albrecht Penck 1924: Lauge Koch 1926: Boris Vilkitsky 1930: Harald Sverdrup 1931: Émile-Félix Gautier 1932: Albert Defant 1937: Roy Chapman Andrews 1939: Vilhelm Bjerknes Vagn W. Ekman 1941: Bjørn Helland-Hansen Hans W. Ahlmann 1944: Lennart von Post 1946: Emmanuel de Martonne 1948: Richard Evelyn Byrd 1950: Hans Pettersson 1951: Carl Troll 1954: Laurence Dudley Stamp 1955: Paul-Émile Victor 1957: Carl O. Sauer 1958: Jacob Bjerknes Tor Bergeron 1959: Mikhail Somov 1961: Richard Joel Russell 1962: Thor Heyerdahl 1963: Louis Leakey 1965: Maurice Ewing 1970: Filip Hjulström Sigurður Þórarinsson 1972: Albert P. Crary 1975: Willi Dansgaard 1981: Valter Schytt 1983: Cesare Emiliani 1984: Hubert Lamb 1986: John Ross Mackay 1987: Gunnar Hoppe Åke Sundborg 1990: George H. Denton 1993: David E. Sugden 1994: Gösta Hjalmar Liljequist 1997: Albert Lincoln Washburn 1999: John Imbrie 2002: Lonnie Thompson 2005: Françoise Gasse 2008: Dorthe Dahl-Jensen 2011: Terry Callaghan 2014: Compton J. Tucker 2015: Lesley Head 2017: Yao Tandong 2018: Gillian Hart 2020: David R. Montgomery 2021: Anssi Paasi 2023: John Smol
Retzius Medal
1913: Oscar Montelius 1920: Arthur Evans 1923: Aurel Stein 1925: Johan Gunnar Andersson 1930: Erland Nordenskiöld 1951: Vernon Victor Hickman 1967: Walter Christaller 1969: David Hannerberg 1973: Torsten Hägerstrand 1976: William William-Olsson 1978: Wolfgang Hartke 1985: Akin Mabogunje 1988: Fredrik Barth 1989: David Harvey Sven Godlund 1991: Allan Pred 1992: Jack Goody 1994: Peter Haggett 1995: Veena Das 1997: Peter Gould 1998: David Maybury-Lewis 2000: Erik Bylund 2001: Sherry Ortner 2003: Doreen Massey 2004: Tim Ingold 2006: Gunnar Törnqvist 2007: John and Jean Comaroff 2009: Allen J. Scott 2010: Ulf Hannerz 2012: Don Mitchell 2013: Paul Stoller
Gold Medal
2016: Didier Fassin 2019: Emily Martin 2022: Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Kritisk Etnografi
Kritisk Etnografi (Swedish for "critical ethnography"), subtitled Swedish Journal of Anthropology, is a bi-annual peer-reviewed, open-access, online-only, academic journal on the subjects of anthropology and ethnography, owned and published by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in collaboration with DiVA, an online archive maintained by Uppsala University. Its first issue was launched on 15 August 2018.
See also List of geographical societies List of anthropology awards List of geography awards
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