By: David Campbell
Princeton University anthropology Professor Abdellah Hammoudi has been honored with a Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage, the university has announced.
Professor Hammoudi won the second prize of 30,000 euros about $36,000 for his 2004 book, "A Season in Mecca. Account of a Pilgrimage."
The book, published by Seuil in Paris, is the story of his pilgrimage to Mecca at age 50.
The prize honors achievements of literary reportage, providing "symbolic, moral and financial support for reporters whose courage, curiosity and integrity drives them to create in-depth, well-researched texts, bringing unknown, forgotten and hidden realities to light."
Organizers and supporters of the award are Lettre International, the Aventis Foundation and the Goethe-Institut.
Professor Hammoudi has been a Princeton faculty member since 1990. He was the founding director of the university’s Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.
He has done work on the ethnohistory of his native Morocco. He teaches courses on Middle Eastern society, colonialism and French ethnographic theory.

