[1] The panel, "Gender, Power, and Ethnicity in China: Papers in Honor of Norma Diamond," at the 2005 American Anthropological Association annual meeting, was devoted to her work.
She was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars[2] She was the first recipient of the George Peter Murdock Prize for Excellence in Ethnology in 1988 for her article, “The Miao and Poison: Interactions on China’s Frontier.” [3] Diamond at age 16, after an accelerated high school course, enrolled in Queens College.
The nationally known scholar Hans Gerth introduced her to the discipline of sociology, especially the Marxist influenced Frankfort School, and encouraged her to study Chinese.
[2] Diamond was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, which organized Asia specialists to oppose American involvement in Vietnam, and was among the feminists in the group.
Her article, “Collectivization, Kinship, and the Status of Women in Rural China,” published in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars and reprinted several other places, was based on field-work and interviews she performed in the summer of 1973.
Although many called the subject of these studies "China," Diamond spoke of "Taiwan" in her reports of fieldwork from the early 1960s and a return visit in 1969.
Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology, wrote one of her former students, is "solid, interesting, accessible, and timeless in the best sense of the term, with hints of issues she would take up later, though the foundational book dutifully examined each topic in turn, in the style of the day.