Subject Guide: Anthropology

The Senior Book Prize
The Senior Book Prize is awarded bi-annually for a book by a senior scholar. The prize goes to a work that speaks to contemporary social issues with relevance beyond the discipline and beyond the academy. Click American Ethnological Society for more information about the sponsors of this award.

2024  The Small Matter of Suing Chevron by Suzana Sawyer ; and Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change by Adriana Petryna
2022  Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication by Heather Hlavka and Sameena Mulla
2020  Political life in the wake of the plantation : sovereignty, witnessing, repair by Deborah A. Thomas; The fetish revisited : Marx, Freud, and the gods Black people make by By J. Lorand Matory (joint winners)
2018  Caravan of martyrs : sacrifice and suicide bombing in Afghanistan by David B. Edwards; The art of life and death : radical aesthetics and ethnographic practice by Andrew Irving (honorable mention); Unsettled : denial and belonging among white Kenyans by Janet McIntosh (honorable mention)
2016  Land's end : capitalist relations in an indigenous frontier by Tania Murray Li
2014  Haunting images : a cultural account of selective reproduction in Vietnam by Tine M. Gammeltoft
2012  Rainforest warriors : human rights on trial by Richard Price; Being Maasai, becoming indigenous : postcolonial politics in a neoliberal world by Dorothy Hodgson
2010  Alien ocean : anthropological voyages in microbial seas by Stefan Helmreich; Just one child : science and policy in Deng's China by Susan Greenhalgh (honorable mention)
2007  Dramas of nationhood : the politics of television in Egypt by Lila Abu-Lughod
2005  Emergent forms of life and the anthropological voice by Michael M. J. Fischer; Friction : an ethnolography of global connection by Anna L. Tsing
2003  Cholas and pishtacos : stories of race and sex in the Andes by Mary Weismantel

Julian Steward Award

The Anthropology and the Environment Section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) awards the Julian Steward Award for the best monograph in environmental/ecological anthropology. Click Anthropology and Environment Society for more information about this section of the American Anthropological Association and sponsor of this award.

2023  When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories by Daniel Ruiz Serna ; and A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa by Robyn d'Avignon
2022   Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation by Sarah E. Vaughn ; Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability by Jacob Doherty
2021  Waste siege : the life of infrastructure in Palestine by Sophia Stamatapoulou-Robbins; and The government of beans : regulating life in the age of monocrops by Kregg Hetherington (joint winners)
2019  The river in us : fighting toxics in a Mohawk community by Elizabeth Hoover
2017  The mushroom at the end of the world : on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
2015  The drug company next door : pollution, jobs, and community health in Puerto Rico by Alexa Dietrich
2013  The paper road : archive and experience in the botanical exploration of West China and Tibet by Erik Mueggler
2011  The banana tree at the gate : a history of marginal peoples and global markets in Borneo by Michael R. Dove; runner-up: Being and place among the Tlingit by Thomas F. Thorton
2009  Moroccan households in the world economy : labor and inequality in a Berber village by David Crawford
2007  Perfect order : recognizing complexity in Bali by Steven Lansing
2006  Do glaciers listen? : local knowledge, colonial encounters, and social imagination by Julie M. Cruikshank
2005  Cattle bring us to our enemies : Turkana ecology, politics, and raiding in a disequilibrium system by J. Terrence McCabe
2004  Hunters and bureaucrats : power, knowledge, and aboriginal-state relations in the southwest Yukon by Dr. Paul Nadasdy
2003  Zapotec science : farming and food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca by Roberto González

The Ruth Benedict Prize

The Ruth Benedict Prize acknowledges excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective about a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered topic. The Ruth Benedict Prize is awarded in each of two separate categories: one for a single-authored monograph and another for an edited volume. Click Association for Queer Anthropology for more information about the sponsors of this prize.

2023
Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy and Saintly Affects in Pakistan by Omar Kasmani
Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas by Joseph C. Russo

2022
Monographs: Knowing women : same-sex intimacy, gender, and identity in postcolonial Ghana by Serena Owusua Dankwa; There's a disco ball between us : a theory of Black gay life by Jafari S. Allen (honorable mention)
2021
Monographs: Hijras, lovers, brothers : surviving sex and poverty in rural India by Vaibhav Saria; honorable mention: Queer Palestine and the empire of critique by Sa’ed Atshan
2020
Monographs: Queer freedom : Black sovereignty by Ana-Maurine Lara; Love in the drug war : selling sex and finding Jesus on the Mexico-US border by Sarah Luna
Edited Volume: Queering knowledge : analytics, devices, and investments after Marilyn Strathern, edited by Paul Boyce, E.J. Gonzalez-Polledo, and Silvia Posocco
2019
Monographs: Queer kinship and family change in Taiwan by Amy Brainer; Transgender refugees and the imagined South Africa : bodies over borders and borders over bodies by B Camminga (honorable mention)
2018
Monographs: Ethno-erotic economies : sexuality, money, and belonging in Kenya by George Paul Meiu; Erotic islands : art and activism in the queer Caribbean by Lyndon K. Gill (honorable mention)
2017
Monographs: The look of a woman : facial feminization surgery and the aims of trans-medicine by Eric Plemons; Queer Maghrebi French : language, temporalities, transfiliations by Denis M. Provencher (honorable mention)
2016
Monographs: Real queer? : sexual orientation and gender identity refugees in the Canadian refugee apparatus by David A. B. Murray; Tourist attractions : performing race and masculinity in Brazil's sexual economy by Gregory Mitchell (honorable mention)
Edited Volume: Queer brown voices : personal narratives of Latina/o LGBT activism, edited by Uriel Quesada, Letitia Gomez, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
2015
Monographs: Given to the goddess : South Indian devadasis and the sexuality of religion by Lucinda Ramberg; Under bright lights : gay Manila and the global scene by Bobby Benedicto (honorable mention)
Edited Volume: Sex and sexualities in contemporary Indonesia : sexual politics, health, diversity and representation, edited by Linda Rae Bennett and Sharyn Graham Davies
2014
Monographs: After love : queer intimacy and erotic economies in post-soviet Cuba by Noelle M. Stout; Queer women in urban China : an ethnography by Elisabeth L. Engebretsen (honorable mention)
Edited Volume: Queer excursions : retheorizing binaries in language, gender, and sexuality, edited by Lal Zimman, Jenny Davis, and Joshua Raclaw
2013
Monographs: Queer activism in India : a story in the anthropology of ethics by Naisargi Dave; Sex in transition : rethinking gender and race in South Africa by Amanda Lock Swarr (honorable mention)
Edited Volume: The transgender studies reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura
2012
Monographs: Techniques of pleasure : BDSM and the circuits of sexuality by Margot Weiss; Spaces between us : queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonialization by Scott Lauria Morgensen
Edited Volume: Deviations : a Gayle Rubin reader by Gayle Rubin
2011
Monographs: Falling into the lesbi world : desire and difference in Indonesia by Evelyn Blackwood; Sex panic and the punitive state by Roger N. Lancaster
Edited Volume: Queer Bangkok : 21st century markets, media, and rights by Peter A. Jackson
2010
Monographs: Moving politics : emotion and ACT UP’s fight against AIDS by Deborah Gould; Gay fatherhood : narratives of family and citizenship in America by Ellen Lewin
Edited Volume: Homophobias : lust and loathing across time and space by David A. B. Murray
2009
Monographs: Allah made us : sexual outlaws in an Islamic city by Rudolf Pell Gaudio; Out in the country : youth, media, and queer visibility in rural America by Mary L. Gray
Edited Volume: Out in public : reinventing lesbian/gay anthropology in a globalizing world, edited by Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap
2008
Monographs: Caribbean pleasure industry : tourism, sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic by Mark Padilla; The archaeology of ethnogenesis :  race and sexuality in colonial San Francisco by Barbara L. Voss
2007
Monographs: Imagining transgender : an ethnography of a category by David Valentine; The politics of passion : women's sexual culture in the Afro-Surinamese diaspora by Gloria Wekker
Edited Volume: Women's sexualities and masculinities in a globalizing Asia, edited by Saskia Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya
2006  Straight to Jesus : sexual and Christian conversions in the ex-gay movement by Tanya Erzen
2005  The gay archipelago : sexuality and nation in Indonesia by Tom Boellstorff
2004
Monograph: Toms and dees : transgender identity and female same-sex relationships in Thailand by Megan Sinnot
Edited Volume: Out in theory : the emergence of lesbian and gay anthropology, edited by Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap
2003  Global divas : Filipino gay men in the diaspora by Martin F. Manalansan IV
2002  The night is young : sexuality in Mexico in the time of AIDS by Hector Carrillo
2001  The stranger next door : the story of a small community's battle over sex, faith, and civil rights by Arlene Stein
2000
Monographs: Margaret Mead made me gay : personal essays, public ideas by Esther Newton; Homosexualities by Stephen O. Murray
Edited Volume: Archaeologies of sexuality, edited by Barbara L. Voss and Robert A. Schmidt
1999  Female desires : same sex relations and transgender practices across cultures, edited by Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia E. Wieringa
1998  Takarazuka : sexual politics and popular culture in modern Japan by Jennifer Robertson
1997
Monograph: Render me, gender me : lesbians talk sex, class, color, nation, studmuffins by Kath Weston; Edited Volume: Two-spirit people : Native American gender identity, sexuality, and spirituality, edited by Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang
1996  Word's out : gay men's English by William L. Leap; Hidden in the blood : a personal investigation of AIDS in the Yucatan by Carter Wilson
1995  De los otros : intimacy and homosexuality among Mexican men by Joseph Carrier
1994  Cherry Grove, Fire Island : sixty years in America's first gay and lesbian town by Esther Newton
1993  Life is hard : machismo, danger, and the intimacy of power in Nicaragua by Roger Lancaster; Boots of leather, slippers of gold : the history of a lesbian community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis
1992  Lesbian mothers : accounts of gender in American culture by Ellen Lewin
1991  Bodies, pleasures, and passions : sexual culture in contemporary Brazil by Richard Parker
1990  Families we choose : lesbians, gays, kinship by Kath Weston; Neither man nor woman : the Hijras of India by Serena Nanda
1987  The Sambia : ritual and gender in New Guinea by Gilbert Herdt
1986  The spirit and the flesh : sexual diversity in American Indian culture by Walter L. Williams

Elliott P. Skinner Book Award

This prize is awarded to the book that best furthers both the global community of Africanist scholars and the wider interests of the African continent as exemplified in the work of Elliott P. Skinner. Click Association for Africanist Anthropology for more information about this section of the American Anthropological Association and the sponsor of this award.

2021 Burning art Europe’s Borders: An Ethnography on the African Migrant’s Experience in Morrocco by Isabella Alexanda-Nathani ; and The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution by Dan Hicks
2020  Captured at sea : piracy and protection in the Indian Ocean by Jatin Dua
2019  Island in the stream : an ethnographic history of Mayotte by Michael Lambek
2018  Children as caregivers :  the global fight against tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia by Jean Hunleth
2017  Gesture and power : religion, nationalism, and everyday performance in Congo by Yolanda Covington-Ward
2016  Give a man a fish : reflections on the new politics of distribution by James Ferguson; Stigma and culture : last-place anxiety in Black America by J. Lorand Matory (honorable mention); Divination's grasp : African encounters with the almost said by Richard Werbner (honorable mention)
2015  AIDS doesn't show its face : inequality, morality, and social change in Nigeria by Daniel Jordan Smith; The scattered family : parenting, African migrants, and global inequality by Cati Coe (honorable mention); The making of an African working class : politics, law, and cultural protest in the Manual Workers' Union of Botswana by Pnin Werbner (honorable mention)
2014  The predicament of blackness : postcolonial Ghana and the politics of race by Jemima Pierre; Chiefs, priests, and praise-singers : history, politics, and land ownership in northern Ghana by Wyatt MacGaffey (honorable mention)
2013  Jazz cosmopolitanism in Accra : five musical years in Ghana by Steven Feld; Genocide lives in us : women, memory, and silence in Rwanda by Jennie Burnet
2012  Darkness before daybreak : African migrants living on the margins in Southern Italy today by Hans Lucht
2010  The masons of Djenné by Trevor Marchand; Uncertain tastes : memory, ambivalence and the politics of eating in Samburu, northern Kenya by Jon Holtzman (honorable mention); Voice of the leopard : African secret societies and Cuba by Ivor L. Miller (honorable mention)
2009  Beyond the state in rural Uganda by Ben W. Jones
2008  Gaining ground? : "rights" and "property" in South African land reform by Deborah James; The water goddess in Igbo cosmology : Ogbuide of Oguta Lake by Sabine Jell-Bahlsen (honorable mention); African anthropologies : history, critique, and practice, edited by Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills, and Mustafa Babiker (honorable mention)

For books related to Anthropology or Archaeology or Sociology or Social Work or Biological Anthropology or Cultural Anthropology (the award changed focus over time). The PROSE Awards annually recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in over 40 categories. Judged by peer publishers, librarians, and medical professionals since 1976, the PROSE Awards are extraordinary for their breadth and depth. Click Professional Scholarly Publishing for more information about the division of the Association of American Publishers that sponsors this award.

2024  Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion by Richard Conniff; and Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City by Katie J. Wells, Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen
2023  The Five-Million-Year Odyssey: The Human Journey from Ape to Agriculture by Peter Bellwood ; Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America by Gregory D. Smithers
2022  Julius Caesar and the Roman people by Robert Morstein-Marx; Halfway home : race, punishment, and the afterlife of mass incarceration by Reuben Miller; Roma minority youth across cultural contexts : taking a positive approach to research, policy, and practice by Radosveta Dimitrova, David Lackland Sam, and Laura Ferrer Wreder
2021  Ancient Maya politics : a political anthropology of the classic period, 150–900 CE by Simon Martin; The tragedy of heterosexuality by Jane Ward; Introduction to social neuroscience by Stephanie Cacioppo and John T. Cacioppo
2020  Making motherhood work : how women manage careers and caregiving by Caitlyn Collins; Climate, clothing, and agriculture in prehistory : linking evidence, causes, and effects by Ian Gilligan
2019  The trans generation : how trans kids (and their parents) are creating a gender revolution by Ann Travers; Unearthing childhood : young lives in prehistory by Robin Derricourt
2018  Inka history in Knots : reading khipus as primary sources By Gary Urton; The plague of war : Athens, Sparta, and the struggle for ancient Greece by Jennifer Roberts (honorable mention); Lissa :  a story about medical promise, friendship, and revolution by Sherine aHamdy and Coleman Nye ; illustrated by Sarula Bao and Caroline Brewer; The limits of whiteness : Iranian Americans and the everyday politics of race by Neda Maghbouleh; Someone to talk to by Mario Luis Small (honorable mention)
2017  Enduring uncertainty : deportation, punishment and everyday life by Ines Hasselberg; Thunder shaman : making history with Mapuche spirits in Chile and Patagonia by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (honorable mention); Destroyer of the gods : early Christian distinctiveness in the Roman world by Larry W. Hurtado; The Byzantine Dark Ages by Michael J. Decker (honorable mention)
2016  European products : making and unmaking heritage in Cyprus by Gisela Welz; The analysis of burned human remains, edited by Christopher W. Schmidt and Steven A. Symes (honorable mention); The scholar denied : W. E. B. Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology by Aldon D. Morris; American zoo : a sociological safari by David Grazian (honorable mention); America's safest city : delinquency and modernity in suburbia by Simon I. Singer (honorable mention)
2015  Ancient pathways, ancestral knowledge : ethnobotany and ecological wisdom of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America by Nancy J. Turner; 1177 B.C. : the year civilization collapsed by Eric H. Cline (honorable mention); Nomadism in Iran : from antiquity to the modern era by D. T. Potts (honorable mention); Doctors Without Borders : humanitarian quests, impossible dreams of Medicins Sans Frontieres by Renee C. Fox; Deeply divided : racial politics and social movements in postwar America by Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos (honorable mention); Reluctant witness : survivors, their children, and the rise of Holocaust consciousness by Arlene Stein (honorable mention)
2013  The body in history : Europe from the Paleolithic to the future, edited by John Robb and Oliver J.T. Harris; Places of pain : forced displacement, popular memory and trans-local identities in Bosnian war-torn communities by Hariz Halilovich (honorable mention)
2012  Ancient Nubia : African kingdoms on the Nile, edited by Majorie M. Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Salima Ikram, and Sue D’Auria; photographs by Chester Higgins, Jr.; How ancient Europeans saw the world : vision, patterns, and the shaping of the mind in prehistoric times by Peter S. Wells (honorable mention)
2011  Histories of Peirene : a Corinthian fountain in three millennia by Betsey Ann Robinson; The evolution of the human head by Daniel Lieberman (honorable mention); Exceptional people : how migration shaped our world and will define our future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, and Meera Balarajan; Popular crime : reflections on the celebration of violence by Bill James (honorable mention)
2010  An anthropology of biomedicine by Margaret Lock & Vinh-Kim Nguyen; Favela : four decades of living on the edge in Rio de Janeiro by Janice Perlman; Fire in the heart : how white activists embrace racial justice by Mark R. Warren (honorable mention); The edge of the woods : Iroquoia, 1534-1701 by Jon Parmenter (honorable mention); The Jeffersons at Shadwell by Susan Kern (honorable mention)
2009  Knossos & the prophets of modernism by Cathy Gere; Dangerous citizens : the Greek left and the terror of the state by Neni Panourgia (honorable mention); Codes of the underworld : how criminals communicate by Diego Gambetta; Black men can't shoot by Scott N. Brooks (honorable mention); Why David sometimes wins : leadership, organization, and strategy in the California farm worker movement by Marshall Ganz (honorable mention)
2008  A Zapotec natural history : trees, herbs, and flowers, birds, beasts, and bugs in the life of San Juan Gbëë by Eugene Hunn; Digging in the City of Brotherly Love : stories from Philadelphia archaeology by Rebecca Yamin (honorable mention); Jamaican food : history, biology, culture by B. W. Higman (honorable mention); Cop in the hood : my year policing Baltimore’s eastern district by Peter Moskos; New tech, new ties : how mobile communication is reshaping social cohesion by Rich Ling (honorable mention)
2007  Antiquity recovered : the legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum by Victoria C. Gardner Coates and Jon L. Seydl; Maya calendar origins : monuments, mythistory, and the materialization of time by Prudence M. Rice (honorable mention); Coercive control : the entrapment of women in personal life by Evan Stark; Poverty and discrimination by Kevin Lang (honorable mention)
2006  Wondrous curiosities : ancient Egypt at the British Museum by Stephanie Moser; Stories in stone : conserving mosaics of Roman Africa : masterpieces from the national museums of Tunisia by Aïcha Ben Abed and Tevuy Ball (honorable mention); The civil sphere by Jeffrey C. Alexander; Territory, authority, rights : from medieval to global assemblages by Saskia Sassen (honorable mention)
2005  The career mystique : cracks in the American dream by Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling; First farmers : the origins of agricultural societies by Peter Bellwood; The human fossil record, volume four : craniodental morphology of early hominids and overview by Jeffrey H Schwartz and Ian Tattersall (honorable mention)
2004  The human fossil record, volume three : brain endocasts - the paleoneurological evidence by Ralph L. Halloway, Douglas C. Broadfield, and Michael S. Yuan; Appalachian folkways by John B. Rehder
2003  Lothagam : the dawn of humanity in eastern Africa by Meave G. Leakey and John M. Harris; Remaking the American mainstream : assimilation and contemporary immigration by Richard Alba and Victor Nee
2002  Heat wave : a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg; The Penitente Brotherhood : patriarchy and Hispano-Catholicism in New Mexico by Michael P. Carroll
2001  Stand and prosper : private Black colleges and their students by Henry N. Drewry and Humphrey Doermann ; in collaboration with Susan H. Anderson
2000  American project : the rise and fall of a modern ghetto by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh; The book of Jerry Falwell : fundamentalist language and politics by Susan Friend Harding (honorable mention)
1999  The barbarians speak : how the conquered peoples shaped Roman Europe by Peter S. Wells
1998  The sociology of philosophies : a global theory of intellectual change by Randall Collins
1997  The anatomy of disgust by William Ian Miller
1996  Encyclopedia of world cultures, David Levinson, editor in chief
1995  The power of place : urban landscapes as public history by Dolores Hayden
1994  The homeless by Christopher Jencks
1993  The Nariokotome Homo Erectus skeleton, edited by Alan Walker and Richard Leakey
1991  The middle ground : Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650-1815 by Richard White

W. W. Howells Prize

This prize is awarded by the Biological Anthropology Section of the AAA to honor a book in the area of biological anthropology. Click Biological Anthropology Section for more information about this section of the American Anthropological Association.

2023  Period: The Real Story of Menstruation by Kate Clancy
2022  Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff
2021  First steps : how upright walking made us human by Jeremy DeSilva
2019  How men age : what evolution reveals about male health and mortality by Richard G. Bribiescas
2018  Close encounters with humankind : a paleoanthropologist investigates our evolving species by Sang-Hee Lee with Shin-Young Yoon
2017  No award
2016  The creative spark : how imagination made humans exceptional by Agustín Fuentes
2015  The omnivorous mind : our evolving relationship with food by John S. Allen
2014  The fruit, the tree, and the serpent : why we see so well by Lynne A. Isbell
2013  Missing & murdered : a personal adventure in forensic anthropology by Alan G. Morris
2012  Mothers and others : the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
2011  Ancient bodies, modern lives : how evolution has shaped women's health by Wenda Trevathan
2010  Primeval kinship : how pair-bonding gave birth to human society by Bernard Chapais
2009  The ape in the tree : an intellectual and natural history of Proconsul by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman
2008  Among orangutans : red apes and the rise of human culture by Carel van Schaik and Perry van Duijnhoven
2007  Skin : a natural history by Nina Jablonski
2006  Man the hunted : primates, predators, and human evolution by Donna L. Hart and Robert W. Sussman
2005  The hunt for the dawn monkey : unearthing the origins of monkeys, apes, and humans by Christopher Beard
2004  Reflections of our past : how human history is revealed in our genes by John Relethford
2003  What it means to be 98% chimpanzee : apes, people, and their genes by Jonathan Marks
2002  God-apes and fossil men : paleoanthropology of South Asia by Kenneth A. R. Kennedy
2000  Mother nature : maternal instincts and how they shape the human species by Sarah Hrdy
1998  Becoming human : evolution and human uniqueness by Ian Tattersall
1997  Race and human evolution by Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari
1994  Dynamics of human reproduction : biology, allometry, demography by James W. Wood
1993  A view to a death in the morning : hunting and nature through history by Matt Cartmill
1992  Chimpanzee material culture : implications for human evolution by William McGrew
1990  How monkeys see the world : inside the mind of another species by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth

J. I. Staley Prize

The School for Advanced Research (SAR) presents the J. I. Staley Prize to a living author for a book that exemplifies outstanding scholarship and writing in anthropology. The award recognizes innovative works that go beyond traditional frontiers and dominant schools of thought in anthropology and add new dimensions to our understanding of the human species. It honors books that cross subdisciplinary boundaries within anthropology and reach out in new and expanded interdisciplinary directions. Click J. I. Staley Prize for more information.

2024  How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others by Tanya Marie Luhrmann
2023  The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time by Hugh Raffles
2022  The fetish revisited : Marx, Freud, and the gods Black people make by J. Lorand Matory
2021  Renegade dreams : living through injury in gangland Chicago by Laurence Ralph
2020  Life beside itself : imagining care in the Canadian Arctic by Lisa Stevenson
2019  Government of paper : the materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan by Matthew Hull
2018  The land of open graves : living and dying on the migrant trail by Jason De León
2017  Alien ocean : anthropological voyages in microbial seas by Stefan Helmreich
2016  Malignant : how cancer becomes us by S. Lochlann Jain
2015  Converting words : Maya in the age of the cross by William F. Hanks
2014  The nuclear borderlands : the Manhattan Project in post-Cold War New Mexico by Joseph Masco
2013  Vita : life in a zone of social abandonment by by João Biehl
2012  Mothers and others : the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
2011  The vanishing hectare : property and value in postsocialist Transylvania by Katherine Verdery
2010  Human rights and gender violence : translating international law into local justice by Sally Engle Merry
2009  What it means to be 98% chimpanzee : apes, people, and their genes by Jonathan Marks
2008  Painting culture : the making of an aboriginal high art by Fred R. Myers
2007  Stories in the time of cholera : racial profiling during a medical nightmare by Charles L. Briggs with Clara Mantini-Briggs
2006  Pathologies of power : health, human rights, and the new war on the poor by Paul Farmer
2005  The symbolic species : the co-evolution of language and the brain by Terrence W. Deacon
2004  Life and death on Mount Everest : Sherpas and Himalayan mountaineering by Sherry B. Ortner
2003  Testing women, testing the fetus : the social impact of amniocentesis in America by Rayna Rapp; No aging in India : Alzheimer's, the bad family, and other modern things by Lawrence Cohen
2002  The future of us all : race and neighborhood politics in New York City by Roger Sanjek
2001  Wisdom sits in places : landscape and language among the Western Apache by Keith Basso
2000  Death without weeping : the violence of everyday life in Brazil by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
1999  Crafting selves : power, gender, and discourses of identity in a Japanese workplace by Dorinne K. Kondo
1998  Anahulu : the anthropology of history in the Kingdom of Hawaii by Patrick Kirch and Marshall Sahlins
1997  Encounters with aging : mythologies of menopause in Japan and North America by Margaret Lock
1995  Priests and programmers : technologies of power in the engineered landscape of Bali by J. Stephen Lansing
1994  Anthropology through the looking-glass : critical ethnography in the margins of Europe by Michael Herzfeld
1993  Alabi's world by Richard Price
1991  Sound and sentiment : birds, weeping, poetics, and song in Kaluli expression by Steven Feld
1990  Karl Marx collective : economy, society and religion in a Siberian collective farm by Caroline Humphrey
1989  Culture and the evolutionary process by Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson
1988  Europe and the people without history by Eric Wolf

The Francis L. K. Hsu Book Prize

The prize is given to the English-language book judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field. The prize is named for the late Francis L.K. Hsu (1909-2000), renowned cross-cultural anthropologist and former President (1977-78) of the American Anthropological Association. Click Society for East Asian Anthropology for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2022  The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan by Chikako Ozawa-De Silva
2021  Prototype nation : China and the contested promise of innovation by Silvia M. Lindtner
2020  Jesus loves Japan : return migration and global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian diaspora by Suma Ikeuchi
2019  Experimental Beijing : gender and globalization in Chinese contemporary art by Sasha Su-Ling Welland
2018  Biomedical odysseys : fetal cell experiments from cyberspace to China by Priscilla Song
2017  Inheritance of loss : China, Japan, and the political economy of redemption after empire by Yukiko Koga
2016  Unknotting the heart : unemployment and therapeutic governance in China by Jie Yang
2015  The sacred routes of Uyghur history by Rian Richard Thum
2014  Tragic spirits : shamanism, memory, and gender in contemporary Mongolia by Manduhai Buyandelger
2013  Depression in Japan : psychiatric cures for a society in distress by Junko Kitanaka
2012  Governing educational desire : culture, politics, and schooling in China by Andrew Kipnis
2011  In search of paradise : middle-class living in a Chinese metropolis by Li Zhang
2010  Sovereignty at the edge : Macau and the question of Chineseness by Cathryn Clayton; South Koreans in the debt crisis : the creation of a neoliberal welfare state by Jesook Song (honorable mention)
2009  Uneasy reunions : immigration, citizenship, and family life in post-1997 Hong Kong by Nicole Dejong Newendorp; The comfort women : sexual violence and postcolonial memory in Korea and Japan by C. Sarah Soh (honorable mention)
2008  Qigong fever : body, science, and utopia in China by David Palmer
2007  Rural women in urban China : gender, migration, and social change by Tamara Jacka
2006  Final days : Japanese culture and choice at the end of life by Susan Orpett Long

Eileen Basker Memorial Prize

This prize is awarded annually for a significant contribution to anthropological scholarship on gender and health by a scholar (or scholars) from any discipline or nation for a specific book, article, film, or exceptional PhD thesis produced within the preceding three years. The Prize is awarded to the work judged to be the most courageous, significant, and potentially influential contribution to this area of scholarship. Click Society for Medical Anthropology for more information about the sponsors of this award.

2023: Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era by Natali Valdez
2022: Dying to Count: Post-Abortion Care and Global Reproductive Health Politics in Senegal by Siri Suh
2021  Documenting death : maternal mortality and the ethics of care in Tanzania by Adrienne Strong.
2020  Inequalities of aging : paradoxes of independence in American home care by Elana D. Buch; Reproductive injustice : racism, pregnancy, and premature birth by Dána-Ain Davis
2019  Marked women : the cultural politics of cervical cancer in Venezuela by Rebecca G. Martínez
2018  Beyond surgery : injury, healing, and religion at an Ethiopian hospital by Anita Hannig; Jailcare : finding the safety net for women behind bars by Carolyn Sufrin (honorable mention)
2017  AIDS and masculinity in the African city : privilege, inequality, and modern manhood by Robert Wyrod
2016  Not tonight : migraine and the politics of gender and health by Joanna Kempner
2015  Haunting images : a cultural account of selective reproduction in Vietnam by Tine Gammeltoft; The violence of care : rape victims, forensic nurses, and sexual assault intervention by Sameena Mulla (honorable mention)
2014  Daughters of Parvati : women and madness in contemporary India by Sarah Pinto
2013  Pretty modern : beauty, sex, and plastic surgery in Brazil by Alexander Edmonds; Intimate enemies violence and reconciliation in Peru by Kimberly Theidon (honorable mention)
2012  Reproduction, globalization, and the state : new theoretical and ethnographic perspectives, edited by Carole Browner and Carolyn Sargent
2011  AIDS, sex, and culture : global politics and survival in southern Africa by Ida Susser; Dangerous pregnancies : mothers, disabilities, and abortion in modern America by Leslie Regan
2010  Birthing a mother : the surrogate body and the pregnant self by Elly Teman
2009  The public life of the fetal sonogram : technology, consumption, and the politics of reproduction by Janelle Taylor
2008  Fixing men : sex, birth control, and AIDS in Mexico by Matthew C. Gutmann; The making of Our bodies, ourselves : how feminism travels across borders by Kathy Davis
2007  On the game : women and sex work by Sophie Day
2006  Women's health in post-Soviet Russia : the politics of intervention by Michele Rivkin-Fish
2005  Vita : life in a zone of social abandonment by João Biehl
2004  Into our own hands : the women's health movement in the United States, 1969-1990 by Sandra Morgen
2003  Contingent lives : fertility, time, and aging in West Africa by Caroline Bledsoe and Fatoumatta Banja
2002  Birthing the nation : strategies of Palestinian women in Israel by Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh
2001  Reproducing Jews : a cultural account of assisted conception in Israel by Susan Kahn
2000  Venus on wheels : two decades of dialogue on disability, biography, and being female in America by Gelya Frank
1999  Testing women, testing the fetus : the social impact of amniocentesis in America by Rayna Rapp; Disciplining reproduction : modernity, American life sciences, and "the problems of sex" by Adele Clarke
1998  No prize
1997  Women, poverty, and AIDS : sex, drugs, and structural violence by Paul Farmer, Margaret Connors, and Janie Simmons
1996  No prize
1995  Quest for conception : gender, infertility, and Egyptian medical traditions by Marcia Inhorn
1994  With child in mind : studies of the personal encounter with infertility by Margarete Sandelowski
1993  The woman beneath the skin : a doctor's patients in eighteenth-century Germany by Barbara Duden; Encounters with aging : mythologies of menopause in Japan and North America by Margaret Lock
1992  Death without weeping : the violence of everyday life in Brazil by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
1991  No prize
1990  Contested lives : the abortion debate in an American community by Faye Ginsburg
1989  Fasting girls : the emergence of anorexia nervosa as a modern disease by Joan Jacobs Brumberg
1988  The woman in the body : a cultural analysis of reproduction by Emily Martin (e-book)

The SANA Book Award

This prize is awarded to a single or multiple authored book (not edited collections) that deals with an important social issue within the discipline of anthropology; has broader implications for social change or justice; and is accessible beyond the discipline of anthropology. Click Society for the Anthropology of North America for more information about the sponsors of this award. The prize was formerly designated as the Delmos Jones and Jabna Scharff Memorial Prize for the Critical Study of North America

2022-2023  Undocumented Motherhood: Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing, by Elizabeth Farfán-Santos 
2020-2021  The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice, by Melissa Checker
2018-2019  Herlands : exploring the women’s land movement in the United States by Keridwen N. Luis
2016-2017  The land of open graves : living and dying on the migrant trail by Jason De León ; with photographs by Michael Wells and Shapeshifters : Black girls and the choreography of citizenship by Aimee Meredith Cox; They leave their kidneys in the fields : illness, injury and illegality among U.S. farmworkers by Sarah Bronwen Horton (honorable mention)
2013-2014  We are the face of Oaxaca : testimony and social movements by Lynn Stephen; Mohawk interruptus : political life across the borders of settler states by Audra Simpson (honorable mention); Making war at Fort Hood : life and uncertaintly in a military community by Kenneth MacLeish (honorable mention)
2011-2012  Tobacco capitalism : growers, migrant workers, and the changing face of a global industry by Peter Benson; Hound pound narrative : sexual offender habilitation and the anthropology of therapeutic intervention by James Waldram (honorable mention)
2011  The accidental slaveowner : revisiting a myth of race and finding an American family by Mark Auslander; Reproducing race : an ethnography of pregnancy as a site of racialization by Khiara M. Bridges (honorable mention)
2009  High stakes : Florida Seminole gaming and sovereignty by Jessica R. Cattelino; Liquidated : an ethnography of Wall Street by Karen Ho (honorable mention)
2007  Local democracy under siege : activism, public interests, and private politics by Dorothy Holland, Catherine Lutz, Don Nonini, Lesley Bartlett, Marla Frederick-McGlathery, Thaddeus C. Guldbrandsen, and Enrique Murillo; The farmworkers' journey by Ann Aurelia López (honorable mention); Imagining transgender : an ethnography of a category by David Valentine (honorable mention)
2005  The near northwest side story : migration, displacement, and Puerto Rican families by Gina Perez

The Diana Forsythe Prize

The Diana Forsythe Prize was created in 1999 to celebrate the best book or series of publications in the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science, and/or technology, including biomedicine. Click Society for the Anthropology of Work for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2022  Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change by Adriana Petryna
2021  Porkopolis : American animality, standardized life, and the factory farm by Alex Blanchette; honorable mention: Animal intimacies : interspecies relatedness in India's central Himalayas by Radhika Govindrajan
2020  Tea and solidarity : Tamil women and work in postwar Sri Lanka by Mythri Jegathesan; The social life of DNA : race, reparations, and reconciliation after the genome by Alondra Nelson (honorable mention)
2019  Chasing innovation : making entrepreneurial citizens in modern India by Lilly Irani; Decolonizing extinction : the work of care in orangutan rehabilitation by Juno Salazar Parreñas (honorable mention)
2018  Fractivism : corporate bodies and chemical bonds by Sara Ann Wylie; Synthetic : how life got made by Sophia Roosth (honorable mention)
2017  Encoding race, encoding class : Indian IT workers in Berlin by Sareeta Amrute; Plastic bodies : sex hormones and menstrual suppression in Brazil by Emilia Sanabria (honorable mention)
2016  Emergent ecologies by Eben Kirksey; The impotence epidemic : men's medicine and sexual desire in contemporary China by Everett Yuehong Zhang (honorable mention)
2015  Hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy : the many faces of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman; Ordinary medicine : extraordinary treatments, longer lives, and where to draw the line by Sharon Kaufman (honorable mention)
2014  Malignant : how cancer becomes us by S. Lochlann Jain; When experiments travel : clinical trials and the global search for human subjects by Adriana Petryna (honorable mention)
2013  The life of cheese : crafting food and value in America by Heather Paxson
2012  Sex cells : the medical market for eggs and sperm by Rene Almeling
2011  Pretty modern : beauty, sex and plastic surgery in Brazil by Alexander Edmonds
2010  Birthing a mother : the surrogate body and the pregnant self by Elly Teman
2009  Bipolar expeditions : mania and depression in American culture by Emily Martin
2008  Will to live : AIDS therapies and the politics of survival by João Biehl
2007  Local babies, global science : gender, religion and in vitro fertilization in Egypt by Marcia Inhorn
2006  Cultures@SiliconValley by Jan English-Lueck
2005  Picturing personhood : brain scans and biomedical identity by Joe Dumit
2003  When nature goes public : the making and unmaking of bioprospecting in Mexico by Cori Hayden
2002  Lucy Suchman, for the body of her work
2001  Silicon second nature : culturing artificial life in a digital world by Stefan Helmreich
2000  David Hess, for the body of his work
1999  Testing women, testing the fetus : the social impact of amniocentesis in America by Rayna Rapp

The Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize

The Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize is awarded to single or co-authored monographs or edited collections published within the past three years. The criteria are the significance of the research, relevance for the anthropology of work, clarity and effectiveness of the presentation, and appeal to a wider audience in anthropology and beyond. Preference will be given to books based on fieldwork and which have not received another award or prize. Click Society for the Anthropology of Work for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2023  [Tie] Laboring for Justice: The Fight Against Wage Theft in an American City by Rebecca Berke Galemba
2023  [Tie] The Eyes of the World: Mining the Digital Age in the Eastern DR Congo by James H. Smith
2022  Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood by Vanessa Díaz2021  How nature works : rethinking labor on a troubled planet by Sarah Besky and Alex Blanchette
2020 Threshold : emergency responders on the US-Mexico border by Ieva Jusionyte
2019  Waste and wealth : an ethnography of labor, value, and morality in a Vietnamese recycling economy by Minh T. N. Nguyen
2018  Environment, labour, and capitalism at sea : "working the ground" in Scotland by Penny McCall Howard
2017  Work and livelihoods : history, ethnography and models in times of crisis by Susana Narotzky and Victoria Goddard
2016  Scratching out a living : Latinos, race, and work in the Deep South by Angela Steusse
2015  Thiefing a chance : factory work, illicit labor, and neoliberal subjectivities in Trinidad by Rebecca Prentice
2014  Street economies in the urban global South by Karen Tranberg Hansen, Walter Little, and B. Lynne Milgram
2013  Fresh fruit, broken bodies : migrant farmworkers in the United States by Seth Holmes; Labor disorders in neoliberal Italy : mobbing, well-being, and the workplace by Noelle Molé
2012  A company of one : insecurity, independence, and the new world of white-collar unemployment by Carrie Lane
2011  The gender of globalization : women navigating cultural and economic marginalities, edited by Ann Kingsolver and Nandini Gunewardena
2010  Globalization in Mexico : three decades of change by Frances Rothstein