The Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) is happy to announce that the 2024 co-winners of the annual Cultural Horizons Prize are David C. Thompson for the article, “Evasion: Prison Escapes and the Predicament of Incarceration in Rio de Janeiro” and Tarini Bedi for the article, “Bumpy Roads, Dusty Air: Gadbad and the Sensate Ecologies of Driving Work in Contemporary Mumbai.”

Recognizing that doctoral students are among the most experimentally minded—and often among the best-read—of ethnographic writers, the SCA created the Cultural Horizons Prize, which is awarded by a jury of doctoral students for the best article appearing in the previous year of Cultural Anthropology.

This year’s jurors were Marios Falaris (Johns Hopkins), Nomaan Hasan (Brown), Austin Bryan (Northwestern), and Wan Yin Kimberly Fung (Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo).

In recognizing Professor Thompson and Professor Bedi’ articles, the jurors write:

The committee has selected David C. Thompson’s “Evasion: Prison Escapes and the Predicament of Incarceration in Rio de Janeiro” and Tarini Bedi’s “Bumpy Roads, Dusty Air: Gadbad and the Sensate Ecologies of Driving Work in Contemporary Mumbai” as this year’s winners of the Cultural Horizons prize. While The co-winners of this year’s award demonstrate innovativeness in distinct ways for anthropological research, both articles hinge upon the fact that it matters how one lives through deleterious conditions and structural violence. The descriptive commitment of each author, not to a romanticized exit from these conditions, but to seeing anew the difficult and creative work which sustains a life with others struck a deep chord with this committee as a horizon for the discipline.

Thompson’s article engages with key concepts in Black and Trans Studies to reckon with his interlocutors’ movements “across rather than against a set of tensions shaped by slavery and incarceration” (52). Thompson offers a nuanced exploration of the complex dynamics surrounding prison escapes in Brazil's penal system. Through the lives of two incarcerated Black travestis, Thompson illuminates the figure of evasion (evasão)—the act of temporarily fleeing prison custody, often with the intention to return. This practice reveals fault lines in Brazil's project of incarceration, blurring our distinctions between confinement and freedom.

Situating evasion within a broader genealogy of negotiating landscapes of captivity, Thompson’s ethnography reverberates with echoes of the long history of Black fugitivity and focuses on how his interlocutors live with captivity, shifting what punishment “could and could not take” from them (49). From the apartment on the third floor where evadidos (escapees) find temporary refuge just a short walk from the prison itself, Thompson shows us how prison walls become porous and freedom intertwines with confinement in unexpected ways. By examining evasion not as a dramatic flight or institutional failure, but as an ordinary and expected occurrence, the article illuminates how incarcerated individuals inhabit the carceral state.

Bedi’s articles introduces the concept of “sensate ecologies” to capture the often overlooked sensory and ecological dimensions of labor as drivers navigate through the ecological onslaught, or gadbad, of urban driving. Bedi’s ethnographic detail vividly captures how drivers navigate these interdependencies, providing a richly textured account that brings the reader into the lived reality of Mumbai’s streets. The narrative unfolds through the ecologies themselves, as illustrated by the distribution of shifts—and thus exposure to smog—between Karim and his nephew, the transfer of dhooli from the car to the construction site’s earth, and the transformation of naka into a surface of worship.

Bedi reveals the ecologies of the roads—dirt, naka debris, water, heat, shade, smog, and pigeon excretions—that are home to the chillia drivers, and are experienced differently by passengers and the ride-share taxi industry. By centering the perspective of urban drivers within a polluted ecology, Bedi offers a rethinking of environmentalist critique, urging us to pay attention to the different orientations, particularly the ethical and pragmatic ones, towards compromised ecologies. The taxi-drivers emerge here not just as precarious workers contributing to pollution but live through it and are shaped by it, building a meaningful life on the road.

From prisons in Brazil to roads in Mumbai, both spaces lack definitive exits or conclusive liberation. Bedi’s focus on a collective ethical orientation of living in and with ecological onslaught sees the roads as home without clear boundaries between beginning and end. Thompson, on the other hand, delineates the “rhythm” of captivity and draws our attention to “the unstable edges” and the potential within. The dhairya practiced by urban drivers in Bedi’s work engages in dialogue with the open-ended uncertainty Thompson presents regarding Hillary's direction at the end of the article. These two articles unravel a mix of two approaches, whether attending to the space within captivities of structural violence or at the edges of unbuilding these containments, to studying lives in an impossible world—perhaps even creating a slice of possibility within the impossibility.

Submitted by Yukiko Koga (Yale University), Cultural Horizons Prize Chair.