The Gregory Bateson Book Prize is awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), the largest section of the American Anthropological Association. Named after distinguished anthropologist, semiotician, cyberneticist, and photographer Gregory Bateson, the award reflects the SCA’s mandate to promote theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded research that engages the most current thinking across the arts and sciences. Welcoming a wide range of styles and arguments, the Gregory Bateson Prize looks to single out work that is interdisciplinary, experimental, and innovative. This year the Gregory Bateson Book Prize Jury honors one winner and two honorable mentions. The jury reviewed over one hundred books from a number of presses over a four-month period. There were quite a few outstanding submissions, reflecting the breadth and scope of the discipline. Ultimately the three books the jury chose exemplify, each in their unique way, a deeply ethical ethnographic integrity, political commitment, and theoretical and citational rigor.
2024 Gregory Bateson Book Prize Winner
Naisargi N. Davé’s Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being (Duke University Press)
In this conceptually brilliant and beautifully written book, Naisargi N. Davé takes us on a path toward an ethics of indifference. Grappling with the long standing and fraught question of how anthropology deals with difference, Davé makes a strong and compelling case for why indifference is actually desirable: it enables the respect for otherness as such, for not imposing a form of “compulsory intimacy.” Davé does this by thinking through both playful and disquieting interspecies encounters in India. Drawing on a queer and unapologetically idiosyncratic approach, Indifference parses big questions around caste, purity, innocence, and anthropomorphism, challenging us to think how indifference can provide a new portal to understanding them. Each chapter gives us an unexpected insight: indifference to consistency in action (saving a dog from maggots, only to be indifferent to it getting hit by a car) leads us to a form of politics that is open, playful, creative; indifference to dirt (after touching animal genitalia) undermines caste’s commitments to purity and disgust; and indifference to innocence (in relation to bestiality and husbandry) opens a language by which to refuse violence.
The committee commends Davé for her exquisite writing skills, which make philosophy so accessible; for thinking with concepts in a way that is both grounded in and yet supersedes context; and for opening the field of Anthropology to a new set of questions around the ethics of relationality.
Honorable Mentions
Shannon Cram’s Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility (University of California Press)
In this masterful and disturbing book, Shannon Cram asks us to consider how we come to fight for the fiction of environmental clean-up, in the face of nuclear contamination that exceeds technical control and promises to outlive our political institutions. Unmaking the Bomb is the product of decades of engaged presence and engaged thought at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and Cram manages to distill this knowledge, and the rage it produces, into a profound and chilling text. Her feminist approach to the technoscientific models and metrics that sanitize the nuclear weapons industry interrupts their false promise of control through ethnographic, auto-ethnographic, and archival turns to the realities they fail to fully apprehend. The result is a book that is as deep as it is uncomfortable.
The committee commends Cram for her dexterity in moving across scales, methods, and vantage points to produce a devastating truth (no longer) hiding in plain sight.
Arseli Dokumaci’s Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Accessible Worlds (Duke University Press)
In Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Accessible Worlds, Arseli Dokumaci offers us a theory and method for surviving a world where the conditions that make life possible are being destroyed and distributed unequally—a way of building and inhabiting livable worlds against all odds. This innovative and thoroughly interdisciplinary ethnography builds conversations between disability studies, performance studies, visual ethnography, and auto-ethnography to reveal the creative force behind the affordances that people make to stretch the ever-shrinking habitus of ability, if only momentarily. Dokumaci employs disability studies as a methodology and forms two major theoretical concepts that have will have wide applicability: Activist Affordances and Shrinkage. At a time when the very fabric of life is targeted with war, genocide, ecological devastation and global pandemics, Activist Affordances insists on the every-day genius, beauty, and stubbornness of survival.
The committee commends Dokumaci for the theoretical and methodological effervescence of Activist Affordances, its contributions to anthropology, and for reminding us that all along, we have been finding ways to inhabit this breaking world and that we must continue to do so, together.
Jury
The 2024 Gregory Bateson Book Prize Jury included Miriam Ticktin (Chair, CUNY Graduate Center), Julie Livingston (NYU), and Maya Mikdashi (Rutgers University).