Each year, the Society for Cultural Anthropology awards two prizes (the Cultural Horizons Prize and the Gregory Bateson Book Prize) to scholars whose work embodies the Society's expansive vision for the discipline. If you would like to support these authors and the Society for Cultural Anthropology, you can visit our Bookshop.org page to purchase our Gregory Bateson Prize Books (below), as well as books written by our Culture at Large Speakers!
Cultural Horizons Prize
Recognizing that graduate 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. The prize is awarded at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association and carries an honorarium of $500.
Cultural Horizons Prize Winners
- 2024 Co-winners David C. Thompson (Simon Fraser University) for “Evasion: Prison Escapes and the Predicament of Incarceration in Rio de Janeiro” and Tarini Bedi (University of Illinois, Chicago) for “Bumpy Roads, Dusty Air: Gadbad and the Sensate Ecologies of Driving Work in Contemporary Mumbai.”
- 2023 Ruth Goldstein (University of Wisconsin-Madison) for “Life in Traffic: Riddling Field Notes on the Political Economy of “Sex” and Nature”
- 2022 Daniela Giudici (University of Trento) for “Beyond Compassionate Aid: Precarious Bureaucrats and Dutiful Asylum Seekers in Italy”
- 2021 Amiel Bize (University of Bayreuth and Cornell University) for “The Right to the Remainder: Gleaning in the Fuel Economies of East Africa’s Northern Corridor”
- 2020 Bo Kyeong Seo (Yonsei University) for “Populist Becoming: The Red Shirt Movement and Political Affliction in Thailand”
- 2019 Sarah Luna (Tufts University) for “Affective Atmospheres of Terror on the Mexico–U.S. Border”
- 2018 Hannah Appel (University of California, Los Angeles) for “Toward an Ethnography of the National Economy”
- 2017 Kristina Lyons (University of Pennsylvania) for “Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Selva, and Small Farmers under the Gun of the U.S.–Colombia War on Drugs”
- 2016 Nicholas Shapiro (University of California, Los Angeles) for “Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime”
- 2015 Charles Briggs (University of California, Berkeley) for “Dear Dr. Freud”
- 2014 Kevin Lewis O’Neill (University of Toronto) for “Left Behind: Security, Salvation, and the Subject of Prevention”
- 2013 Catherine Fennell (Columbia University) for “The Museum of Resilience: Raising a Sympathetic Public in Postwelfare Chicago”
- 2012 Mette N. Svendsen (University of Copenhagen) for “Articulating Potentiality: Notes on the Delineation of the Blank Figure in Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research”
- 2011 Jessica Cattelino (University of California, Los Angeles) for “The Double Bind of American Indian Need-Based Sovereignty”
- 2010 Nancy Ries (Colgate University) for “Potato Ontology: Surviving Postsocialism in Russia”
- 2009 Omri Elisha (Queens College, City University of New York) for “Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism”
- 2008 Ilana Feldman (George Washington University) for “Difficult Distinctions: Refugee Law, Humanitarian Practice,and Political Identification in Gaza”
- 2007 Shao Jing (Nanjing University) for “Fluid Labor and Blood Money: The Economy of HIV/AIDS in Rural Central China”
- 2006 Peter Redfield (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for “Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis”
- 2005 S. Lochlann Jain (Stanford University) for “Dangerous Instrumentality: The Bystander as Subject in Automobility”
- 2004 William Mazzarella (University of Chicago) for ““Very Bombay”: Contending with the Global in an Indian Advertising Agency”
- 2003 Paul K. Eiss (Carnegie Mellon University) for “Hunting for the Virgin: Meat, Money, and Memory in Tetiz, Yucatán”
- 2002 Saba Mahmood (University of Chicago) for “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival”
Gregory Bateson Book Prize
One of anthropology’s most distinguished thinkers, Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) and his diverse body of work are emblematic of what the SCA was founded to promote: rich ethnographic analysis that engages the most current thinking across the arts and sciences. Welcoming a wide range of styles and argument, the Gregory Bateson Book Prize looks to single out work that is theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded, and in the spirit of the tradition for which the SCA has been known: interdisciplinary, experimental, and innovative. The prize is awarded at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association and carries a honorarium of $500.
Bateson Prize Winners
- 2024 Naisargi N. Davé for Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being (Duke University Press)
- 2023 Jafari Allen for There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life (Duke University Press), Darren Byler for Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press), and Maya Mikdashi for Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon (Stanford University Press)
- 2022 M. Bianet Castellanos for Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico (Stanford University Press), Hilda Llorens for Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (University of Washington Press), and Elan Abrell for Saving Animals: Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care (University of Minnesota Press)
- 2021 Ana-Maurine Lara for Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty (SUNY Press)
- 2020 Savannah Shange for Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (Duke University Press), Miyarrka Media for Phone and Spear: A Yuta Anthropology (Goldsmiths Press), and Alan Klima for Ethnography #9 (Duke University Press)
- 2019 Radhika Govindrajan (University of Washington)
- 2018 Louise Meintjes (Duke University)
- 2017 Susan Lepselter (Indiana University)
- 2016 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (University of California, Santa Cruz)
- 2015 Lucas Bessire (University of Oklahoma)
- 2014 Eduardo Kohn (McGill University)
- 2013 Elizabeth Anne Davis (Princeton University)
- 2012 David Graeber (London School of Economics)
- 2011 Karen Strassler (Queens College, City University of New York)
- 2010 Stefan Helmreich (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
- 2009 Barry F. Saunders (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)