Each year, the Society for Cultural Anthropology awards two prizes to scholars whose work embodies the Society's expansive vision for the discipline.

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

• 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)
  
• 2018 Hannah Appel (University of California, Los Angeles)
  
• 2017 Kristina Lyons (University of Pennsylvania)
• 2016 Nicholas Shapiro (University of California, Los Angeles)
• 2015 Charles Briggs (University of California, Berkeley)
• 2014 Kevin Lewis O’Neill (University of Toronto)
• 2013 Catherine Fennell (Columbia University)
• 2012 Mette N. Svendsen (University of Copenhagen)
• 2011 Jessica Cattelino (University of California, Los Angeles)
• 2010 Nancy Ries (Colgate University)
• 2009 Omri Elisha (Queens College, City University of New York)
• 2008 Ilana Feldman (George Washington University)
• 2007 Shao Jing (Nanjing University)
• 2006 Peter Redfield (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
• 2005 S. Lochlann Jain (Stanford University)
• 2004 William Mazzarella (University of Chicago)
• 2003 Paul K. Eiss (Carnegie Mellon University)
• 2002 Saba Mahmood (University of Chicago)

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

• 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)