Book Prizes Awarded Since 2001:

2005 Senior Book Prize Joint Winners
Anna L. Tsing, Univ. of California at Santa Cruz
Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection
(Princeton Univ. Press, 2004)
and
Michael M. J. Fischer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice
(Duke University Press, 2003)

The 2005 AES Senior Book Prize Committee: Adriana Petryna (co-chair), Kim Fortun (co-chair), and Bill Maurer

2005 Sharon Stephens First Book Award Joint Winners:
Kim Gutschow, Williams College
Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas
Harvard University Press, 2004
and
Gaston R. Gordillo, Univ. of British Columbia
Landscapes of Devils:Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco
Duke University Press, 2004

The 2005 AES Sharon Stephens Prize Committee: Mary Weismantel (chair), Ida Susser, and Mary Moran

2003 Senior Book Prize
Mary Weismantel, Northwestern University
Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes
(University of Chicago Press)

2003 Sharon Stephens First Book Award Joint Winners:
Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Advocacy After Bhopal - Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders
(University of Chicago Press)

Adriana Petryna, New School University
Life Exposed - Biological Citizens after Chernobyl
(Princeton University Press)

2003 Sharon Stephens First Book Award Honorable Mention:
Hugh Raffles, University of California at Santa Cruz
In Amazonia – A Natural History
(Princeton University Press)

Click here to read about the 2001 Awards

AES 2007 Book Prizes Pre-Announcement
PLEASE CIRCULATE this announcement to authors, publishers, students, and colleagues
Every other year, the American Ethnological Association awards two prizes for books that speak to contemporary social issues with relevance beyond the discipline and beyond the academy. Ethnographies and critical works in contemporary theory - single-authored or multi-authored but not edited collections, published in 2005 or 2006 - are eligible. One prize is for a work by a senior scholar. The second, the Sharon Stephens Prize, is awarded for a first book.

The prize committee wll be named shortly by the board. Nominations require a letter from a scholar (who is not a representative of a press) describing the appropriateness of the book for the AES Senior Book Prize, and three copies of the book -- sent directly to each member of the prize committee.

The prize committee will announce its decision shortly prior to the 2007 AAA meetings.

Elsie Clews Parsons Prize

The AES is pleased to announce the reinstatement of the Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for best graduate student essay presented at the annual spring meeting. The prize, which began in about 1970 and was discontinued in the 1980s, was commemorated by a silver medallion made by a Hopi silversmith. The design of this medallion utilizes a spider symbol common to Hopi pottery design. It appears on this website as the AES logo.

The prize is given every other year for the best graduate student paper delivered at the spring meeting. The Elsie Clews Parsons Prize was most recently awarded in Spring 2005.

Graduate students interested in applying for the Elsie Clews Parsons Prize should mail three copies of the complete paper to Fran Rothstein, Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, Towson University, Towson, MD 21252-0001 by April 15, 2007. Papers should be no longer than 35 double-spaced pages, previously unpublished, and should conform to American Ethnologist style guidelines.

ECP Award for 2005
Marc David, Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“A Cursing of History, A History of Cursing: Remembering Collective Time from Zero-Degree in South Louisiana”

ECP Award 2003:
Gavin Hamilton Whitelaw, Yale University
“Fermenting Flows: Japanese Buyers, Canadian Farmers, and the Moral Economy of the Non-Transgenic Soybean"

Honorable Mention:
Helena Hansen, Yale University
“Isle Evangelista: A Story of Church and State, Puerto Rico’s Faith Based Initiatives in Drug Treatment”

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