UC Press Blog

Salih Can Aciksoz

Middle East Studies (MES) Book Award 2021, Honorable Mention
American Anthropological Association, Middle East Section

New Millennium Book Award 2021
Society for Medical Anthropology

Salih Can Açiksöz is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey

Sacrificial Limbs chronicles the everyday lives and political activism of disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war, one of the most volatile conflicts in the Middle East. Through nuanced ethnographic portraits, Açiksöz examines how veterans’ experiences of war and disability are closely linked to class, gender, and ultimately the embrace of ultranationalist right-wing politics. Bringing the reader into military hospitals, commemorations, political demonstrations, and veterans’ everyday spaces of care, intimacy, and activism, Sacrificial Limbs provides a vivid analysis of the multiple and sometimes contradictory forces that fashion veterans’ bodies, political subjectivities, and communities. It is essential reading for students and scholars interested in anthropology, masculinity, and disability.

Matilde Córdoba Azcárate

SLACA Book Prize 2021
The Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

Matilde Córdoba Azcárate is Associate Professor in the Communication Department at the University of California, San Diego.

Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yucatan

Tourism has become one of the most powerful forces organizing the predatory geographies of late capitalism. It creates entangled futures of exploitation and dependence, extracting resources and labor, and eclipsing other ways of doing, living, and imagining life. And yet, tourism also creates jobs, encourages infrastructure development, and in many places inspires the only possibility of hope and well-being. Stuck with Tourism explores the ambivalent nature of tourism by drawing on ethnographic evidence from the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, a region voraciously transformed by tourism development over the past forty years. Contrasting labor and lived experiences at the beach resorts of Cancún, protected natural enclaves along the Gulf coast, historical buildings of the colonial past, and maquilas for souvenir production in the Maya heartland, this book explores the moral, political, ecological, and everyday dilemmas that emerge when, as Yucatán’s inhabitants put it, people get stuck in tourism’s grip.

Maggie Dickinson

Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Prize 2021, Honorable Mention
Society for the Anthropology of North America

Maggie Dickinson is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the City University of New York’s Guttman Community College.

Feeding the Crisis: Care and Abandonment in America’s Food Safety Net

Feeding the Crisis tells the story of eight families as they navigate the terrain of an expanding network of assistance programs in which care and abandonment work hand in hand to make access to food uncertain for people on the social and economic margins. Amid calls at the federal level to expand work requirements for food assistance, Dickinson shows us how such ideas are bad policy that fail to adequately address hunger in America. Feeding the Crisis brings the voices of food-insecure families into national debates about welfare policy, offering fresh insights into how we can establish a right to food in the United States.

Rebecca Lester

Eileen Basker Memorial Prize 2021, Honorable Mention
Society for Medical Anthropology

Rebecca J. Lester is Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and a licensed clinical social worker. She is the author of numerous academic articles and the award-winning books Famished, and Jesus in Our Wombs.

Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America

When Rebecca Lester was eleven years old—and again when she was eighteen—she almost died from anorexia nervosa. Now both a tenured professor in anthropology and a licensed social worker, she turns her ethnographic and clinical gaze to the world of eating disorders—their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and place in the American cultural imagination.

Famished, the culmination of over two decades of anthropological and clinical work, as well as a lifetime of lived experience, presents a profound rethinking of eating disorders and how to treat them. Through a mix of rich cultural analysis, detailed therapeutic accounts, and raw autobiographical reflections, Famished helps make sense of why people develop eating disorders, what the process of recovery is like, and why treatments so often fail. It’s also an unsparing condemnation of the tension between profit and care in American healthcare, demonstrating how a system set up to treat a disease may, in fact, perpetuate it. Fierce and vulnerable, critical and hopeful, Famished will forever change the way you understand eating disorders and the people who suffer with them.

Amanda Logan

ASFS Book Award (First Book) 2021
Association for the Study of Food and Society

Amanda L. Logan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University.

The Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security in Ghana

A free open access ebook is available at www.luminosoa.org.

The Scarcity Slot is the first book to critically examine food security in Africa’s deep past. Amanda L. Logan argues that African foodways have been viewed through the lens of ‘the scarcity slot,’ a kind of Othering based on presumed differences in resources. Weaving together archaeological, historical, and environmental data with food ethnography, she advances a new approach to building long-term histories of food security on the continent in order to combat these stereotypes. Focusing on a case study in Banda, Ghana that spans the past six centuries, The Scarcity Slot reveals that people thrived during a severe, centuries-long drought just as Europeans arrived on the coast, with a major decline in food security emerging only recently. This narrative radically challenges how we think about African foodways in the past with major implications for the future.

Maurice Rafael Magaña

Anthony Leeds Book Prize 2021
Critical Urban Anthropology Association

Maurice Rafael Magaña is a sociocultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona.

Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico

In his exciting new book, based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Maurice Magaña considers how urban and migrant youth in Oaxaca embrace subcultures from hip-hop to punk and adopt creative organizing practices to create meaningful channels of participation in local social and political life. In the process, young people remake urban space and construct new identities in ways that directly challenge elite visions of their city and essentialist notions of what it means to be indigenous in the contemporary era. Cartographies of Youth Resistance is essential reading for students and scholars interested in youth politics and culture in Mexico, social movements, urban studies, and migration.

Kathryn A. Mariner

Edie Turner Prize 2021, Honorable Mention
Society for Humanistic Anthropology

Kathryn A. Mariner is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.

Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.

Amy Moran-Thomas

Victor Turner Prize 2021
Society for Humanistic Anthropology

Amy Moran-Thomas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic

Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a five-hundred-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction “sugar”—or, as some say in Belize, “traveling with sugar.” A decade in the making, this book unfolds as a series of crónicas—a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease. It profiles the careful work of those “still fighting it” as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, these individuals speak back to science and policy misrecognitions that have prematurely cast their lost limbs and deaths as normal. Their families’ arts of maintenance and repair illuminate ongoing struggles to survive and remake larger systems of food, land, technology, and medicine.

Mark D. McCoy

Best Book Award (Popular Book) 2021
Society for American Archaeology

Mark D. McCoy is an expert in geospatial archaeology and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of over forty scientific journal articles on the archaeology of the Pacific Islands.

Maps for Time Travelers: How Archaeologists Use Technology to Bring Us Closer to the Past

Written by a preeminent expert in geospatial archaeology, Maps for Time Travelers is a guide to how technology is revolutionizing the way archaeologists study and reconstruct humanity’s distant past. From satellite imagery to 3D modeling, today archaeologists are answering questions about human history that could previously only be imagined. As archaeologists create a better and more complete picture of the past, they sometimes find that truth is stranger than fiction.

Scott Stonington

Edie Turner First Book Prize 2021, Honorable Mention
Society for Humanistic Anthropology

New Millennium Book Award 2021
Society for Medical Anthropology

Sharon Stephens Prize 2021, Honorable Mention
American Ethnological Society

Scott Stonington, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, International Studies, and Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan.

The Spirit Ambulance: Choreographing the End of Life in Thailand

The Spirit Ambulance is a journey into decision-making at the end of life in Thailand, where families attempt to craft good deaths for their elders in the face of clashing ethical frameworks, from a rapidly developing universal medical system, to national and global human-rights politics, to contemporary movements in Buddhist metaphysics. Scott Stonington’s gripping ethnography documents how Thai families attempt to pay back a “debt of life” to their elders through intensive medical care, followed by a medically assisted rush from the hospital to home to ensure a spiritually advantageous last breath. The result is a powerful exploration of the nature of death and the complexities arising from the globalization of biomedical expertise and ethics around the world.

Adrienne Strong

Adele E. Clark Book Award 2021, Honorable Mention
ReproNetwork

Eileen Basker Memorial Prize 2021
Society for Medical Anthropology

Adrienne E. Strong is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida.

Documenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania

A free open access ebook is available at www.luminosoa.org. Documenting Death is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ward, anthropologist Adrienne E. Strong untangles the reasons Tanzania has achieved so little sustainable success in reducing maternal mortality rates, despite global development support. Growing administrative pressures to document good care serve to preclude good care in practice while placing frontline healthcare workers in moral and ethical peril. Maternal health emergencies expose the precarity of hospital social relations and accountability systems, which, together, continue to lead to the deaths of pregnant women.

Li Zhang

Victor Turner Prize Honorable Mention 2021
Society for Humanistic Anthropology

Li Zhang is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of two award-winning books, Strangers in the City and In Search of Paradise.

Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy

The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. This book offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Li Zhang shows that anxiety—broadly construed in both medical and social terms—has become a powerful indicator for the general pulse of contemporary Chinese society. It is in this particular context that Zhang traces how a new psychotherapeutic culture takes root, thrives, and transforms itself across a wide range of personal, social, and political domains.