We’re thrilled to share the list of UC Press authors receiving awards at the 2023 American Anthropological Association conference! Please help us spread the news and visit our virtual exhibit page to get 40% off for a limited time.

Community-Based Archaeology
Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities

by Sonya Atalay

Winner, Patty Jo Watson Distinguished Lecturer

Traces of Violence:
Writings on the Disaster in Paris, France

by Robert R. Desjarlais and Khalil Habrih 

Winner, 2023 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology

“What does it mean to write in the aftermath of political violence—of sudden and spectacular violence, as well as of enduring, even everyday violence? This book, a ‘collection of shadows’ surrounding the 2015 Paris attacks, is a searing set of meditations on the impossibility and necessity of writing about disaster. I am extremely grateful to Robert Desjarlais and Khalil Habrih for what they have risked in choosing to write—and to write collaboratively/contrapuntally––in the face of disaster.”
—Lisa Stevenson, author of Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic

Whiteout:
How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America

by Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, David Herzberg

Winner, New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology

“Psychiatrist and anthropologist Hansen, policy advocate and sociologist Netherland, and historian Herzberg richly scrutinise drug use and race along multiple axes that include medicine, public policy, and history to emerge with a powerful portrait of precisely how the social construct of race and systemic racism have both created and blinded us to the unequal treatment of Black and white drug users. Through anthropology, personal histories, and nuanced data analysis this troika engages in textured, deeply researched, scholarship.”

—Lancet

A Landscape of War:
Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon

by Munira Khayyat

Winner, Edie Turner Prize for First Book in Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology

“A Landscape of War is a rich and daring ethnography. Ethically and politically committed to honoring the terms through which her interlocutors understand their vital and lethal environments, Khayyat conceptualizes war as a place of life and reclaims resistance as political action, highlighting its ordinary and relational nature. . . . a powerful and necessary meditation on the domesticity of war.”
—Current Anthropology

Tanya Luhrmann

Winner, Lifetime Achievement Award

The Anatomy of Loneliness:
Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan

by Chikako Ozawa-de Silva 

Winner, Stirling Prize for Established Author, Society for Psychological Anthropology

“Ozawa-de Silva has written what amounts to a book of wisdom for the art of living. It develops a theory of human relational meaning which it applies to understand the nexus of suicide, loneliness, social isolation, and failure of finding meaning in relationships. It makes a fundamental contribution to anthropological and psychological studies of subjectivity and suicide.”
—Arthur Kleinman, author of The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor

Silence and Sacrifice:
Family Stories of Care and the Limits of Love in Vietnam

by Merav Shohet

Winner, 2023 Stirling Prize for First Book, Society for Psychological Anthropology

“Shohet continuously weaves together family interaction and life-history narratives with Vietnam’s often conflictive past. Thus, while this is a book about family and language, it also illuminates much larger questions about the social legacy of war, political turbulence, and economic change.”
—Linguistic Anthropology

Trash Talk:
Anti-Obama Lore and Race in the Twenty-First Century

by Patricia Turner

Second Place, Chicago Folklore Prize

“Patricia Turner is a venerable scholar of American rumor, and Trash Talk is a brilliant examination of the conspiracy theories, legends, myths, and national lies that attended the rise, election, and governance of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. Her book also ingeniously unmasks the folklore, ideology, and logic of anti-blackness that seethe at the heart of white supremacy. Trash Talk is a tour de force of American culture criticism.”
—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Entertaining Race: Performing Blackness in America

Pinelandia:
An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire

by Nomi Stone

Winner, Middle East Section Book Award

“Welcome to Pinelandia—the historic training ground for US imperialism—where the violent ambitions of empire are rehearsed daily. Nomi Stone maps the fantasies and poetics supporting US militarism today—an astonishingly original book.”
—Joseph Masco, author of The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making

Weighing the Future:
Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era

by Natali Valdez

Winner, Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, Society for Medical Anthropology

“Weighing the Future brilliantly exposes how cutting-edge science fosters the same old racialized narratives of health. Carefully detailed, analytically nuanced, politically engaged, and ethnographically rich, Valdez chronicles how histories of race continue to shape science’s views of pregnancy and the pregnant body. A must-read book for our times.”
—Banu Subramaniam, author of Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity

Cancer and the Kali Yuga:
Gender, Inequality, and Health in South India

by Cecilia Coale Van Hollen

Honorable Mention, Council on the Anthropology of Reproduction Book Prize

“Cancer and the Kali Yuga is a timely and revelatory text that vividly represents the possibilities of public health focused ethnographic research carried out in the contexts of structural casteism in contemporary south India. It is a meaningful resource not only for global health researchers but equally for students of gender studies, critical medical anthropology, health equity studies and feminist studies of wellbeing and care in the Global South.”
—Anthropological Quarterly

After Servitude:
Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia

by Mareike Winchell 

Honorable Mention, Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology Book Award

“Through her deft interweaving of classical and contemporary social theory and the actions and words of her Bolivian interlocutors, Winchell creates a complex and sobering picture of the tangled and often contradictory valences of who lays claims to former hacienda land, how those claims are raised and resolved, and the extent to which land as property is intertwined with long-standing schemas of sociality and inequity in Bolivia’s central highlands.”
—American Ethnologist