2018 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing
The Society for Humanistic Anthropology is delighted to announce the winners of the 2018 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing. We are grateful to the work and commitment of the book prize committee: Julia Offen, Helena Wulff, and Anna Tsing. The committee evaluated over 75 ethnographies for their originality, innovative methods, experience-near approach, quality of writing, presentation and engagement with humanistic anthropology and anthropological scholarship in general. We chose the ethnographies that we found to be exemplars of the best ethnographic writing, the ones destined to make a significant impact on the doing and writing of ethnography. The winners exemplify the broad and deep diversity of anthropologists’ approaches to their craft.
1st Place: Katherine Verdery, My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Duke, 2018
2nd Place: Piers Vitebsky, Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos U Chicago 2017
3rd Place: Ellen Wiles, The Invisible Crowd Harper Collins HQ 2017
Honorable Mention: Susan Helen Ellison, Domesticating Democracy: The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia Duke 2018
SHA Ethnographic Fiction and Creative Nonfiction Contest
1st Place: Annalisa Bolin “A Ghost Map of Kigali”
2nd Place: Helle Bundgaard “Much Ado about a Ladies Bicycle”
Honorable Mention: Jesse Cheng “Why This Killer Should Live”
Honorable Mention: Xenia Cherkaev “St. Xenia and the Gleaners of Leningrad”
Honorable Mention: Rima Praspaliauskiene “Lenin”
SHA Ethnographic Poetry Contest
1st Place: (tie) Darcy Alexandra “Extrajudicial Killing, San Salvador, 1991; Ruta de la Malintzin; Is it More Ordinary to Forget or to Remember?”
1st Place: (tie) Iza Kavedžija “worlds apart, or two fieldsites [by Iza Kavedžija and Harry Walker]; (no longer mine) view of Utsubo park”
2nd Place: William M. Cotter “56 Seconds”
Honorable Mention: Wesley Brunson “Cultivating Boredom”
Honorable Mention: Cassie Smith-Christmas “Virginia Place”
