| Year | Award | Author | Title | Press |
| 2023 | 1st Prize | Alan Mikhail | My Egypt Archive | Yale |
| 2023 | 2nd Prize | Naveeda Khan | River Life and the Uprising of Nature | Duke |
| 2023 | 3rd Prize | Michael Jackson | The Genealogical Imagination: Two Studies of Life over Time | Duke |
| 2023 | Honorable Mention | Levi Vonk with Alex Kirschner | Border Hacker: A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run | Bold Type Books |
| Year | Award | Author | Title | Press |
| 2022 | 1st Prize | Lucas Bessire | Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains | Princeton |
| 2022 | 2nd Prize | Tarini Bedi | Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India | Washington |
| 2022 | 3rd Prize | Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu | Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam | Duke U |
| 2022 | Honorable Mention | Shannon Dawdy | American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the 21st Century | Princeton |
| 2022 | Honorable Mention | Melinda Hinkson | See How We Roll: Enduring Exile between Desert and Urban Australia | Duke |
| 2022 | Honorable Mention | Chikako Ozawa-de Silva | The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan | California |
| Year | Award | Author | Title | Press |
|
2021 | 1st Prize | Amy Moran-Thomas | Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic | U California |
| 2021 | 2nd Prize (tie) | Laurence Ralph | The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence | U Chicago |
| 2021 | 2nd Prize (tie) | Alex Blanchette | Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm | Duke U |
| 2021 | Honorable Mention | Li Zhang | Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy | U California |
| 2021 | Honorable Mention | John Hartigan, Jr | Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain | U Minnesota |
| Year | Award | Author | Title |
Press |
|
2020 | 1st Prize | Sarah E. Wagner | What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War | Harvard U |
| 2020 | 2nd Prize | Charles Piot | The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles | Duke U |
| 2020 | 3rd Prize | Rebecca J. Lester | Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America | U California |
| 2020 | Honorable Mention | Jason Pine | The Alchemy of Meth: A Decomposition | U Minnesota |
| 2020 | Honorable Mention | Dána-Ain Davis | Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth | NYU |
| 2019 | 1st Prize | Elizabeth Ferry and Stephen Ferry | La Batea | Red Hook |
| 2019 | 2nd Prize | Didier Fassin | Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition | Polity |
| 2019 | 3rd Prize | Ieva Jusionyte | Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border | U California |
| 2019 | Honorable Mention | Chandra D. Bhimull | Empire in the Air: Airline Travel and the African Diaspora | NYU |
| 2019 | Honorable Mention | Chip Colwell | Fractured Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture | U Chicago |
| 2019 | Honorable Mention | Amira Mittermaier | Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times | U California |
| 2018 | 1st Prize | Katherine Verdery | My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File | Duke U |
| 2018 | 2nd Prize | Piers Vitebsky | Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos | U Chicago |
| 2018 | 3rd Prize | Ellen Wiles | The Invisible Crowd | Harper Collins |
| 2018 | Honorable Mention | Susan Helen Ellison | Domesticating Democracy: The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia | Duke U |
| 2017 | 1st Prize | Emma Tarlo | Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair | Oneworld |
| 2017 | 2nd Prize | Anand Pandian | Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation | Duke U |
| 2017 | 3rd Prize | Robert Desjarlais | Subject to Death: Life and Loss in a Buddhist World | U Chicago |
| 2017 | Honorable Mention | David Hughes | Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity | Duke U |
| 2017 | Honorable Mention | Janet McIntosh | Unsettled: Denial and Belonging Among White Kenyans | U California |
| 2016 | 1st Prize | Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing | The Mushroom at the End of the World | Princeton U |
| 2016 | 2nd Prize | Cristiana Giordano | Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy | U California |
| 2016 | 3rd Prize | Aimee Meredith Cox | Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship | Duke U |
| 2015 | 1st Prize | Lisa Stevenson | Life Beside Itself | U California |
| 2015 | 2nd Prize | Lucas Bessire | Behold The Black Caiman | U Chicago |
| 2015 | 3rd Prize | Laurence Ralph | Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago | U Chicago |
| 2014 | 1st Prize | S. Lochlann Jain | Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us | U California |
| 2014 | 2nd Prize | Anand Pandian and M.P. Mariappan | Ayya’s Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India | Indiana U |
| 2014 | 3rd Prize | Zareena Grewal | Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority | NYU |
| 2013 | 1st Prize | Julie Livingston | Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic | Duke U |
| 2013 | 2nd Prize | Christine Walley | Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago | U Chicago |
| 2013 | 3rd Prize | Kenneth T. Macleish | Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community | Princeton U |
| 2012 | 1st Prize | Angela Garcia | The Pastoral Clinic. Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande | U California |
| 2012 | 2nd Prize | Mark Auslander | The Accidental Slaveowner. Revisiting the Myth of Race and Finding an American Family | U Georgia |
| 2012 | 3rd Prize | Daniel Reichman | The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras | Cornell U |
| 2011 | 1st Prize | Neni Panourgiá | Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State | Fordham U |
| 2011 | 2nd Prize | Amira Mittermaier | Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the imagination | U California |
| 2011 | special | Shirleen Smith and Vuntut Gwitchin | People of the Lakes: Stories of Our Van Tat Gwich’in Elders | U Alberta |
| 2010 | Winner | Tracey Heatherington | Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism | U Washington |
| 2010 | Honorable Mention | Laurie A. Wilkie | The Lost Boys of Zeta Psi: A Historical Archaeology of Masculinity at a University Fraternity | U California |
| 2010 | special | Hugh Raffles | Insectopedia | Random |
| 2009 | Winner | Matthew Engelke | A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church | U California |
| 2009 | Honorable Mention | Billie Jean Isbell | Finding Cholita | U Illinois |
| 2008 | Winner | Richard Price | Travels with Tooy: History, Memory and the African Imagination | U Chicago |
| 2008 | Honorable Mention | Ann Fienup-Riordan | Yuungnaqpiallerput: The Way We Genuinely Live | U Washington |
| 2008 | Honorable Mention | Harry G. West | Ethnographic Sorcery | U Chicago |
| 2007 | Winner | Ira Bashkow | The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World | U Chicago |
| 2007 | Honorable Mention | Roy R. Grinker | Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism | Basic Books |
| 2006 | Winner | Julie Cruikshank | Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination | U Washington |
| 2006 | Honorable Mention | Piers Vitebsky | The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia | Houghton Mifflin |
| 2005 | Winner | Bill Maurer | Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason | Princeton U |
| 2005 | Honorable Mention | Joao Biehl | Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment | U California |
| 2005 | Honorable Mention | Michael Jackson | In Sierra Leone | Duke U |
| 2004 | Winner | John M. Chernoff | Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl | U Chicago |
| 2004 | Honorable Mention | William Mazzarella | Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India | Duke U |
| 2003 | co-Winner | Alan Klima | The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand | Princeton U |
| 2003 | co-Winner | Hugh Raffles | In Amazonia: A Natural History | Princeton U |
| 2003 | Honorable Mention | Judith Farquhar | Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China | Duke U |
| 2003 | Honorable Mention | Thomas Buckley | Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850-1990 | U California |
| 2003 | Honorable Mention | Michael J. Lambek | The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanqa, Madacascar | Palgrave Macmillan |
| 2002 | Winner | Henry S. Sharp | Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene Community | U Nebraska |
| 2002 | Honorable Mention | Mary Weismantel | Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes | U Chicago |
| 2002 | Honorable Mention | Catherine Lutz | Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century | Beacon |
| 2001 | Winner | Tanya M. Luhrmann | Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry | Picador |
| 2001 | Honorable Mention | Roy R. Grinker | In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin M. Turnbull | St. Martin’s |
| 2001 | Honorable Mention | Setha Low | On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture | U Texas |
| 2000 | Winner | Cheryl Mattingly | Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience | Cambridge U |
| 1999 | co-Winner | Jean L. Briggs | Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old | Yale |
| 1999 | co-Winner | Robert Desjarlais | Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless | U Penn |
| 1999 | Honorable Mention | Ralph Cintron | Angel’s Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life and the Rhetorics of the Everyday | Beacon |
| 1999 | Honorable Mention | Michael Stewart | The Time of the Gypsies | Westview |
| 1998 | Winner | Lawrence Cohen | No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, The Bad Family, and Other Modern Things | U California |
| 1998 | Honorable Mention | Kathleen Stewart | A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America | Princeton U |
| 1998 | Honorable Mention | Robin Ridington and Dennis Hastings | Blessing for a Long Time: The Sacred Pole of the Omaha Tribe | U Nebraska |
| 1997 | Winner | Keith H. Basso | Wisdom Sits in Prizes: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache | U New Mex |
| 1997 | Honorable Mention | Andrew Shyrock | Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan | U California |
| 1996 | Winner | Carol B. Stack | Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South | Basic Books |
| 1996 | Honorable Mention | Laura R. Graham | Performing Dreams: Discourses of Immortality among the Xavante Indians of Central Brazil | U Texas |
| 1996 | Honorable Mention | Philippe Bourgois | In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio | Cambridge U |
| 1995 | Winner | Margaret Wiener | Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic and Colonial Conquest in Bali | U Chicago |
| 1995 | Honorable Mention | Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang | Gifts, Favors and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China | Cornell U |
| 1995 | Honorable Mention | Susan Brett-Smith | The Making of Bamana Sculpture: Creativity and Gender | Cambridge U |
| 1995 | Honorable Mention | Ann Fienup-Riordan | Boundaries and Passages: Rule and Ritual in Yupik Eskimo Oral Tradition | U Oklahoma |
| 1995 | Honorable Mention | José Limón | Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas. | U Wisconsin |
| 1994 | co-Winner | Lila Abu-Lughod | Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories | U California |
| 1994 | co-Winner | Mary Margaret Steedly | Hanging without a Rope: Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland | Princeton U |
| 1994 | Honorable Mention | Martha Balsham | Cancer in the Community: Class and Medical Authority | Smithsonian Inst |
| 1994 | Honorable Mention | Ruth Behar | Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story | Beacon |
| 1994 | Honorable Mention | Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing | In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Prize | Princeton U |
| 1993 | Winner | Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham | Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa | U Chicago |
| 1992 | co-Winner | Karen McCarthy Brown | Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn | U California |
| 1992 | co-Winner | Jim Wafer | The Taste of Blood: Spirit Possession in Brazilian Candomble | U Penn |
| 1992 | Honorable Mention | Claire Farrer | Living Life’s Circle: Mescalero Apache Cosmovision | U New Mex |
| 1992 | Honorable Mention | C. Nadia Seremetakis | The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani | U Chicago |
| 1992 | Honorable Mention | Margaret Trawick | Notes on Love in a Tamil Family | U California |
| 1991 | Winner | Dennis Tedlock | Days from a Dream Almanac | U Illinois |
| 1991 | Honorable Mention | Deborah B. Gewertz and Frederick Errington | Twisted Histories, Altered Contexts: Representing the Chambri in a World System | Cambridge U |
| 1991 | Honorable Mention | Miles Richardson | Cry Lonesome, and Other Accounts of the Anthropologist’s Project | SUNY |
| 1991 | Honorable Mention | Carol Laderman | Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance | U California |
| 1990 | Winner | Kirin Narayan | Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching | U Penn |
| 1990 | Honorable Mention | Barbara Bode | No Bells to Toll: Destruction and Creation in the Andes | Charles Scribner’s Sons |
| 1990 | Honorable Mention | Michael Jackson | Paths towards a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Enquiry | Indiana U |
| 1990 | Honorable Mention | Dorinne Kondo | Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese WorkPrize | U Chicago |
| 1990 | Honorable Mention | Smadar Lavie | The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedoin Identity under Israeli and Egyptian Rule | U California |
