Elliott P. Skinner Book Award

2021

  • Isabella Alexanda-Nathani (UCLA), Burning art Europe’s Borders: An Ethnography on the African Migrant’s Experience in Morrocco, Oxford University Press (2021)
  • Dan Hicks, (University of Oxford), The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, Pluto Press (2020)

2020

  • Jatin Dua (University of Michigan), Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean (University of California Press, 2019)
    • Finalists:
      • Kamari Clarke (University of Toronto), Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback (Duke University Press, 2019)
      • Cati Coe (Rutgers University, Camden), The New American Servitude: Political Belonging among African Immigrant Home Care Workers (New York University Press, 2019)
  • 2019
  • Michael Lambek (University of Toronto), Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte (University of Toronto Press, 2018)
  • Finalists:
    • Jennifer Diggins (Oxford Brookes University), Coastal Sierra Leone: Materiality and the Unseen (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
    • Mariane C. Ferme (UC Berkeley), Mout of War: Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone (University of California Press, 2018)

2018

  • Jean Hunleth (Washington University in St. Louis), Children as Caregivers: The Global Fight against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia (Rutgers University Press, 2017)
  • Finalists:
    • George Paul Meiu (Harvard University), Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
    • Kenda Mutongi (Williams College), Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

2017

  • Yolanda Covington-Ward (University of Pittsburgh), Gesture and Power: Religion, Nationalism, and Everyday Performance in Congo (Duke University Press, 2016)

2016

  • James Ferguson (Stanford University), Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution (Duke University Press, 2015)
  • Honorable Mentions:
    • J. Lorand Matory (Duke University) Stigma and Culture: Last-Place Anxiety in Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
    • Richard Werbner (Manchester University), Divination’s Grasp: African Encounters with the Almost Said (Indiana University Press, 2015)

2015

  • Daniel Jordan Smith (Brown University), AIDS Doesn’t Show Its Face: Inequality, Morality, and Social Change in Nigeria (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
  • Honorable Mentions:
    • Cati Coe, The Scattered Family: Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
    • Pnina Werbner, The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law, and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers Union of Botswana (Pluto Press, 2003)

2014

  • Jemima Pierre (University of California, Los Angeles), The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
  • Honorable Mention: Wyatt MacGaffey (Haverford College), Chiefs, Priests, and Praise-Singers: History, Politics, and Land Ownership in Northern Ghana (University of Virginia Press, 2013).

2013

  • Steven Feld (University of New Mexico), Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana (Duke University Press, 2012)
  • Jennie Burnet (University of Louisville), Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012)

2012

  • Hans Lucht (University of Copenhagen), Darkness Before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today (University of California Press, 2011)

2010

  • Trevor Marchand (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), The Masons of Djenné (Indiana University Press, 2009)
  • Honorable Mentions:
    • Jon Holtzman (Western Michigan University), Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya (University of California Press, 2009)
    • Ivor L. Miller (Boston University), Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba (University of Mississippi Press, 2009)

2009

  • Ben W. Jones (University of East Anglia), Beyond the State in Rural Uganda (University of Edinburgh Press, 2009)

2008

  • Deborah James (London School of Economics and Political Science), Gaining Ground?: “Rights” and “Property” in South African Land Reform (Routledge, 2007)
  • Honorable Mentions:
    • Sabine Jell-Bahlsen (Ogbuide Films), The Water Goddess in Igbo Cosmology: Ogbuide of Oguta Lake (Africa World Press, 2008)
    • Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills, and Mustafa Babiker (editors), African Anthropologies: History, Critique, and Practice (Zed Books, 2006)

Bennetta Jules-Rosette Graduate Student Essay Award

  • 2022- Adéwálé Adénlé (Ohio State University) “Dialogue with the Spectacle and the Spirits: Re/Contextualizing Yorùbá Spiritual Objects in American Art Museums
    • Honorable Mention, Irene Routté (University of Michigan), ‘Will You Take Care? Bio-Space, Racial Assemblages and the US Your Refugee Resettlement Welfare System.
  • 2020 – Justin Haruyama (UC Davis), “Shortcut English: A Pidgin Language and Symbolic Power at a Chinese-Operated Mine in Zambia”
    • Honorable Mention, Aalyia Sadruddin, Yale University, “Preparing for Death in ‘Ordinary Times’: Everyday Life in Post-Genocide Rwanda”
    • Honorable Mention, Ben Eyre, University of Manchester, “‘Modern’ Cows and ‘Traditional’ Loans: From Moral Possibilities to Possible Moralities of Dairy Development in South West Tanzania”
  • 2019 – Brittany Birberick (UC Berkeley), “Dreaming Numbers”
    • Honorable Mention: Kathryn Mara (University of Wisconsin, Madison),”Jenoside, Génocide, Genocide: Socialization into Naming the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi”
  • 2018 – Laura Meek (UC Davis), “Fakes, Poisons, and Medicines: Pharmaceutical Capacities in the Context of Radical Uncertainty in Tanzania”
    • Honorable Mention: Michael Obiri-