The American Ethnological Society awarded its biannual book prizes at the AES business meeting on Thursday, November 29th 2007, during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, DC. The Sharon Stephens Prize is given for a junior scholar's first book, while the Senior Book Prize recognizes a book by a senior scholar.

The awards go to works that speak to contemporary social issues with relevance beyond the discipline and beyond the academy. Ethnographies and critical works in contemporary theory - single-authored or multi-authored but not edited collections - are eligible.

This year's recipient of the Senior Book Prize is Lila Abu-Lughod, for Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
The two recipients chosen for the Sharon Stephens First Book Award are Charles Hirschkind, for The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counter Publics (Columbia University Press, 2006) and Julia Elyachar, for Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development and the State in Cairo (Duke University Press, 2005).

The Senior Book Prize Committee was chaired by Carla Freeman and included Donna Goldstein and Ken Guest.

The Junior Book Prize Committee was chaired by Jacqueline Solway and included Richard Handler and Rosemary Coombe.

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Lila Abu-Lughod is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Televsion in Egypt was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005.

Carla Freeman, AES Concilor and Senior Book Prize Committee Chair, had this to say about Abu-Lughod and Dramas of Nationhood:

It is my great pleasure to award the AES Senior Book Prize this evening. I want to thank my wonderful committee, Donna Goldstein and Ken Guest, with whom I had spirited and probing discussions of many excellent and very diverse books. I would also like to thank those who nominated these marvelous books, and took the time to write quite detailed and helpful letters on their behalf. This is a time consuming and generous labor and I want to acknowledge and thank those who wrote these very helpful letters.

I knew that this process would provide a broad education spanning diverse points across the globe as well as exposure to the multitude of approaches to the field of anthropology and this was, indeed, a great privilege. The committee had several months of fascinating reading, but what we had not thought much about prior to taking up this job was what it would illuminate about the anthropological life-course. What kinds of issues, approaches, and analyses are taken up by anthropologists well established in the field? [What are] the differences between a first book (those reviewed by the Sharon Stephens committee) and those of a Senior anthropologist with one or several books already under their belts? The committee began with a set of criteria with which to review our nominations that included: originality, rigor, and maturity of research; an innovative approach to ethnography; theoretical sophistication and depth; thematic prescience, as well as what we believed would be an enduring contribution to Anthropology and beyond.

I am pleased and honored to present this year’s AES Senior Book Prize to Lila Abu-Lughod, for her marvelous work: Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago Press. This work is steeped within more than a decade of original fieldwork in Egypt, and draws upon wide ranging theorizations of television media and its relationship to citizenship, national identity-formation, gender, Islam, the imagination, and everyday life. Dramas of Nationhood focuses on the national identities at play in serial dramas and argues that these dramas and the conversations that emerge around them in urban and village life, production settings, and in the press, give us insight into how Egyptian citizens are thinking through Islam, the changing norms of gender, citizenship-claims across classes and regions of Egypt, and what are construed to be “proper life goals.” Abu-Lughod unravels the developmentalist ideology and the visions of national progress that once dominated Egyptian television and examines debates inflamed by subsequent strategies for combating religious extremism. At the same time she illustrates through her artful use of ethnographic vignette, the dramatic unfolding of hardships borne by poor Egyptian women in parallel to those more glamorously portrayed in the television serials.

Dramas of Nationhood is written in Abu-Lughod’s characteristically beautiful prose, sophisticated, clear, and often poetic. The breadth of this book’s scholarship and its wide reach to readers concerned with nationalism, modernity, contemporary cultural politics and Islam, both within and beyond the Middle East makes Dramas of Nationhood an exemplary AES Senior book.

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Charles Hirschkind is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics was published by the Columbia University Press in 2006.

In The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counter Publics (Columbia University Press, 2006) Charles Hirschkind boldly stakes out new theoretical territory in his ethnographic exploration of the moral auditorium of cassette sermons in Cairo. As the paradigmatic media form of the Islamic Revolution, he effectively shows us, cassette sermons shape the affects, sensibilities and perceptual habits of their city audiences. Exploring the sociality invited by these sermons, he provides an historical review and rhetorical analysis of a genre of homiletic speech and the affective, kinesthetic, and gestural dimensions of contemporary auditory knowledge in urban environments. In so doing, Hirschkind revisits the hierarchies of the senses naturalized by modernity. Through consideration of the embodied performance of listening as a technique of self-fashioning, he illustrates how ethical subjects in Cairo assume a virtuous habitus that predisposes them to engage in new kinds of political practice. Elegantly written and beautifully structured, this volume is simultaneously a contribution to the anthropology of the senses, political anthropology, and the anthropology of religion. Nonetheless, the author implicitly challenges the constitution of anthropology’s subdisciplines while providing a commentary on the limits of modern categories of thought for appreciating current configurations of power and knowledge. Hirschkind does so, moreover, by making an intelligent and moving intervention into the Western public discourse of immoral panic that surrounds “Islamic fundamentalism”. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counter Publics exemplifies the enduring value of ethnography in addressing contemporary moral challenges.

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Julia Elyachar is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo was published by Duke University Press in 2005.

Richard Handler, member of the Sharon Stephens Junior Book Prize Committee, had this to say about Elyachar and Markets of Disposession:

Julia Elyachar’s Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development and the State in Cairo (Duke University Press, 2005) is an ethnographic comparison of locally rooted craft workshops and recently induced mircoenterprises in Cairo. Tacking between Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand of the market, and Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, Elyachar shows that “the market” comes into being, and is remade, in historically specific contexts, in which the power wielded by global institutions, national governments, and local officials overrides neat neoliberal formulations of progress and development. As her title suggests, Elyachar shows that empowering the poor to become microentrepreneurs more often than not has disadvantageous consequences for people who are not already well connected to political and economic capital. Throughout her analysis, Elyachar attends to the role of social-scientific theory and practice in promoting development schemes that, in the end, reproduce the long history of peripheral subjugation in the world system. In this, her work confirms anthropology’s growing awareness of its own entanglement in the worlds it studies. And in its constant attention to the ways in which theory illuminates ethnography, and ethnography prompts criticism of theory, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development and the State in Cairo reaffirms the finest tradition of anthropological writing.