Previous Book Prize Winners - Society for Linguistic Anthropology

Edward Sapir Book Prize

The Edward Sapir Book Prize was established in 2001 and is awarded to a book that makes the most significant contribution to our understanding of language in society, or the ways in which language mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes. *Now awarded every two years*

Winners of the Edward Sapir Book Prize

2024

Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India by Amanda Weidman offers a groundbreaking exploration of voice as a critical site for cultural and political expression in South Indian cinema. Through her study of playback singing—where cinematic voices are detached from onscreen bodies—Weidman illuminates how gender, identity, and affect are articulated through vocal performance. This masterful synthesis of ethnomusicology and linguistic anthropology demonstrates how vocal aesthetics, technological mediation, and language interweave with sociopolitical formations, opening fresh avenues for understanding voice as central to ethnolinguistic identity and cultural life.

Language in Culture: Lectures on the Social Semiotics of Language by Michael Silverstein represents the culminating vision of one of linguistic anthropology’s most influential theorists. Drawing from Silverstein’s legendary course taught for nearly 50 years at the University of Chicago, this posthumous work unifies a lifetime of innovative ideas into a compelling account of how language enables us to represent our world and act within it. Brilliantly demonstrating how discourse unfolds in social interaction, the book reveals the centrality of not just what we say, but how and when we say it, offering an essential guide to understanding language’s role in enacting and transforming social and political life.

Honorable mention: Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway, for Signing and Belonging in Nepal

2016

Angela Reyes and Stanton Wortham, for Discourse Analysis beyond the Speech Event

2015

Kristina Wirtz, for Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History.

2014

Francis Cody, for The Light of Knowledge: Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India.

Nicholas Harkness, for Songs of Seoul An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea.

2013

Paul Manning, for Semiotics of Drink and Drinking.

2012

Summerson Carr, for Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety.

2010

William F. Hanks, for Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross.

Honorable mention: Bernard Bate, for Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic.

Honorable mention: Niko Besnier, for Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics.

2008

Asif Agha, for Language and Social Relations.

2006

Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, for Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality.

2004

Robert Bringhurst and his posthumous co-authors Ghandl and Skaay, for the three-volume work Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers.

Honorable mention: Dennis Tedlock, for Rabinal Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice.

2002

Alexandra Jaffe, for Ideologies in Action: Language Politics on Corsica.

Honorable mention: Laura Ahearn, for Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal.

New Voices Book Prize

The New Voices Book Prize was established in 2021 and is awarded to a book by a junior scholar that makes a pathbreaking contribution to our understanding of language in society, or the ways in which language mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes.

Winners of the New Voices Book Prize

2025

Making Sense: Language, Ethics, and Understanding in Deaf Nepal by Mara Green is simply an excellent linguistic ethnography of small deaf communities in Nepal, grounded in the author’s sustained relationships. Green’s focal point is so-called “natural sign,” including improvisatory signs whose success depends on interlocutors’ willingness to try to make sense of one another. She delicately weaves linguistic description with an engaging account of deaf values and practices, revealing the otherwise obscure relationships between these dimensions. With detailed illustrations, she demonstrates the creativity of natural signers and shows how their intelligibility is socially produced and relational. Among other achievements, Green’s book demonstrates that linguistic “emergence” and understanding are entangled with social responsibilities and may be negotiated in ethical as much as linguistic terms.

Making Sense beyond impressed the jury, with more than one juror commenting on Green’s beautiful writing. An immense contribution to literatures on deaf communities, not only does Green’s book articulate the complexities, nuances, and lived world of language among a Nepalese deaf community, it moves us to consider a truly dynamic understanding of the sign and its legibility. A truly deserved and unanimous winner of the New Voices book prize, this book is a testament to what linguistic anthropology can be, and will no doubt inspire and open up new avenues of thought.

Honorable Mention: On Speaking Terms: Avoidance Registers and the Sociolinguistics of Kinship by Luke Fleming offers an insightful account of language as social action, while furnishing a bold example of the potential cross-cultural comparison can have for linguistic anthropology. Fleming synthesizes a vast range of kinship avoidance registers (as well as related avoidance behaviors) in unrelated languages, showing surprising convergences. His scholarship illustrates the interpenetration of lexicons and phenomenology, showing as well how words may perform the extra-linguistic work of ‘standing in’ for real-world relationships. His examples confirm that beliefs about what language is can have startling effects on linguistic behavior and real effects on linguistic structure. As Fleming brings us to a reconsideration of kinship itself, his achievement demonstrates that comparative linguistic work can shed light on some of anthropologists’ most foundational concerns.

Fleming’s work is truly an original, and “expansive” does not do it justice. Weaving together such a dazzling array of examples, vignettes, and contexts, that this book contributes not only to our understanding of avoidance registers, and indeed the conceptual architecture of “register” itself, while also standing amongst one of the finest books in recent memory on kinship, is a testament to the depth of this work.

Honorable Mention: In lyrical prose, Telling Blackness: Young Liberians and Raciosemiotics of Contemporary Black Diaspora by Krystal Smalls draws on ethnographic work among young transnational Liberians to retheorize “narrative,” offering instead the notion of “telling” as a means of exploring Black ways of relating. After providing rich theoretical and historical context, Small’s ambitious book wends toward a subtle exploration of “raciosemiotics” and the ways speakers generate modes of sharing Black consciousness and expressing what it means to be Black in the face of anti-Blackness. Smalls shows how diasporic Black communication holistically “tells things into being,” often playfully yet always inflected by race. Through this powerful work, we see how Black languaging can accumulate and produce incalculable “errant perlocutionary effects,” including the affirmation of Black personhood.

In what is a daunting task, exploring the topics of “narrative” and “talk,” topics that have been tackled more than once, one might think there would be something staid here. Nothing could be further from the truth. Small’s work is exhilarating, innovative, and itself an act of affirmation of what an ethnography of telling can be.

Special Recognition: Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan by Shannon Ward

The jury shares a special recognition of a wonderful scholar that unfortunately passed away recently, and far, far too soon, Shannon Ward. Hers is a voice too soon lost to us. But we are tremendously lucky to have her book, Amdo Lullaby, a resonating and surely enduring work. This is a textured and beautifully written ethnography on the swirling complexities of Chinese-state language politics faced by Tibetan children, a political context that is in many ways out of their reach, but one which they live, breathe, and one that in a very real way, they speak. Ward shows us what it is to navigate formal language policies, the expansiveness and depth of Amdo Tibetan, and the demands of learning and speaking Mandarin in Tibet. Looking to the finely grained language practices, the contexts of language policy and educational settings, as well as the familial and community ties produced in and through Amdo Tibetan, Ward’s wonderful ethnography is a testament to how linguistic anthropologists can understand the multiple scales of political and social action that are embedded in language, and ultimately even in the voices of children.