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.