The Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA) is very pleased to announce the 2018 winners of the Ruth Benedict Book Prize for outstanding scholarship on a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic. The prize is presented each year at the American Anthropological Association’s national meeting to acknowledge excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective that engages theoretical perspectives relevant to LGBTQ studies.

The Ruth Benedict Book Prize Committee considered a significant number of nominations this year, representing the range and depth of exceptional new work in queer anthropology. We are delighted to announce this year’s winners:

In the category of Outstanding Single­-Authored Monograph, the 2018 Ruth Benedict Prize winner is George Paul Meiu for Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money and Belonging in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Ethno-erotic Economies is a theoretically sharp, ethnographically rich, and engagingly written investigation of the effects of tourist markets on rural Samburu ‘beach boys’ who have sexually intimate relationships with European women in coastal Kenya. Meiu explores the material, social and moral implications of these relationships, focusing on how these men take their ethnicity and sexuality to the market in order to access resources that allow them to participate more fully in kinship relations and ethno-regional politics in their local communities, and the profound impact of this new wealth on everyday life in these communities. Ethno-erotic Economies makes important contributions to African and queer studies, providing new insights into understanding the complex intersections of intimacies, political economies and moral worlds in rapidly changing postcolonial contexts.

The Committee would also like to recognize Lyndon K. Gill’s single-­authored monograph Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2018) with an Honorable Mention. Erotic Islands is a beautiful and evocative meditation on queer artists and activists in Trinidad and Tobago.  Drawing on the work of Audre Lorde and black queer diasporic scholars, Gill argues for a reconceptualization of the ‘erotic’ as a concept that accommodates the political, sensual and spiritual dimensions of his interlocutors.   Weaving together nuanced narratives of his own and participants’ personal, social and political lives, along with an emphasis on different sensorial frameworks (sight, sound and sensation), this smart and moving book brings an ethnography of queer aesthetics and activism into dialogues with critical gender, race,and postcolonial theories.

The Ruth Benedict Book Prize will be presented to the winning authors during the AQA Business meeting on Thursday November 15, 2018 at the American Anthropological Association 2018 Annual Meeting. AQA would like to thank the Ruth Benedict Book Prize Committee for their work, including former Benedict Prize winners David A.B. Murray, Rudi Gaudio, Lucinda Ramberg and Graduate Student Representative Annie Wilkinson. For additional information, please contact the Committee Chair, David A.B. Murray, at damurray@yorku.ca.