Elliott P. Skinner Book Award

For more information about the Association for Africanist Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association and sponsor of this award, click here.

2017     Gesture and power : religion, nationalism, and everyday performance in Congo by Yolanda Covington-Ward
2016     Give a man a fish : reflections on the new politics of distribution by James Ferguson; honorable mention: Stigma and culture : last-place anxiety in Black America by J. Lorand Matory; honorable mention: Divination's grasp : African encounters with the almost said by Richard Werbner
2015     AIDS doesn't show its face : inequality, morality, and social change in Nigeria by Daniel Jordan Smith; honorable mention: The scattered family : parenting, African migrants, and global inequality by Cati Coe; honorable mention: The making of an African working class : politics, law, and cultural protest in the Manual Workers' Union of Botswana by Pnina Werbner
2014     The predicament of blackness : postcolonial Ghana and the politics of race by Jemima Pierre; Honorable mention: Chiefs, priests, and praise-singers : history, politics, and land ownership in northern Ghana by Wyatt MacGaffey
2013     Jazz cosmopolitanism in Accra : five musical years in Ghana by Steven Feld; Genocide lives in us : women, memory, and silence in Rwanda by Jennie Burnet
2012     Darkness before daybreak : African migrants living on the margins in Southern Italy today by Hans Lucht
2010     The masons of Djenné by Trevor Marchand; Honorable mention: Uncertain tastes : memory, ambivalence and the politics of eating in Samburu, northern Kenya by Jon Holtzman; Honorable mention: Voice of the leopard : African secret societies and Cuba by Ivor L. Miller
2009     Beyond the state in rural Uganda by Ben W. Jones
2008     Gaining ground? : "rights" and "property" in South African land reform by Deborah James; Honorable mention: The water goddess in Igbo cosmology : Ogbuide of Oguta Lake by Sabine Jell-Bahlsen; Honorable mention: African anthropologies : history, critique, and practice, edited by Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills, and Mustafa Babiker