I am not a big believer in the true meaningfullness of awards. As a professor, I squirm everytime I have to take each of my student’s unique papers and shove their particularity into the confines of a letter grade. So I don’t believe that books that win awards are somehow necessarily much better than the runners-up (or a lot of other books that have been written). However, I do think there is something wonderful about obscure academic book awards. They give my brain the same tickle as occasional pieces by OHK Spate or Benjamin Franklin’s dialogue with his gout — ethnographically they are, as one of my profs in grad school used to put it, “delicious little somethings.”

I also like book awards becuase they serve as excellent filters on the world of content. In fact I imagine back in the good old days when Amazon.com wasn’t parsing out your preferences that awards were even more important as a filter to direct you to Premium Content. And of course the real book awards are sufficiently old-school that they don’t even have fer-trulies websites.

All of which is to say that in addition to my old-standbys the “Thomas Cook Award”:http://www.thomascookpublishing.com/travelbookawards.htm (an award the celebrates postcolonial imperialist knowledge of The Other in the name of an eponymous old-school imperialist) and the “Victor Turner Award”:http://www.smcm.edu/sha/turner01.htm (an old favorite of mine) I now add the “Edelstein Prize For The History of Technology”:http://shot.press.jhu.edu/Awards/edelstein.htm, which was “established in 1968 through the generosity of the late Sidney Edelstein, a noted expert on the history of dyes and dye processes, founder of the Dexter Chemical Corporation.”

The best part of this prize are the prize winners. Although I don’t do history of technology the books all sound scrumptious. Some — like Machines as the Measure of Men — are already well known to me. But Russell’s _ War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring_? Ingenious! And the most recent winner is The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 by Emily Thompson. Another super-intriguing. No wonder she “won a Macarthur”:http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.1076861/apps/nl/content2.asp?content_id={86CDA030-FA8E-437D-918E-BE7479D7DF5F}&notoc=1.

Are there any other awards on people’s radars, anthropological or no?