Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize

The Society for East Asian Anthropology invites submissions for the 2020 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize. A prize of $300 is given to the English-language book published in the previous calendar year (2019) judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field. The prize is named for the late Francis L.K. Hsu (1909-2000), renowned cross-cultural anthropologist and former president (1977-78) of the American Anthropological Association.

Book submissions from all four fields of anthropology as they relate to East Asia, as well as books that venture beyond standard ethnographic modes of writing, are very much encouraged. Nominations for the prize may be made by authors, publishers, or interested third parties (with the consent of the author). Reference works, translations, textbooks, edited works, and anthologies are not eligible. Both members and non-members of SEAA are eligible. The winner of the prize serves on the committee the following year.

The submission deadline for this prize is May 1, 2020.

Please send (1) a hard copy of the book and (2) an electronic copy of the book (PDF or ebook) to each of the four Committee members at the addresses listed below. Books must be received by the May 1 deadline for full consideration.

Nicholas Harkness
Tozzer Anthropology Building
21 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
e-mail: harkness (at)fas.harvard.edu

Gordon Mathews (chair)
Dept. of Anthropology
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong
e-mail: cmgordon(at) cuhk.edu.hk

Ellen D. Oxfeld
60 Seminary Street
Middlebury, Vermont 05753, USA
e-mail: oxfeld (at) middlebury.edu

Sasha Su-Ling Welland (2019 Winner of the Hsu Prize)
130 NW 58th Street,
Seattle, WA 98107, USA
e-mail: swelland(at)uw.edu

Past Francis Hsu Book Prize Recipients:

2019: Sasha Su-Ling Welland’s Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018)

2018: Priscilla Song’s Biomedical Odysseys: Fetal Cell Experiments from Cyberspace to China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)

2017: Yukiko Koga’s Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute 2016).

2016: Jie Yang’s Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China (Cornell University Press 2015).

2015: Rian Thum’s The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Harvard University Press 2014).

2014: Manduhai Buyandelger’s Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia (University of Chicago Press 2013).

2013: Junko Kitanaka’s Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress (Princeton University Press) and Judith Farquhar & Qicheng Zhang’s Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (Zone Books 2012).

2012: Andrew Kipnis’s Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics, and Schooling in China (University of Chicago Press 2011).

2011: Li Zhang’s In Search of Paradise: Middle Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis (Cornell University Press 2010).

2010: Cathryn Clayton’s Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness (Harvard East Asian Monograph Series 2009).

2009: Nicole Dejong Newendorp’s Uneasy Reunions: Immigration, Citizenship, and Family Life in Post-1997 Hong Kong (Stanford University Press 2008).

2008: David Palmer’s Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia (Columbia University Press 2007).

2007: Tamara Jacka’s Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (M.E. Sharpe Press).

2006: Susan Orpett Long’s Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life (University of Hawaii Press 2005).

2005: Vanessa Fong’s Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy (Stanford University Press 2004).

2004: Bonnie Adrian’s Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry (University of California Press 2003).