2017
Yukiko Koga’s Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire (University of Chicago Press).
2016
John F. Collins’ Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy (Duke University Press).
2015
Kristin Peterson’s Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Duke University Press).
2014
Mun Young Cho’s The Spectre of “the People�: Urban Poverty in Northeast China (Cornell University Press).
2013
Daniel M. Goldstein’s Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City (Duke University Press).
2012
Danny Hoffman’s The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Duke University Press).
2011
No prize awarded.
2010
Philippe Bourgois’ Righteous Dopefiend (University of California Press). Photographs by Jeff Schonberg.
2009
Bob W. White’s Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire (Duke University Press).
2008
Xiang Biao’s Global “Body Shopping�: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry (Princeton University Press).
2007
Steven Gregory’s The Devil behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic (University of California Press).
2006
Joao Biehl’s Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (University of California Press).
2004
Nancy Abelmann’s The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea (University of Hawai’i Press).
2003
Kim Hopper’s Reckoning with Homelessness (Cornell University Press).
2002
Catherine Lutz’s Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Beacon Press).
2001
Karen Tranberg Hansen’s Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (University of Chicago Press).
and
Setha Low’s On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (University of Texas Press).
2000
Mary Beth Mills’ Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves. (Rutgers University Press).
1999
Roger Sanjek’s The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City. (Cornell University Press).
1998
Steven Gregory’s Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community. (Princeton University Press).
1997
Ewa Morawska’s Insecure Prosperity: Small-town Jews in Industrial America. (Princeton University Press).
1996
Charlotte Ikels’ The Return of the God of Wealth: The Transition to a Market Economy in Urban China (Stanford University Press).
1995
Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick’s City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami. (University of California Press).