Sapir prize goes to Bauman & Briggs

The biennial Edward Sapir Prize in Linguistic Anthropology for the best monograph published in the last two years was announced at the last Society of Linguistic Anthropology business meeting at the annual American Anthropological Association conference in San Jose, California late last year.

From the Society for Linguistic Anthropology column in the January 2007 Anthropology Newsletter by Mark Allen Peterson and James Stanlaw

The Sapir Prize for the monograph making the most significant contribution to linguistic anthropology went to Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs for their book Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge, 2003). “It began over a beer,” said Bauman, “We came up with the idea of thinking about the intellectual history of what we all do. Fourteen years later, here we are.”

Joel Kuipers [president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology] said the experience of reading and evaluating the 22 books submitted for the prize was tremendous. “We were really impressed by what our field has become,” he said. “There is such energy and vitality in our field it was humbling.”

Richard Bauman website

Charles Briggs website