Book Awards

Congratulations to our author Miriam Driessen! Her book, Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia, has won an Honorable Mention for the Hsu Book Prize 2020 for the Anthropology of East Asia!

2020 Francis L. Hsu Book Prize Honorable Mention
From the Society for East Asian Anthropology

In this pathbreaking book, Miriam Driessen details the lives of Chinese road builders, managers and workers in Ethiopia, and also explores Ethiopian responses to the Chinese. She probes into social class and generational differences amongst the Chinese, considers the circumstances that motivated them to go to Ethiopia, and analyzes their racial and national ideologies and attitudes, and the ways these buttress and sometimes contradict their social relations cross the racial divides. Finally, the book analyzes the strategies used by Ethiopian workers to alter working conditions. The study contextualizes the current situation within the larger context of changing Chinese/African relations over the decades from the Maoist era through the reform periods. In sum, the book builds on impressive fieldwork, and utilizes nuanced ethnographic detail in a particular case to explore the larger issue of Chinese/African encounters in the contemporary world.

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Congratulations to our author Timothy Grose for winning the 2020 Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award in the Social Sciences category for his book Negotiating Inseparability in China: The Xinjiang Class and the Dynamics of Uyghur Identity !

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