The Society for the Anthropology of Work, with the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing, awarded the 2020 Diana Forsythe Prize to Mythri Jegathesan for her book Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka. The book, published by the University of Washington Press in 2019, was recognized by the prize jury as “a moving account of the value of women’s work, not as mere accumulation by dispossession but as testament to the durability of life itself.”

Earlier this year, in recognition of the important role that early-career researchers play in the life of our section and the future of our field, SAW invited a diverse group of graduate students to read and compose brief responses to Jegathesan’s award-winning book. This book forum gathers responses by Hannah Borenstein (Duke University), Pooja Nayak (University of Pennsylvania), William Stafford (University of Toronto, Mississauga), and Anabelle Suitor (Brown University), as well as a generous reply by Jegathesan.

Our hope is that these forums will both extend the reach of scholarship that has been recognized by SAW and contribute to the intellectual exchange across career stages that has long been a hallmark of the section.

Editor Bio

Parker Hatley is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, working across the fields of environmental anthropology, political ecology, and visual anthropology. He is a student representative to the board of the Society for the Anthropology of Work.