Anthropologist earns book award

Kristina Wirtz, anthropology, has received the 2015 Edward Sapir Book Prize from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology for “Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History.” Wirtz received the honor Nov. 21 during the American Anthropological Meetings in Denver.

Her book, published by the University of Chicago Press last year, analyzes a variety of performances and the ways they construct Cuban racial and historical imaginations, thereby marrying racial studies, performance studies, anthropology and semiotics. The Sapir prize goes to a book that makes the most significant contribution to the understanding of language in society, or the ways in which language mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes.