The Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Cultural Horizons Prize for 2025 is awarded to Dr. Leniqueca Welcome, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University, for the article “On and In Their Bodies: Masculinist Violence, Criminalization, and Black Womanhood in Trinidad” (Cultural Anthropology 39 (1): 37–63).
The graduate student readers were Parag Jyoti Saikia (UNC), Randy Burson (Penn), Sujan Dangal (NUS), Zhiyi Wang (UC Riverside), and Dejana Kostic (Pitt).
In recognizing Dr. Welcome’s article, the selecting readers note:
The jury has selected Dr. Leniqueca Welcome’s article “On and In Their Bodies: Masculinist Violence, Criminalization, and Black Womanhood in Trinidad” as this year’s winner of the Cultural Horizons Prize. Welcome’s article exemplifies what anthropology should aspire to: a brave and careful analysis that centers the voices of interlocutors, confronts the political implications of research, and ultimately leaves space for hope.
Welcome traces how Black women in Trinidad bear the brunt of intersecting forms of violence: gender-based violence, inter- and intra-community violence, and state violence. Moving between ethnographic encounters, media analyses, and historical archives, Welcome collapses the public–private divide by showing how these domains of violence are not discrete but interlocking forces that converge on Black women’s bodies, sustaining masculinist forms of state and economic power. With clarity and care, Welcome shows how poor Black women, scapegoated and criminalized, are rendered vulnerable even as they are made responsible for violence not of their making. In doing so, she reminds us that the Black female body has long been positioned as both sacrifice and battlefield for hegemonic power, a condition with deep historical roots in the plantation past of the Caribbean.
The strength of Welcome’s contribution lies not only in her analytical acuity but also in her writing—meticulous, elegant, and deeply moving. Her work tugs at the reader’s heartstrings, showing how violence cuts into and onto women’s bodies, while refusing to remain in despair. Instead, she offers a vision grounded in resilience, togetherness, and the preciousness of life. As she instructs us at the end of her article, “may we take a breath on this ground on which moments of precious life are lived now, and let it help us find an opening” (58).
Ultimately, Welcome pushes for new horizons of anthropological inquiry and engagement. By insisting on the unconditional preciousness of life and illuminating how Black women in Trinidad “make joy with and despite terror,” (42) her article offers a new understanding of what it means to be human in contemporary times.