The Gregory Bateson Book Prize is awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), the largest section of the American Anthropological Association. Named after distinguished anthropologist, semiotician, cyberneticist, and photographer Gregory Bateson, the award reflects the SCA’s mandate to promote theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded research that engages the most current thinking across the arts and sciences. Welcoming a wide range of styles and arguments, the Gregory Bateson Prize looks to single out work that is interdisciplinary, experimental, and innovative.
This year, the Gregory Bateson Book Prize Jury honors one winner and two honorable mentions. The jury reviewed seventy books over five months. Many submissions were outstanding, showcasing the breadth and scope of the discipline. Ultimately, the three books chosen demonstrate, in their own unique ways, anthropology’s impressive ability to engage with essential and timely topics with care, commitment, and creativity. Yielding insights that can only come from sustained ethnographic work, these books exemplify what makes anthropology such a vibrant, broad, and exciting field. Each book speaks with its own distinctive voice, engaging with diverse fields such as science and technology studies, urban studies, indigenous studies, philosophy, and more. In their own way, each author invites us to reflect on world-making at a time when harm, the instability of reality, and existence under oppressive settler-colonial regimes are expanding and taking new and intensified forms. We are delighted to recognize these authors and their unique, far-reaching voices.
2025 Gregory Bateson Book Prize Winner
Lisa Messeri’s In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke University Press)
We are thrilled to award this year’s Gregory Bateson Prize to Lisa Messeri’s profound and timely In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles. Messeri immerses us in the world of Los Angeles-based VR creators who, during a period of great social fracture, championed their medium as an “empathy machine”—a tool to unite humanity by allowing users to step into another’s reality. With deep ethnographic sensitivity, Messeri does not dismiss this ambition but instead takes as her primary object of investigation the fantasies that animate it, fantasies shared in various ways by techno-optimists, artists, and even anthropologists. If fantasies index dreamed-of futures, Messeri develops, alongside and often against those abstract aspirations, the concept of the unreal: that space of the everyday in which the instability of reality is a lived experience that cannot be ignored or dreamed away. It is within this clash of the fantastical and the unreal that Messeri locates her ethnography. The book’s scope is impressive—from tech innovators, to military history, to Hollywood—all while engaging in vital ways with the role of race and gender in producing, and exploding, the fantasies of virtual reality. Messeri tells stories with ease and grace, rending a complex and nuanced narrative, as well as a conceptually hefty text, into a page-turner of an ethnography. In the Land of the Unreal is a study of VR but also a close and crucial meditation on why we dream of better worlds and why, in our current moment, such dreams feel especially unreal.
Honorable Mentions
Jean Dennison’s Vital Relations: How the Osage Nation Move Indigenous Nationhood into the Future (University of North Carolina Press)
Showing how relationality is much more than a literary or metaphorical gesture, Vital Relations: How the Osage Nation Moves Indigenous Nationhood into the Future by Jean Dennison is a powerful invitation into the relentless work of making better worlds materialize. Far from turning relations into an aesthetic object for settler consumption, this book shows how the future of Osage relationality shifts as challenges emerge—from the technical task of translating Osage language into Unicode to the complex issues involving Osage Nation members and their mineral rights. Vital Relations makes it clear: Shaping the future and dismantling settler worlds require inventiveness and creativity but are driven by a fierce will to endure. The book shows how sovereignty is a web of negotiations and disruptions, constantly recalibrating as Indigenous nations resist settler-colonial efforts to erase them. Dennison’s work is a lifeline for many anthropologists who also see themselves as world-makers, theorizing with the worlds they come from and committed to fostering responsible relations within the worlds they study. Written without the indulgences that distant observation allows, Vital Relations raises essential questions about how to conduct research one is inescapably accountable for—as an individual, a family member, or a member of a nation.
Chloe Ahmann’s Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore (University of Chicago Press)
Futures After Progress offers an intimate ethnography of “hope in the key of doubt” amidst late industry’s ambient remains. Tracing entangled histories of modernist fantasy and structural precarity in South Baltimore, Chloe Ahmann asks what it means to construct a livable future from a profoundly uncertain present. In particular, she engages the subjunctive to consider how competing narratives of place and progress among local residents have produced radically different visions for a better life. Conditioned by centuries of toxic production, racialized anxiety, and dissociative governance, these ways of knowing the future both resist and reproduce the speculative dreams that came before. Each chapter attends to the everyday practices of the possible in a place forever altered, but not wholly foreclosed, by structural violence. The result is a beautifully grounded book that insists late industry’s aftermath is not the same as its ending.
Jury
The 2025 Gregory Bateson Book Prize Jury included Andrea Ballestero (Chair, Rice University), Shannon Cram (University of Washington Bothell), and Naisarge Davé (University of Toronto).