Newell Wins Amaury Talbot Prize

Sasha Newell’s book, The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire, has won the Amaury Talbot Prize for African anthropology. The Royal Anthropological Institute gives this prestigious award annually to the most valuable book in African anthropology published in the previous year.

Newell, an assistant professor of anthropology, conducts research on the social life of objects and the role of materiality in the production of culture. The Modernity Bluff describes how urban African youth consume European and American brands in an effort to perform “modern” success. Such performances, involving dance, slang and conspicuous consumption, are recognized as bluffing, but imitation is appreciated as an art form rather than scorned as artifice.

Newell is currently engaged in a new research project on storage space, memory and role of stored objects in the production of kinship in U.S. culture.